Release Notes: April 23, 2020

Here’s what’s new with DirectScale the week of April 23rd, 2020.

We are excited about some significant improvements to the Retail Site this week! We hope you love seeing all these improvements across all our systems as much as we do. 

Remember to come back every Thursday or subscribe to “News from DirectScale” to get reminders about all the cool things we are delivering.

🎁 New Features and 🌟 Enhancements for All!

🌟 Improved! Logging Into Retail Sends User to the Right Webalias [Retail Site] If a user who has their own retail site logs into the retail site under a different webalias (ie: ‘www’), they will now be redirected to back to their own webalias to shop and manage their account.

🌟 Improved! Decreased the Calculate Order Calls [Retail Site] The Retail Site used to call the Corp Office Admin to calculate the order very frequently. This caused issues with excessive calls to get tax and shipping calculations and slowed the pages down. Now the calculations for order totals are mostly happening on the page and only called to the system when necessary.  You should notice a much faster site and fewer hits to shipping and tax providers for unnecessary calculations. 

🌟 Improved! Additional Cached Items to Speed Up the Site [Retail Site] Additional information is being cached on the site (customer data and settings) so the Retail Site can run even faster. 

🌟 Improved! Clear Error Messages [Retail Site] There were a lot of errors that weren’t being handled. Things like invalid credit cards and duplicate emails will be more clear for the user, so they will understand what they need to fix before they can submit orders. 

🐞 Bugs That Have Been Squashed

🐞Fixed: Corp Office > Orders Weren’t Showing Ship Method [Corp Office] This was just a display issue on Orders in the Corp Office. Under the Packages section, a bug was introduced last week that hid the Ship Method and Warehouse from being displayed. The data was there and packages were being shipped correctly; it was just missing from the page.  

🐞Fixed: Updating Rep Site URL in Admin Didn’t Update in Retail [Retail Admin] This is a very small use case, but if a client needed to update the domain, the changes weren’t being sent to the Retail Admin. Now updates are sent through. 

🐞Fixed: Next Rank = First Rank for Top Rank [Web Office] This might just be considered a good problem to have. ;) When a distributor hit the top rank, the Rank Information widget on their home page showed their Next Rank as the First Rank. This has been fixed so they just see their rank if they’ve reached the top!

📘 Help Center and Training

📘New! Introduction to the DirectScale Platform Video [Video] A brand new introduction video has been added to help new customers and new users get a feel for what the platform does, which apps do what, and, most importantly, how to log into everything.

📘New! Launch and Go-Live Checklist [Checklist] We added a checklist to help customers know everything they should test themselves or with help from Customer Care before attempting to go live with the platform.

📘New! Configuring the Web Office Homepage [Video] Continuing our effort to create videos for every step in each of our Setup and Customization guides.

📘New! How to Add a Quick Report with Web Office Admin [Article] Added this and the following new articles for an improved Help Center experience.

📘New! How an Associate Can Create a Report in Web Office [Article] 

📘New! How to Add Corporate Contact Info to Web Office [Article] 

📘New! How to Customize the Web Office Pay History Adjustments Report [Article] 

📘New! How to Add Bonuses to the Web Office Commissions Report [Article] 

📘New! How to Customize the Web Office Commissions Report [Article] 

🌟 Improved! Setting Up a Custom Domain, SSL Certificate, and CNAMES [Article] Made accuracy, usability, and readability updates to this article and the following articles.

🌟 Improved! Creating Report Center Quick Reports [Article]

🌟 Improved! Adding Inventory Categories [Article]

🌟 Improved! Using the SQL Manager to View Data [Article]

🔮 What Cool Things Are We Working On?

• Improving the user experience for when orders have volume that gets distributed over time.
• Better backup options for when tax providers go down. 
• Unifying the Admin experience across all our tools.
• Ongoing enhancements to improve Retail Admin’s ease of use and add new configurable settings.
• We are creating more user guides for specific parts of the system such as adding a new market.
• We are creating videos for the most important parts of initial launch customization.
• We are documenting the testing needed for going Live with your platform.

Is something missing from this list? Report bugs that you find to our amazing Support Team by chatting with them from the platform or submitting a request here.  

Do you have a cool idea for a new feature? Join the community discussion to suggest new features and see other ideas you might have never thought of here.