Bank Transfers Now Supported as Customer Payment Method
FastSpring has been working hard this season to enable your customers to pay using even more payment methods than previously existed. Now, in addition to major credit cards, PayPal, check, money order, and purchase orders, your FastSpring store can also accept bank transfers, which is the most common form of cashless consumer payments in most countries within the EU and Asia-Pacific.
Bank transfers offer many benefits for FastSpring clients. They can broaden your customer base, appealing to those customers who do not have a credit card, or who do not want to use a card to complete a payment via the Web or mail. Since there is no possibility of payment reversals or payment chargebacks, you can feel secure that once a customer has paid, the funds are truly yours.
Note: The bank transfer payment method is available for one-time purchases, but not for subscription-based products/services relying on recurring billing. For more information, you can refer to the support article on bank transfers.
New Localization Settings Add Flexible Behaviors for Selling Globally
Now you can customize which information in your store changes based on each customer’s automatically detected location. If a customer selects a different country than the auto-detected one, you can choose from the following three options to occur:
- The language and the currency will both change accordingly
- The language will change accordingly, but the currency will not change
- The language will not change, but the currency will change accordingly
Additionally, the information used during the checkout process for subscriptions is now translated for the top visitor languages. Previously, this content was only translated for all non-subscription based purchases.
Supported Download Formats Greatly Expanded
Some common file extensions that we now support for file downloads, by category, are:
Text Files: .doc, .docx, .txt
Data Files: .epub, .ppt, .xml
Audio Files: .mid, .mp3, .ra, .wav, .wma
Video Files: .avi, .mov, .mp4, .mpg, .swf, .wmv
Image Files: .ai, .eps, .ps, .max, .gif, jpg, .png, .psd
Page Layout Files: .pdf, .qxd, .rels
Spreadsheet and Database Files: .accdb, .db, .mdb, .swl, .xls, .xlsx
Executable Files: .app, .cgi, .exe, .vb
Compressed Files: .7z, .pkg, .rar, .sit, .zip
Disk Image Files: .dmg, .iso, .vcd
Increased Efficiency Via Reusable Downloads & License Generators
Now downloadable files and license generators are re-usable across multiple products. If you have multiple products using the same downloadable file (or license generator), instead of uploading a separate copy of the same file for each product, you can choose from an existing file (or license generator) you have already uploaded. This will reduce the effort and time needed to set up components of your store.
Update Referrers Post-Purchase Within UI
With any digital purchase, but especially with subscription orders, you can pass on a custom identifier per order or subscription. This custom referrer gets passed via a parameter ?referrer=XYZ in the URL. On occasion, there are issues which cause the referrer to be incorrect. Now it is possible to update the referrer after a purchase has been made and those issues have been resolved.
Additional Improvements
A few more updates to SpringBoard:
SpringBoard has simplified. With our most recent release, the FastSpring team has simplified many of the menus within SpringBoard and given clients greater access to making changes to their own stores. For example, in our Store Settings menu, the available payment methods and each of their settings are now located in a single location. FastSpring clients can log in at any time and choose to enable or disable the following payment methods: PayPal, Bank Transfer, Check or Money Order, and Purchase Orders.
Other improvements include:
- Self-signed and unsupported root certificates are now allowed for SSL via the “trust://” protocol. Prefix this protocol on URLs for use in notification and licenses
- Order Creator UI now validates the phone number field according to the same validation as the store if a physical address is entered
- The phone number validation message in the store now reports the correct number of digits depending on the country
- Updates to Dutch translation
- The email address to receive low license count notifications is now customizable
These primarily technical additions have also gone live with SpringBoard’s new release:
- Product display names have been added to the “View All Product Prices” UI. Products have two possible names – a name and a display name. Some clients use one, some clients use both. The Products & Pages UI already displays both names if used. Now the “View All Product Prices” UI does as well. The reason both names need to be displayed is because some clients use the name as an internal SKU.
- New functions have been added to the JavaScript license environment for DSA signing and base64.
- An “Original Reference” column has been added to Order and Order Item CSVs to allow association of returns to original orders. Previously it wasn’t possible to tell which order a return went with in the CSV export. The new Original Reference column now contains the ID of the order associated with a return.
- Support has been added for custom style messages in offer titles / displays. Messages are a technique for performing custom translations in the store. Many areas support messages and offers now do as well.
- The productPath attribute has been added to the order item and subscription template variables. The productPath attribute allows the store URL of a product to be retrieved in templates. Templates are used throughout SpringBoard for email, web delivery, notifications, and tracking.
- The coupon code attribute has been added to the order item template variable. This addition allows the coupon of an order item / line item to be retrieved in templates.
