SuiteCommerce latest release Aconcagua is out and it’s time for a quick review of its most important features. Before publishing this article, we were waiting on a second Aconcagua release, published by the NetSuite SuiteCommerce product team, just in case there were significant changes worth addressing in this post.
While Kilimanjaro, previous SuiteCommerce release, came with only a few features additions which were not that important, Aconcagua comes to change all things around.
This new SuiteCommerce release drastically changes the landscape of the SuiteCommerce product and offerings and you will quickly understand why. Let’s get started!
Themes
When it comes to designing your SuiteCommerce or SuiteCommerce Advanced (SCA) website, NetSuite is strongly suggesting that you do so creating a new Theme. A Theme includes HTML templates, Sass files and other assets coded following very specific NetSuite guidelines leveraging all new Site Management Tools features, such as the Theme Customizer which we are going to address shortly.
Extensions
Extensions is the new way of developing customizations of standard website functionality. Instead of altering the code of the application itself, extensions are created using SuiteCommerce Components that interact with the Extensibility API. Basically, this allows developers to create new website functionality without having to touch the website base code, helping become this new functionality more scalable. Extensions can have any number of JavaScript, SuiteScript, configuration JSON, and other files bundled into a single SuiteApp or deployed to a NetSuite account.
Extensions are the ONLY option available when it comes to creating website customizations to a SuiteCommerce website (versus SCA).
In order to activate and manage Themes and Extensions you need to first activate the SuiteCommerce Extensions Management SuiteApp which adds the Manage Extensions Wizard to your account. Through the tools available in this SuiteApp developers can:
- Develop Sass and HTML templates and deploy as themes.
- Expose Sass variables to the Site Management Tools Theme Customizer.
- Develop JavaScript, SuiteScript, or configuration objects that are accessible using the
- Extensibility API and deploy as extensions.
- Test themes and extensions on a local server.
- Create Custom Content Types (CCTs) as extensions.
SMT New Features
Site Management Tools comes recharged in Aconcagua with a lot of great new features:
- Content Visibility Dates: You can now select which page and changes you would like to publish, which don’t and even setup content visibility dates and options (always visible, display at a certain date and time and never expire, display at a certain date and time and expire at a certain date and time)
- Landing Page Visibility Dates: You can control when a landing page is published and even schedule publication.
- Theme Customizer: This allows merchants to do website style changes (such as size/style of heading fonts, background color, or links colors) without the need of a developer assistance. You can save style changes as skins and manage them.
Search Synonyms
You can include various synonyms or words that you think your shopper will search for when looking for a specific product and make sure that search result displays the product shopper is searching for.
Free Gift Promo Auto-Apply
With Aconcagua and through the use of SuitePromotions, you can create a promo that gives a certain item for free when buyers meet a given criteria (ie, Bogo) and enable the website to auto apply promotion for qualifying orders.
Website Specific Customers
When using multiple websites, merchants can restrict customer login access to s specific website(s). Prior to Aconcagua, customers who registered on one website had access to all.
SuiteCommerce
Last but not least, SuiteCommerce.
You know how NetSuite had two web store products available as part of their offering: Site Builder and SuiteCommerce Advanced? Well, now they have three. Say hi to SuiteCommerce (or previously called SuiteCommerce Standard), a lighter version of SuiteCommerce Advanced.
It’s practically the same product as SCA but it comes with some important development restrictions – custom functionality can only be added through Extensions.
So the one million dollar question is, can I create any custom functionality on my SuiteCommerce website? The answer is… as a rule of thumb, you can only create custom functionality which required components are supported and available in the Extensibility API.
The good thing with SuiteCommerce is that it has same SCA design flexibility to accomplish a pixel perfect custom design and it updates version automatically (same as your NetSuite account).
So here you have a quick look to the most important Aconcagua features, but there are more. So if you would like to learn more about this new release or have any questions, contact us.
