What a Year! 20 December 2013  |  Cate

2013 has been an extremely exciting year here at Bluepark, not only did we take on a new member of the team but we’ve introduced some incredible new features and improved the usability and speed of the system.

In January we took on our newest technical support member, James, who has embraced the ethos of Bluepark with complete ease and, I’m sure those of you who have had the pleasure of speaking to him would agree, he will always go above and beyond what is expected of him to help answer your queries. We honestly couldn’t have wished for a better person to compliment the team.

We started the year by making improvements to the import/export system, making it easier (and less scary!) to do product imports with the addition of a preview window to check you are importing the correct data to the correct fields. We also added the category structure and category data imports making it quicker to add and populate your categories.

The options and variants functionality had an overhaul in the summer, allowing greater control over what your customers can view and purchase. We also introduced the ability to create new options, brands and attributes via the Product Editor rather than having to go back to the relevant Manager each time.

A whole influx of new payment options were introduced in the autumn, including CardSave, Iridium, Optimal Payments and Payment Sense, as well as the newly introduced Barclays ePDQ Essential, taking our total number of payment options to 27!

At the end of October we introduced the ability to control your DNS settings via the Bluepark CMS, giving you more flexibility when wanting to host your emails via Google Apps or Microsoft Office 365. It also enabled the ability to create sub-domains and TXT records.

We also had two upgrades on the amount of bandwidth allowance on each of our packages with an initial increase to the Enterprise package in January and then the incredibly popular unlimited bandwidth on all packages in December. This completely abolished all charges on bandwidth so that no matter how successful your business becomes, we won't charge you extra for your hard-earned customer traffic.

But, of course, we kept the best for last! In December we launched the highly anticipated Bluepark REST API which will allow all those talented developers out there to build integrations and apps into our software to plug-in external systems such as stock management, despatch management and customer management. This has opened up the Bluepark system to all sorts of wondrous opportunities and we are very excited to see how our customers will use it.

This was then, very quickly followed by the release of the exclusive Bluepark to Bluepark Multi-Channel feature which allows you to control multiple Bluepark sites via one admin panel. All orders, customers and products can then be automatically fed in and out of the ‘master’ site in real-time, allowing complete, up to the minute, control over all sites at once. The early adopters of this are already seeing the benefits mount up with seamless stock control, faster processing and reduced resource time.

There were many other smaller improvements sprinkled inbetween, too many to list here, however, we’re not done yet! Next year we have some really exciting features already in the initial stages of development. Firstly, we will be releasing Bluepark mobile for those of you that wish to offer a more simplified version of your site to mobile and smartphone users. Then, we will be working closely with eBay to produce an industry leading integration from the Bluepark CMS so that listing and selling on eBay is controlled seamlessly through your website. Finally, there will be the last string in our multi-channel bow with an integration to allow you to sell on Amazon.

We think you’ll all agree it has been an amazing year for us, but we couldn’t have done it without you, our customers. You continue to drive us on to becoming one of the best ecommerce platforms on the market today and we hope that you continue to do so in 2014. We wish you all the best for the festive period and hope that the New Year will bring you even greater success.