Suggestions - Development roadmap / timeline / upcoming features

Development roadmap / timeline / upcoming features

Printed From: ProductCart E-Commerce Solutions
Category: ProductCart
Forum Name: Suggestions
Forum Description: ProductCart Suggestions
URL: https://forum.productcart.com/forum_posts.asp?TID=5975
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Topic: Development roadmap / timeline / upcoming features

Posted By: Brett
Subject: Development roadmap / timeline / upcoming features
Date Posted: 22-January-2015 at 5:27pm

Does ProductCart have a public development roadmap where we can see what the devs are currently working on and a rough timeline? Or some other overview of the state of development activity for the software?

Replies:

Posted By: ProductCart
Date Posted: 23-January-2015 at 7:51pm

Hi Brett,

For competitive reasons, we don't publish a detailed development road map with time lines, etc., but we understand that it's important for the ProductCart merchant community to know that NetSource will continue improving ProductCart long into the future and we will always look for ways to help you be more successful selling online with our software. Here are some of the things you can expect to see from our development team this year:

- Updated FedEx Web Services integration (with their latest API)

- Updated UPS integration

- Adding more popular payment gateways (Payeezy from First Data is up next)

- Improved Sales Tax calculation and reporting

- Improved faceted Product search functionality

- Updated encryption and security measures

- Improved flexibility for promotions, and a true "Buy One - Get One free" (BOGO) feature

- Support for listing Products on the Amazon Marketplace, including Inventory synchronization (note: this might be done by leveraging a 3rd-party platform)

- Many other general enhancements

In addition, we are making an important change related to the software 'builds' and updaters for the various ProductCart versions that will significantly facilitate our ability to put out new releases by consolidating everything into a single code base regardless of whether the store is running Standard, Apparel, Configurator or Configurator Plus. On the surface, this might not seem like a customer-centric exercise... but it will definitely translate into additional time for our developers to be able to work on new features and projects (so merchants will indirectly benefit in that regard)!

If you have any specific questions or concerns that you would like to discuss in more detail, please feel free to call our office any time.

-------------
The ProductCart Team

Home of ProductCart http://www.productcart.com" rel="nofollow - shopping cart software

Posted By: Brett
Date Posted: 23-January-2015 at 8:14pm

Thanks for the reply, and the partial upcoming feature list. These all sound like great improvements to me. And actually I'll be happy to see a single unified codebase as well, as presumably it will make it easier for me to develop new custom modifications or additional features. Hopefully it will mean that more people are running the same code, facilitating greater collaboration and a wider range of potential users.

With regard to the "competitive reasons" for keeping future development a secret, I must admit I'm having a bit of a hard time understanding how this would benefit ProductCart's competitors and/or harm ProductCart. From my limited research on the matter, I've found that publishing a list of future development efforts seems to be standard practice throughout the industry. To me it seems like in ecommerce, every new feature has been done before at some point, and the real challenge (and value) is in actually implementing these new features. Everything mentioned above has been done before, and I would be exceedingly surprised if anything actually new and "never done before" was created.

I could of course be mistaken, and it's possible that you guys have some stuff in the works that is truly new and innovative, but even then I would have thought that there would be more value in letting people know about it as a potential benefit to choosing ProductCart over another solution, as opposed to keeping it secret until it's done. I guess I'm just having a bit of trouble seeing the value in keeping new features secret. Then again, who knows, maybe you'll come up with something amazing no one would have ever thought of before. I hope this is the case and, if so, I look forward to what's coming!

Thanks again for the reply. The only other thing I'd like to ask is if you have a rough timeline in mind for these future improvements, as well as the aforementioned secret improvements in the works.