Roadmap
Our roadmap is designed to give you an idea of what's coming in the next quarter. Have an idea for a feature? We'd love to hear from you!
Roadmap updates We are doing things a little differently for 2024 and beyond. To get an advanced sneak-peak of our upcoming roadmap developments, please email [email protected]
🎉 NEW FEATURES
🟢 Company Users (Phase 2)
Earlier this year, we launched our new Company Users feature, allowing companies to create "teams" of users to manage their B2B ordering. We're excited to announce the next phase of this, "order approvals". Order approvals will allow teams to set up specific privileges for their team, allowing some users to add items to a "quote", and others to fully approve the order. This will essentially allow different roles to be configured all from within SparkLayer.
🟢 Sales Agents Enhancements
We'll be making some big improvements to our Sales Agent Ordering feature to further empower your sales team using this tool. The updates will include:
- Customer Record Creation: Sales agents will have the ability to create customer records directly via SparkLayer (useful for sales agents on the road or at trade shows).
- Price Modification: We're introducing the ability to adjust prices in real-time
- Commission Reporting: we'll be releasing basic reporting on tracking sales agent commissions
- Access History and Order Overview: Sales agents will be able to view the most recently accessed accounts and orders across all customers.
- User Experience Improvements: We'll be separating the sales agent roles from customer group setup, allowing sales agents to place orders more seamlessly.
- Customer Buying Behaviour: The system will list the most frequently bought products per customer, assisting in sales and marketing efforts.
🟢 Headless frontend support
We'll be kicking off Q3 with the public release of our frontend headless support and you can get a sneak preview here!
🟢 API enhancements
Our team is continuing to work on some major improvements to our API that will further unlock the power of SparkLayer. We will be more formally announcing this later in the year!
🛠️ IMPROVEMENTS
- Checkout address management We’ll be releasing the ability to add addresses directly via the My Cart Interface
- Product page We'll releasing a new “matrix view” ordering, making it easier to add multi-variant products to an order. This will complement existing product page customisations.
- Price lists We'll be extending the available source "price types" within the Price Lists tool, allowing you to select sources including "cost price" from platforms such as Shopify
🎉 NEW FEATURES
🟢 API enhancements
Our team is busily working on some major improvements to our API that will further unlock the power of SparkLayer. We will be more formally announcing this later in the quarter!
🛠️ IMPROVEMENTS
- Product page We’ll be making incremental improvements to the SparkLayer Frontend widgets, including more customisations on what can be shown on the product cards
- My account We'll be making further enhancements to the data that is shown in the My Account area, including the ability to define "custom fields" against a customer's account.
- Cart and checkout We'll be releasing the ability to add addresses straight from the checkout process, improving the checkout-flow for B2B customers.
🎉 NEW FEATURES
🟢 Company Users
We’ll be releasing the highly anticipated “Company Users” functionality to SparkLayer, allowing company B2B activity to be “shared” between users of the same company. The first phase of “Company Users” will allow the inviting of other users who’ll be able to login, place orders, create shopping lists, and manage addresses (if enabled). Any activities performed will be visible to all company users, giving instant visibility of B2B ordering activity.Q1 will also see the launch of the second phase of “Company Users” with the introduction of a preliminary permissions system. This will allow companies to specify which users can and cannot complete orders; for those who cannot place orders, they’ll be able to submit orders as “quotes” (or “draft orders”) which can then subsequently be approved.
🟢 Pricing Engine
We’ll be releasing our new pricing engine that brings some major improvements to the SparkLayer pricing tool. Updates will include:
- The ability to automatically synchronise pricing directly from your eCommerce platform (e.g. Shopify) and applying a percentage change (e.g. 40% off retail prices)
- The ability to “stack” pricing rules and combine multiple pricing types,
- The ability to make “ad hoc” changes to pricing files directly from the SparkLayer Dashboard
- UX improvements such as exporting price list files
…and more! This will be a major upgrade to the SparkLayer pricing system and give merchants even more flexibility in how they manage their B2B pricing.
🛠️ IMPROVEMENTS
- Dashboard We’ll be improving areas of the SparkLayer Dashboard, such as easier customer group management, enhancing our B2B shipping system, and more!
🎉 NEW FEATURES
🟢 Multi-currency support
Inline with Shopify's improvements to draft orders supporting Shopify Markets, we'll be building out a robust way to manage multiple currencies within the same Shopify store. It'll mean you'll be able to centrally manage multiple price list currencies within Sparklayer and assign which currencies your B2B customers place orders in.
🟢 Support for pre-ordering (or "back in stock") dates
We'll be improving the product purchasing interface to support the addition of "dates" that can be displayed to customers. For example, if your store is set up to support back-ordering or pre-ordering, you'll be able to add a date at a variant level (e.g. "Stock due in 15th April").
🛠️ IMPROVEMENTS
- Product page We'll be making a number of user interface improvements to the product purchasing interface including improved stock messaging on product cards
- Dashboard We'll be continuing our enhancements to the price list importing system within the SparkLayer Dashboard, making it even easier to manage B2B pricing.
🎉 NEW FEATURES
🟢 Support for B2B-Shipping
If you're running SparkLayer on a combined B2C & B2B store, you'll be able to more easily set up B2B-only specific shipping methods that only apply to signed in B2B customers. This means you can run different shipping rules based on who the customer-type is. Learn more about how this works.
🟢 Custom fields during checkout
If you need to capture additional information from a customer when they checkout, such as a delivery date or a special shipping note, our custom fields feature will bring an easy way to manage this. Via SparkLayer, you'll be able to set up different field types (e.g. date entry, text input, select menu) which will then show to customers within the SparkLayer Quick order interface. This will also remove the need to create custom workarounds via the Shopify checkout.
🟢 Performance Improvements & Bulk Pricing API Endpoints
Under the hood, we are planning improvements to ensure reliability and performance of the Shopify updates to SparkLayer. As part of performance updates, additional new API endpoints will be added for uploading pricing in bulk.
🛠️ IMPROVEMENTS
- Price Lists We'll be improving the Price List area within SparkLayer, giving new tools to edit and delete price lists, get better visibility of the price lists you've uploaded, automate pricing rules from Shopify, as well as the ability to export active price lists for more rapid changes.
- Order Editing If you make changes to an order after it's placed, SparkLayer will automatically display live order edits, ensuring order history is fully accurate for customers. This is particularly useful if order edits are made via an ERP system and data needs to be re-synced.
🎉 NEW FEATURES
🟢 Sales Agent Enhancements
Sales Agent Ordering lets you easily place orders on behalf of customers right from within your Shopify store. As part of this feature, we'll be making the following improvements:
- On a per Sales Agent basis, configure
- Display the
- Display the
🛠️ IMPROVEMENTS
- Order Editing We'll be improving the order synchronisation between Shopify and SparkLayer, allowing order edits to automatically display within the My Account interface when a customer views an order
- Dashboard Within the SparkLayer Dashboard, you'll be able to more easily delete and edit price lists and customer groups.
- Price Lists If you're using tiered pricing, it will be possible to show available discounts on the product card view as well as on the product detail page.
- Invoices For backend systems that allow order invoices to be generated, we'll be adding support to allow these to show within the My Account interface for customers to download.
🎉 NEW FEATURES
🟢 Sales Agent OrderingSales Agent Ordering will allow you to place orders on behalf of your customers straight from your storefront. This is ideal for merchants looking to place phone orders or manually submit orders for a specific B2B customer.
Example of how the SparkLayer Quick Order will look with Sales AgentsWithin SparkLayer, you'll be able to configure special 'Sales Agent' accounts that, once logged in, can then:
- Search for an individual B2B customer,add items to their order, and then submit this as a Draft order to then be processed
- View and save shopping listsagainst the customer
- Take overpending orders and complete them on behalf of a customer
Further enhancements will likely include the ability to specify which customers a sales agent can sign-in on behalf off.
🟢 Credit Accounts and Credit Limits
For merchants requiring credit control for their B2B customers, it will be possible to synchronise this with SparkLayer and bring credit management to your Shopify store.
Example of how credit messaging will display in the SparkLayer Quick OrderCredit functionality will include:
- The ability to display messaging
- Optionally blocking the checkout processif they exceed their credit limit
🟢 Custom Frontend Components
We'll be releasing documentation on how to create a fully customised layout for the Product Purchasing Interface, allowing merchants to build fully bespoke implementations of the product page widgets. This is ideal for merchants who have more complex product types or want a fully customised brand experience for their B2B customers.
🛠️ IMPROVEMENTS
- Order notes Order notes in the order summary will be able to be set as mandatory, allowing you to always collect notes (such as a PO number)
- Price Lists The tiered pricing interface will support multi-dimension products allowing you to more easily show quantity price breaks for products that come in different variants (e.g. colour, size, material)
- My Order The Cart Interface will have improved handling for products that have many variants (e.g. products that come in 30 colours), making it easier for customers to add and edit quantities.
- Dark Mode For stores that have been designed to use dark backgrounds (e.g. white on black), it will be possible to enable dark mode for the frontend widgets making it easier to view.\
- Stock If you're displaying the live stock count on the product detail page, you'll be able to display special messaging when stock counts exceed a specific threshold, e.g. In stock: 50+
- Integrations For merchants using Unleashed, we'll be adding multi-currency support
About the Roadmap Please note, items listed on the roadmap are be subject to change and SparkLayer reserves the right to adjust timings and associated functionality