Since we announced IP.Nexus back in May, the interest shown has been phenomenal. We have held two limited pre-sales of IP.Nexus providing participants with a beta version of the product to provide feedback and testing beyond our internal QA team.
The ideas presented by the participants of these pre-sales has been invaluable. By using Nexus in real-world situations, users have provided some great ideas both for putting the finishing touches on 1.0 and for future versions. I wanted to go over some of the bigger things we've improved on since my original development entries so you can see how the feature-set has progressed thanks to these pre-sales.
Improved Tax Classes and Shipping Methods
For users selling physical items, we have improved and expanded on the tax class and shipping method functionality and interface.
It is now easy to set up multiple tax classes with rates dependant on the location of your customers, and flexible shipping methods which are also location-dependant and taxable.
See these short videos for an short overview:
Upsell
Lots of stores offer addon products and services for a product. When a user adds an item to the cart, this is a perfect opportunity to present such addons to customers to upsell.
We've added this to IP.Nexus. This is an example of what you might see now when you add an item to your cart which has addon services:
Improved IP.Downloads Integration
IP.Nexus integrates with IP.Downloads in a way that allows you (or even your users) to add files to IP.Downloads and specify them as being paid.
While this works great if you're selling single files, some users wanted a way to sell items through the IP.Nexus Store, but still be able to take advantage of the great IP.Downloads file handling features like secure non-web-accessible files and version handling.
We've tightened up the integration between IP.Downloads to provide an additional option when uploading a file: the option to associate a download with an IP.Nexus package.
To the administrator, what this means is, if you're setting up a package in IP.Nexus which you'd like to add a download to, you would then go to IP.Downloads and add the file there. You can use a category no users can access to make the process a bit more seamless, but if a user who hasn't purchased the package stumbles across the file in IP.Downloads, they'll simply be redirected to the Store if they try to download.
To the user, when they purchase an item in IP.Nexus which has a file associated with it, they will then see a "Download" button when they view that package in the client area:
Clicking that link will begin the download immediately - the integration is completely seamless to the user.
You can of course, have downloads which are associated with more than one package, and packages that are associated with more than one download (multiple download buttons will show).
IP.Nexus Release Schedule
As we have received so much great feedback from our pre-sale beta testers, we have been implementing many of their ideas and fixing issues they have discovered. This does mean that the first supported release of IP.Nexus has been delayed as we add new requests and then must test those new additions. However, we believe that taking this extra time to mature and expand the product's feature set will benefit everyone in the long run. As IP.Nexus deals with commerce on your community we of course want it to be as stable as possible for its first release.
We are anticipating a final, supported release of IP.Nexus sometime in October at the current time. We may do another pre-sale between now and then for those who cannot wait to try IP.Nexus so keep an eye on our Blog or subscribe to our Blog for updates.
Thank you all for your interest!