What's New in Version 1.46 (Locke)

The only defense against the world is a thorough knowledge of it.”

John Locke
(1632 - 1704)

John Locke is often regarded as one of the most influential philosophers of the early modern period. He asserted that the mind was a tabula rasa, or "blank slate," upon which sensory input left impressions. His theory of knowledge is called empiricism, which states that all knowledge comes from experience.

Locke is the father of knowledge management. Knowledge management has become a very important endeavor for businesses, because it helps companies deal with the ever-growing amount of information that they have to manage every day. Information is typically paired with data (which is the new gold) and it will only continue to be more valuable as time goes on. That's why at Pelcro we are driven to find new ways to extract, structure, and provide insights from the abundance of data, so your business can figure out what is the best strategy for targeting potential customers.

Let's take a look at some of our important updates, themed around enhancing your data insights and more, which are included in our v1.46 release:

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PLATFORM UPDATES

• Translation is one of the big hurdles for many online businesses. That's why we're introducing our new Multilingual Paywall, an easy way for sites to enhance their reach for international audiences, by having the ability to differentiate products with a language field. Pelcro would automatically detect the site language on the frontend and pass it as a parameter through all SDK API endpoints, and display all information about products, plans, and your paywall in that language automatically. This helps your business offer services, products, and content in high-value markets which may lack the resources for localization.

• We understand the importance of enabling store owners & eCommerce businesses with a system that is user-friendly, so they can handle any eCommerce order. Now, through the platform, you can create ecommerce orders from the dashboard itself, which makes it easier for you to review and send out products without having to go through all the work of setting up a digital storefront in order to do so. This is also helpful with cases when your customers come back with an error or forget what they wanted altogether, so you can help them out by creating the order for them from your side in a matter of seconds. This way, you will have more sales without having to communicate as much with your customers and it will also be easier for you because all the items are right in front of you.

• Admin type collaborators will now be able to add, structure or update the metadata fields that are available for editing for your end users. You can use metadata to track, organize and identify information about your customers, which can provide value to your business beyond its mere existence, and provide context to help you find the content you need, be it tags, categories, ratings or any other type of information.

• We added a new report to our analytics module which provides insights about the number of subscribers that were active over a given period. The report enables you to see what percent of all subscribers were active during that time and the date range of the system's "active" status. It is one of the most important reports for companies who want to know more about their audience or provide insights on where and when they can improve their products and services.

• We added an easy way to make sure that tracks all of your customers login activity. This can be helpful when you need to make sure that each of your users is logging in at the right time, and when you're monitoring the number of logins to the website. The more people who login, the better it is for your business as this means more traffic on your website and hence, more revenue.

• We're introducing major performance enhancements to a number of our platform slow views, including: customers, addresses, payment, invoices, and refunds.

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INTERFACE REFINEMENT & CUSTOMIZATION

• Tracking subscriptions can be a time-consuming task, especially when you have to manage the process manually. Now, through Pelcro's user dashboard, your end users will now see both current and future phases of their subscriptions. It's a way to keep your users updated of the status of their current subscriptions, how much has been paid, and if they are due for another subscription coming up.

• Our interface components will now leverage "Lazy Loading" for Stripe SDK components to display content to the user only when it is required, rather than loading everything at once. This reduces the initial load time for the webpage, the total time required to display a page, and can increase performance by reducing server load and bandwidth usage.

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API ADDITIONS

• Beta To prevent the risk of fraud, most online payments require a verification system, one example of which is a challenge-response test "Captcha" for a user to prove they are not a bot, and it's a common kind of fraud prevention system that is used by many retailers. Our SDK API now includes ReCaptcha, considered to be the most secure captcha to date, and built to withstand the latest in brute-force attacks. This is a new line of defense that we're introducing into the Pelcro platform, as part of our Fraud Prevention System, with more to come.

• We've introduced a couple of enhancements to our Core API Customer endpoint, which helps in streamlining migrating your data to Pelcro without hassle, by giving you the capability to import data related to your customers that are already created on Stripe, but not on Pelcro. Some of these enhancements include:
  • Create Customers endpoint now allows optional attributes payment_gateway_ids, and import_payment_method.
  • Update Customers endpoint now allows optional attributes import_payment_methods
  • Renew Subscriptions endpoint now allows optional attributes auto_renew to control subscription renewal behavior
  • Create & Update Subscriptions endpoints now allow optional attribute auto_renew to auto-renew or to cancel subscription at period end it.
  • Create Subscriptions endpoints now allow optional attributes current_period_end, shipments_remaining, shipments_undeliverable, shipments_suspended_until, metadata to help with accurate subscription migrations, taking into account subscription period and how it ties in with the plan, associated shipment information and status, as well as any additional information under the subscription metadata.

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WEBHOOKS ADDITIONS

• Added Stripe's object_id to all webhooks, which makes it easier for you to tie in data across Pelcro and Stripe together.

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INTEGRATION IMPROVEMENTS

• We made some improvements to our Mailchimp Integration, used by many of our clients for sending newsletters and other notifications to their customers via an all-in-one service where they are able to easily manage all of their subscriptions with less hassle. Some of these improvements include:

  • The ability to see order creation events.
  • The ability to see payment charge creation, and charge statuses for e-commerce orders, along with details about order and invoice information.

• Additionally, our SendGrid integration will allow you to control when to trigger the customer reset password event based on the source from which the event comes from: the platform, APIs. This helps you minimize any unnecessary noise in your customer's email inboxes per your control.

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BUG FIXES

• A bug fix is never late, nor is it early. It arrives precisely when it means to. Speaking of which:

  • Fixed an issue with our DialogInsight integration that sets postal codes incorrectly in some scenarios.
  • Minor Improvements to the Multi-factor authentication mechanism and user interface.
  • Fixed the format and column headers for the shipments renewal export.
  • Removed additional Next + Previous navigation buttons on the bottom left of all platform sections.