Aug 21, 2018 3:19:16 PM
Category: Product Updates

Workarea 3.3 Announcement

The latest release of the Workarea platform adds many major features and platform enhancements. Notable additions include Omnichannel Inventory, Workarea Webhooks, Sparkline Merch Trends and Site Planner Calendar Sync. This release has benefits for shoppers, admin users and tech teams using Workarea. More detail on v3.3 and prior releases can be found on the Workarea Community Site.

To watch an on-demand recording of select feature products for the Workarea release, download the demo recording. Otherwise, for an in-depth overview of the new product features and upgrades, read below.

Checkout Optimizations

As checkout usability techniques become best practices, we enhance the platform to make these techniques easy to implement for our customers. The Workarea product team regularly tests UX and employs 3rd party expertise to keep the checkout experience, the most important experience for conversion optimization, the best it can be. Leveraging recent studies by the Baymard Institute, the following is available in Workarea 3.3 to be used to reduce cart abandonment:

  • Geolocated Shipping and Tax Estimates
  • Additional validate checks
  • Required fields marking
  • Hide optional inputs
  • Keyup validation
  • Hide promo fields by default

Email Enhancements

Although most Workarea customers use a third party email service provider (ESP), some system emails are generated from Workarea. This release contains significant enhancements around email. 

Email Capture Admin

Workarea supports a number of ways for the ecommerce storefront to capture customer emails. This version adds the capability for Admin users to view and export opt-in customers. Marketing teams can use this utility to support a simpler integration with their ESP.

System Email Template Optimization

This release includes enhancements to our standard email templates. Employing email best practices, Workarea system emails now have:

  • CSS styles converted to inline style attributes
  • Relative paths converted to absolute paths
  • CSS properties checked against email client capabilities
  • Additional create a plain text version of the email
  • Allow the addition of product images where applicable to email templates

Product Detail Page Options

Version 3.3 adds additional configuration options for Product Detail Pages, giving greater admin control over how product options are displayed and presented. Each of these options employ the same inventory availability logic implemented for the storefront.

Option Select

This configuration shows a select field per option based on product variant details.

Option Selects

Option Thumbnails

This configuration shows product image thumbnails matching the option when available.

Option Thumbnails 

 Option Swatches

This configuration allows for swatch images or hexadecimal color codes to be used for color options.
Option Swatches

Omnichannel Inventory / Pickup In Store

Store locations with specific inventory levels as well as Store Pickup functionality can be managed within Workarea in v3.3, via two Workarea Plugins: Store Locations and Store Pickup. These enhancements significantly reduce the time to implement Workarea for an omnichannel strategy.

Store Locations Plugin

  • Inventory per store location
  • Default Store location selection for customers (used for Store Pickup Inventory check)
  • Geolocation defaults store location
  • Product level and SKU level inventory display options

Store Pickup Plugin

  • Omnichannel carts / orders. Customers can built carts that contain shipped items as well as multiple store pickup items.
  • Orders will properly decrement inventory across inventory sources.
  • Enhanced options for offering store pickup on ecommerce storefront.

Product Reviews Plugin Improvements

The Workarea Product Reviews Plugin provides a native alternative to 3rd party reviews systems. This release offers improvements to the shopping experience as well as the admin capabilities for this Plugin. 

  • Amin UI for for importing reviews from a .csv template
  • Added ability to send follow up email workflows requesting shoppers to write reviews for recent purchases
  • Reviewer item purchase verification
  • Usability updates to product review approval admin screens

Customer Service - Impersonate Guest Checkout

Customer services agents can impersonate shopper's online sessions to facilitate actions that occur on the ecommerce storefront. This capability has been expanded to include both logged in and guest shoppers.

 

Workarea Search Admin Improvements 

This version allows Workarea admins to configure the display order of product filters. These configurations can also be category specific. 

 

Merchandising Trend Sparklines

Inline trend sparklines were added to areas of the Admin where this data is relevant to the task at hand. Merchandisers can quickly see how individual assets are performing as they work in the system:

  • All product selection UIs - (Trend represents product sales history)
  • Featured Products UI for categories
  • Index Pages for Categories (Trend represents sales history for category)
  • Index Pages for Products (Trend represents sales history for the product)
  • Index Pages for Discounts (Trend represents sales associated with discount)
  • Index Pages for Searches (Trend represents searches)
sparklines

 

Workarea Webhooks

Webhooks are an useful developer tool that allows for the execution of code based on events that occur in the system. As such, they have been popular as a way to integrate data between systems.

Workarea Webhooks can be triggered on creation, update or deletion (except where noted below) for the following events in the platform.

      • User
      • Order (trigger on Order Placed)
      • Fulfillment (trigger on updated)
      • Catalog Category
      • Catalog Product
      • Content Asset
      • Content Page
      • Email Signup
      • Inventory Sku
      • Navigation Menu
      • Navigation Redirect
      • Navigation Taxon
      • Pricing Discount
      • Pricing Sku
      • Tax Category

Webhooks are configured in the Workarea Admin where administrators can view examples of what data will be sent for each event type.

 webhooks

 

Site Planner - Work Calendar Sync

Workarea's Site Planner offers a great way for retailers to organize, preview and automatically publish content and configurations on the platform. With v3.3 updates, Releases within Site Planner an be automatically synchronized with your work calendar. This provides a great way to stay on top of campaigns and site changes as well as provide increased visibility to coworkers not regularly working with the Workarea Admin. Once this simple integration is set up, current and future releases will be visible and sharable from your work calendar such as iCal, Outlook or Google Calendar.

Google Calendar - Week of July 22, 2018 2018-08-09 13-14-59

 

Claire Cupples