September: HelpDesk, Google and Yandex sign-in, and Cart Keeper

September brought four new add-ons: the HelpDesk support center, Cart Keeper, and one-click sign-in with Google and Yandex ID. Ten more add-ons got new versions, including Live Search, the Google Analytics 4 integration and Virtual categories.

New add-ons

HelpDesk - customer support center

If customer questions keep getting lost between e-mail and messengers, HelpDesk brings them into the store. Customers open tickets from their account, and managers reply from the admin panel with the customer's past tickets, order count and total spend in view. Conversations and attachments stay in the store, even if the mailbox changes or an employee leaves.

• A familiar chat layout: color-coded statuses, avatars, and drag-and-drop attachments checked for format and size before upload.
• Managers can open a ticket on a customer's behalf, for example after a phone call.
• Time tracking for every ticket, with monthly reports.
• On Multi-Vendor, the admin routes a ticket to a vendor in one click and can take it back if the vendor is slow to reply. Vendors see only the tickets assigned to them.

Version 1.1.0 followed on September 11, fixing errors when customers created a ticket on the storefront and when vendors or administrators without full permissions opened one. Compatible with CS-Cart 4.1.x–4.21.x.

Cart Keeper

Out of the box, CS-Cart quietly drops a product from the cart once it runs out of stock. Cart Keeper keeps it in place, marked “Out of stock”, and when the product is back, the customer returns it to the order with one click. With auto-return on, the add-on does it for them.

• A checkbox on every cart row: an unchecked item stays in the cart but is left out of the totals and the order, so customers can check out just part of the cart.
• Out-of-stock items get a “Similar products” button and a back-in-stock notification option.
• The same controls work in the mini cart in the header.
• Set-aside items are saved in the customer's profile and are available on any device.

Multi-Vendor with separate checkout and UniTheme2 are supported. The first version came out on September 17, and by the end of the month the add-on had reached 1.3.0. Compatible with CS-Cart 4.1.x–4.21.x.

One-click sign-in: Google One Tap and Yandex ID

Two add-ons built on the same idea: customers sign in with an account they already have, with no password and no confirmation e-mails. Google One Tap Sign-In and Yandex ID One Tap Sign-In came out on September 28 and work with CS-Cart 4.3.x–4.21.x. The Yandex one suits stores selling in Russia and the CIS, where most shoppers already have a Yandex ID.

• The button appears in every sign-in form: the pop-up in the header, the sign-in page, checkout and the registration page.
• New customers get an account on the fly with their name and e-mail, plus the phone number from Yandex ID when permitted. Returning customers land in their own account with the order history.
• Guests already signed in to Google or Yandex in the browser are offered their account in the corner of the page: the One Tap prompt from Google or the Yandex instant sign-in widget.
• Administrator and vendor accounts are never affected. B2B stores can limit sign-in to a list of e-mail domains.

Setup comes down to pasting the Client ID from Google Cloud or Yandex OAuth; no application secret is needed. The Yandex widget may not appear in Safari or with an ad blocker, but the sign-in button still works there.

Updates

Live Search: 9.6.2 to 9.7.0

This release of Live Search with Search History is mostly fixes, and the first one matters for marketplaces.

• On marketplaces with direct customer-to-vendor payments, a product added from the search results could land in another vendor's cart, so the order and the payment went to the wrong vendor. Fixed.
• Products and prices reserved for a specific customer group are no longer shown to, or cached for, other groups.
• On mobile devices, suggestions no longer stop appearing after the security token expires.
• Store pages load faster: Live Search no longer contacts the server on every page view.

Google Analytics Enhanced Ecommerce GA4: 1.4.0 to 1.6.0

Three releases in one month, all about accurate data in Google Analytics 4. If you watch your sales funnel in GA4, this update is worth installing.

• Connect directly with the Google tag (gtag.js) or through Google Tag Manager. Events sent through gtag.js could fail to reach Google Analytics; that is fixed.
• Signing in and out no longer sends stray remove-from-cart events, quantity changes are counted correctly, and with page caching on, events are no longer lost or duplicated.
• The shipping and payment steps reach the funnel even when the customer keeps the suggested methods or comes back to checkout.
• The order value is sent without shipping, with shipping and tax as separate fields, as Google Analytics recommends.
• New: tracking of product views in product blocks and a debug mode that prints every event to the browser console.

Virtual categories: 2.8.1 to 2.9.0

Virtual categories gained an “Out of stock actions” condition: a category can be built from products available for pre-order or back-in-stock sign-up. Scheduled linking of products now runs noticeably faster with less server load, and the add-on works with the third-party AB Category banners add-on.

Extended conditions and bonuses of promotion: 1.5.3 to 1.6.0

The promotions add-on has a new bonus, “Free shipping for part of the cart”: shipping is free only for selected categories, products, feature values or products above a set price, and the rest of the order is charged as usual. The “Products in stock qty” cart condition is fixed too: the promotion applied even when the selected product was not in the cart.

Also updated

• Full page CACHE + HTML minify 5.8.2. If your store uses captcha v3, update: a cached page could reach visitors without the captcha, and their forms would not submit. Pages are now cached separately for sessions with and without captcha.
• YML Export products 4.11.0. Exporting a price list with selected categories no longer stops before the end of the catalog, so products no longer go missing from the feed.
• Advanced product price calculation (calculator) 4.5.0. The storefront price updates as a value is entered, even when the product has only a numeric calculator option.
• Multilevel filters add-on 2.6.0 and Additional object fields/tabs 1.8.0. PHP 8.3 compatibility, an add-on page with version and update subscription info, security updates.
• Addons Manager 2.0. Security and stability updates and interface changes in the block that shows new add-on versions.

In all, seven add-ons gained PHP 8.3 compatibility in September.

Customers' choice

The most purchased add-ons in September were Live Search with Search History and Limit number of categories per product, a small add-on that prevents excessive category assignment and keeps the catalog tidy.

New versions install from your store's admin panel. Updates are free while the add-on's update subscription is active, and a Premium subscription covers all your add-ons at once.