Five new plugins have arrived on the marketplace this summer, and a good number of the ones you already use have been updated. Here is what is new, and what changed under you.
Everything below is on the marketplace.
- Nexi Checkout, and the end of NETS
- Price per category
- Price per quantity
- Amazon S3 for your download files
- DAC7 for marketplaces
- Updates to the plugins you already use
Nexi Checkout is the payment platform known as Nets Easy, and as DIBS before that, and it is what merchants in the Nordics and in Italy are being moved to. The plugin uses its hosted payment page: your customer is taken to a page hosted by Nexi, pays there by card, wallet, invoice or instalment depending on what your Nexi account offers, and comes back to your shop with the order updated.
It arrives as its replacement: the old NETS plugin is not included in HikaShop anymore. It integrated Netaxept, the platform Nexi has retired, so a shop still on it has to move. If you were using NETS, this is the plugin to install.
Some things are sold once but priced differently depending on who they are for: a ticket at an adult price, a child price and an infant price, a workshop at a member and a non member price, a tour at a resident and a visitor price. Until now that meant one product per price, or characteristics your customer had to pick before seeing anything.
The Price per category plugin puts them side by side on one product. You define the categories, you give each one its price, and the product page shows a line per category with its own quantity field instead of a single price and a single quantity. Your customer takes two adults and one child in one go, and the cart carries the three lines with the right prices.
If you give a better price above a certain quantity, your customer only found out at the cart. The Price per quantity plugin refreshes the product page as the quantity changes, showing the unit price which applies at that quantity and the total for it, without reloading the page. The customer sees the tier they are about to reach, which is the whole point of having tiers.
If you sell files, they sit on your own server, they are in your backups, and every download goes through your hosting. The Amazon S3 plugin moves them to S3, or to any storage which speaks the same protocol, and your customers download straight from the storage rather than through your site.
Your server stops carrying the traffic and the disk space, large files stop timing out on a shared host, and the files stay private: the link a customer receives is signed and expires, so it cannot be passed around. The download limits and the access rules you have set in HikaShop keep applying, since the plugin only changes where the file lives.
If you run a marketplace with HikaMarket, the European DAC7 directive makes you report your sellers to your tax administration every year. The plugin does the work that comes before filing: it adds the identity fields the directive requires to your vendor forms, seller type, tax identification number and its issuing country, date and place of birth for individuals, business registration number and IBAN, and it works out, per seller and per quarter, the net consideration paid to them, the number of sales, and the fees and commissions you withheld.
It applies the exclusion threshold, so a casual seller below thirty sales and two thousand euros for the year is listed but not reported, and it shows you which sellers are missing data before you file rather than after. What it deliberately does not do is file for you: the obligation is yours as the operator, and you submit the declaration on your national portal.
New plugins are the visible part. Behind them, a good number of the plugins you already have installed were updated over the summer, and several of those updates are worth applying rather than waiting for the next time something breaks. They all come through the one click updater of your Joomla or WordPress site.
Electronic invoicing got most of the attention. Attach invoice 4.1.0, in June, repaired Factur-X: the PDF could fail to generate with a "fonts must be embedded" error, and, more importantly, the Factur-X XML was not actually being embedded in the PDF, so the structured data platforms look for was missing. 4.1.1 and 4.1.2, in July, dealt with the invoice logo, which could stop the PDF from being generated at all, and which went missing on servers where the address of the logo mixes domains. 4.1.3, this week, writes the UBL invoice of a French customer for the French flow of the reform rather than as a PEPPOL invoice, and corrects the cadre de facturation of a private customer, which was S3, a code a French invoice may not carry, so platforms refused the invoice.
Super PDP 1.1.0, the plugin which sends those invoices to Super PDP, one of the French approved platforms, follows the same week. It now reports the payment of an invoice as well as the invoice, with the "Encaissée" message of the life cycle, which is what the tax administration builds the payment side of the e-reporting from, and what a shop selling services owes, since the VAT on a service falls due on the day it is paid. A new setting turns it off if your invoices leave before your customers have paid. Invoices to a French customer go through the French flow too.
Stripe Checkout 1.4.0 put your order number on the Stripe payment page, so a customer who checks their bank statement recognizes the line, and 1.5.0 renews the subscriptions of HikaSerial from the Stripe side. GA4 1.5.2 and 1.5.3 fixed a category detection which could be empty and stop the tracking. Printify 1.0.2 and 1.0.3 stopped re-importing the images you had deleted every time you saved a product, and repaired the per variation product selector. Product order listing 1.0.3 lost a PHP 8 deprecation. Calculations 2.4.2 resolves a range date picker to its number of days inside a formula, so {price} * {booking_dates} does what you expect, and refreshes the live price when the customer changes the dates. Booking 1.1.0 arrived with nineteen translations, and 1.1.1 with its update server, so it updates in one click like the others.
You will find all of these on the marketplace. If one of them does something you need but not quite the way you need it, tell us on the forum: most of what is above started as somebody asking.
