Deployment Day: Version 1.4.4 is now live

Posted by SolidShops on May 20, 2012 at 06:14 PM

SolidShops v1.4.4 improves the way you can handle taxes on your orders and enables linking multiple domain names to your store. Read on for a number of practical use cases.

Taxes: private individuals vs. companies

We’ve received feedback from a number of store owners that wanted a way to charge different taxes depending on wether a customer is a private individual versus a company. Here’s how you can accomplish just that.

When you navigate to your “settings : taxes” page you will see that there are now two separate columns where you can enter different tax percentages for either private individuals and companies.

We will differentiate between those two customer types by checking if a customer has entered a company/VAT ID on the checkout page or not.

Simply put: if a customer enters a VAT/Company ID on the checkout page, we will charge the tax percentage in the column that says “Taxes Companies”. If a customer leaves the VAT/Company ID field empty, we will charge the tax percentage from the column that says “Taxes Individuals”.

Linking multiple domain names to your store

When you link a custom domain name to your SolidShops store, you need to set the CNAME’s of your DNS records. That’s easy enough to do, but some DNS  registrars don’t allow you to redirect e.g. www.yourstore.com to http://yourstore.com and the other way around.

To solve this problem for a number of customers, we’ve added the ability to link up multiple domain names to your store. This way you can set both the CNAME “yourstore.com” and “www.yourstore.com” to point to your SolidShops account. Just set those two domains in your settings and we’ll do the rest.

Another use case is moving from one domain to another. Add your new and primary domain name as the first domain and then add your old domain name as your secondary domain. That way, visits to both domain names will continue to work, but we’ll permanently redirect all requests from your old domain name to the new one. Search engines will pick up that redirect and will update your domain name in the search results.

That’s it for this release folks. Let us know what you need in order to build better stores for your clients and we’ll make sure to update SolidShops accordingly. Thanks again for all the feedback, it’s making SolidShops better, one release at a time.