11.31.0 Release
Production Release Date: Tuesday, October 10, 2023
Platforms: Backoffice (B2B), Online Checkout (B2C), ACME Sales (POS)*, Payments
Release Type: Minor
Downtime: None
Test Environments: Sandbox 10, POS Sandbox 11.31.0, ACME AC 11.29.0*
*POS Application is valid through 10/02/2024 and AC is valid through 7/18/24
Enhancements
ACME Sales (POS) | Compatibility for iPadOS 17 and iOS 17
It's that time of year! The latest versions of our applications are now verified to support the latest OS versions:
Note: On POS we did notice a few minor layout issues. We are working on a fix for an upcoming release. |
Online Checkout (B2C) | iOS17 Browser Issue
While this is a bug, we want to call it out early in our release notes to ensure you all see it.
A few reports came in recently that some customers could not complete online purchases on mobile because the "Place Order" button is not visible on the cart page. Turns out this is a bug with browsers (Safari, Chrome, Firefox, etc) in the recent iOS17 release, and can impact folks that have already upgraded their iPhones. We've reproduced with iOS version 17.0.2.
Based on testing, Apple has a fix for this coming in their iOS17.1 release. However, this is only in beta and not available for the general public to upgrade yet. As such, we are including our own fix in this release for anyone with iOS 17.0.2 on their iPhone.
IMPORTANT: In order for this fix to take affect, go to Backoffice › Theme and tap Update. The change will take affect within 30 min.
ACME Sales (POS) | Card Reader Connection Improvements Utilizing Latest SDKs
Let's all make a toast! To continued improvements from our team to keep those card readers connected and payments flowing smoothly.
- Ingenico Card Readers: Utilizing the latest TriPOS Mobile SDK (v3.0.2) that we upgraded to in our 11.30.0 release, we bring you improvements around connectivity.
- If an established connection to any of these card readers is dropped, we'll now search for it every 10 seconds and reconnect once we find it. What's lost is now found!
- And although connection errors stink, they can still happen and it's better when you can at least see them. We now show you errors from the SDK that we've been sending to our logs.
- BBPOS & M2 Bluetooth: We have updated to the latest version of the Stripe SDK (v3.0.0) for the BBPOS and M2 Bluetooth card readers.
And it doesn't stop there! Along with the above improvements, a new toast (message window) will display as a card reader connects after login so you're no longer in the dark. Not only that, but rather than drumming your fingers on login waiting for POS to search and connect to your card reader, we'll get you right in so you can start selling items or looking up orders. While the card reader connects, the toast will display at the bottom of the screen letting you know what's going on. As always with feature enhancements like this, we welcome your feedback on how it's working for you.
ACME Sales (POS) | Larger Display Area for Tiles
In the 11.28.0 release we added the ability to select a time for standard event tiles for a specific ticket type. A great feature, but for those of you with a lot of time slots, we prematurely cut off the display halfway down the screen. Whoops! We now utilize the full height of the screen.
Online Checkout (B2C) | New Text Variables for Checkout
We are excited to bring you two new text variables to bring your voice to the checkout experience!
You all know your members and guests the best, so we love giving you opportunities to optimize the experience for them. For each of these, you can choose to keep with our defaults or modify as desired. All support HTML for formatting and styling.
- Phone: By default, no message displays below the phone field. A new text variable (checkout-process-page-phone-message) will display directly below the Phone field when configured, offering you an opportunity to help folks know what their phone number will (and will not) be used for.
- Checkout Processing: While checkout is processing, a message displays in the popup modal that by default says "Placing order please wait…". You can replace this with a new text variable (process-modals-checkout-modal-message) with HTML capabilities to support text, styling, and even an animated loading gif if desired.
- Keep in mind, unless someone is on a slow network, this message will not display for very long and goes away as soon as checkout completes. As such, we do recommend keeping the message brief and not including any critical information in it.
- The confirmation page has text variables you can configure for important messages if you have not done so already ("checkout-confirm-message" and "checkout-confirm-page-description").
Example configurations:
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Online Checkout (B2C) | State/Province Selection for International Visitors
"I can show you the world... shining shimmering splendid." Yes yes, ware finally extending our State/Province selection beyond just the United States and Canada. As many of you welcome international visitors, we want their checkout experience to be easy. Now for every country selected, rather than manually typing in their state/province, international visitors will be able to select from a dropdown with the valid options. That also means consistent data for you! By replacing freeform entry with a selection list, all visitors from the same location will be consistent.
ACME Payments | 3D Secure
We're releasing some enhancements that will enable us to bring you 3D Secure before long! 3D Secure will help protect your customers from unauthorized purchases with their credit card. Look for more to come on this soon.
Bug Fixes
Online Checkout (B2C) | Saving the Correct State/Province
Continuing on the above theme, in our testing we ran into a unique case where if a member or guest filled in all of their billing information for either United States or Canada, continued to the "review" step, then tapped "Change" and selected the opposite country (either United States or Canada), on checkout the prior state was unexpectedly saving for the billing contact. We have not received any reports of this happening in production, but we had to fix this now that all countries come with a state/province select list.
Online Checkout (B2C) | My Membership Displaying Old Versions
Let's be honest, this one was a doozy. The 'My Membership' page was sometimes showing members an older version of their membership that was expired. For many, logging out and re-verifying then correctly showed their latest membership. However, this did not always resolve the issue, and we felt your pain as we worked with many of you to try and unblock them and figure out what was going on.
As it turns out, it happened when members verified by email. Big shout out to everyone that helped us investigate this and finally get steps to reproduce the issue. We'll say it again - it takes a village and we very much appreciate your collaboration on tricky ones like these!
Speaking of tricks - it's now time for a treat. Not only have we fixed this issue, but we've also made sure for any members that renew early, if their next membership is not effective until a future date, we inform them that they've already renewed and let them see the renewal details.
Online Checkout (B2C) | Form Responses
We unfortunately received a few reports again of forms sometimes not saving to the order on checkout. It's a unique workflow that we originally found and fixed in the 11.26.0 release. We dug into our code to further harden this and ensure forms are not dropped on checkout.
Backoffice (B2B) | ZIP in Ticket Analytics Report
You all don't really care to report on your guests' ZIP code data, do you? Oh my, of course you do. In the spirit of improving reports in recent releases, we are glad to continue this trend. As it turns out, ZIP code data was never populated in the Ticket Analytics report. Given the massive amount of tickets you all have sold over the years, orders prior to this 11.31.0 release still won't display ZIP codes in the Ticket Analytics report, but any orders placed after this release will.
There are a variety of ways you can collect ZIP code information, so we've made sure the following flows send ZIP to Ticket Analytics:
- Transact as a member with a ZIP code on any sales channel
- Collect ZIP during checkout on any sales channel
- Collect ZIP during checkout at POS
- Collect ZIP via the survey after checkout at POS survey
Note: For those of you using Access Control for member card scanning, we do have some additional work for this scenario to populate the ZIP code of the member in Ticket Analytics. We are looking to support this in a future release.
ACME Sales (POS) | Post-Checkout Screen Freezing
A few of you reported after our 11.29.0 release that the post-checkout screen is frequently freezing, preventing you from checking in tickets or printing receipts. We dug into this and noticed our implementation with the latest Epson ePOS driver could cause the app to hang if there was a connectivity issue to the device. We tightened it up to keep things from hanging and now will display a message if there is a connectivity issue post-checkout.
ACME Sales (POS) | Sending Email After Checkout
Pre-filling information is great, but not when it slows you down. Improvements in our 11.30.0 release to the post-checkout buttons had an unintended consequence of disabling the "Send" button when it was pre-filled with the member or guest email address. Now the "Send" button will only disable after you tap to send, and it will continue to re-enable anytime you edit the email address to send another email.
ACME Sales (POS) | Back to the Future?
Have you noticed your staff accidentally selling tickets to future dates? It was brought to our attention recently that after selling a standard ticket to a future date, the future date was used for the next sale even though the app displayed today's date. Great Scott! We've tuned this up and now bring you back to present day after each sale.
ACME Sales (POS) & Access Control (AC) | Check In Shenanigans
We discovered that the check in counts sometimes had a mind of their own while checking in tickets via AC or POS. If you check in tickets, uncheck in a ticket, do that a few times and do the hokey pokey ... our system got a little confused and displayed willy nilly check in counts. We gave it a tune up and we correctly track the check in counts no matter what crazy steps you take.
ACME Sales (POS) | Fresh Start Every Morning
If a user leaves the POS open, logged in, and on the checkout confirmation screen overnight, we discovered that at times the previous customers' payment information displayed for the first sale the next day. This happened extremely rarely, but as it relates to payment, we of course prioritized a fix. Now when the app automatically logs you out overnight, we also make sure to clear all transaction data for a fresh start in the morning. Take a look at our Hardware: End Of Day Recommendations for our best practice recommendations.
ACME Sales (POS) | Rare Order without Payment
For those of you that have been with us awhile, you may recall an odd case we tracked down where some orders were completed with the information from the last 4 digits of the credit card, but no payment was processed. This was fixed back in January 2023 with our 11.24.0 release, but we found one more loophole where this could happen. The loophole: If you have an external keyboard connected to POS, you tap the spacebar when you get to checkout, switch to cash, then switch back to credit card, the app displays $0 for the amount and this is what is prompted for on the connected card reader. If your staff and guest proceed, it was possible to complete the order without a payment. We believe none of you actually ran into this issue, but certainly you no longer can as we closed this final loop.
ACME Sales (POS) | Issues with the Side Menu
In our 11.30.0 release we made some updates to the side menu. Turns out our code changes could sometimes cause the menu to be unresponsive or the app to crash after tapping to open it. This primary culprit seemed to be tapping the option to reconnect to the card reader. Caught and fixed!
New and Updated Knowledge Articles
We are continuously updating and adding new articles to our Knowledge-base in the ACME Support Portal. Below are some recently added or updated articles:
- NEW! Workato: ACME/Salesforce Integration Resource Center
- Read the "Transactions" Order Tab in Backoffice
- Google Analytics 4 Setup
- Creating a Private Event Instance
- NEW! Removing Membership Options from Future Sale
- Membership Auto Renew Resource Center (Early Adopters)