Our Summer 2022 release just shipped, and it’s our biggest yet.
Although we release updates (you know, the standard “bug and performance fixes”) constantly throughout the year, our seasonal releases tend to be where all the big stuff drops.
And because of the size, we took a little longer to make sure things were just right rather than rushing to get something out the door. We underpin some very large companies in Australia and so our quality must be top-notch.
So what’s new for this release?
In no particular order, here’s what we’ve been up to:
Hybrid ordering has arrived!
A standard process in the retail world, but much rarer in the B2B space, is being able to browse items and order without an existing account login. The has been our number 1 requested new feature, and we’re proud to say it is now live!
So now, you can setup a Shopify-style public website, and list items for sale, but have the benefit of all Knead’s B2B features when it comes to order routing and management.
Which leads us into…
The Universal Checkout!
Seen one checkout, you’ve seen them all? Not quite.
We specialise in B2B commerce – quotes, orders and service requests between businesses – so therefore, the checkout process must handle all of these with the best possible user experience.
We spent weeks taking a standard shopping cart and checkout process, and running it across all of customers’ different needs to result in what we believe is the most flexible and efficient checkout we could deliver.
In summary, we’ve split this into 3 key steps:
- Customer confirmation
- Shipping detail
- Order review and confirmation
Now, regardless of the user being a guest (no account), logged-in, or a sales/service team member the checkout process adapts automatically to the types of product, and requests or confirms details only if required.
We’ve got shiny new servers
Our engineering team has totally revised our hosting architecture and migrated all customer workloads to brand-new, latest generation servers.
Just from this upgrade alone, we observed performance gains of up to 50% in side-by-side testing of common customer transactions.
Aside from the user performance benefits, this has also enabled us to deploy releases and stand up new customer sites faster than ever before.
The Knead Integrated Workflow
Integration is life at Knead. There’s loads of way to put items online and sell them, but it takes a specialised platform to then manage those orders – getting the right details, and placing them into the right systems – all the way to completion.
Our integrated workflow is where is all the magic happens, and in this release we’ve made a wave of enhancements specifically around reliability and robustness:
- Integration Logging – being able to trace (at a system level) how information is being exchanged between systems during each step of a workflow
- Catalogue and User sync – ensuring that everyone has a login, their company details, and access to all products with correct pricing
- Order Retry – some things are unavoidable, a system might be down, or a key field was missed in a user profile. After correcting an order, just hit retry and the process will continue without anyone having to resubmit
So no matter if you use ServiceNow, Zendesk, ConnectWise or any other business platform, you be assured that all information is being reliably synchronised and delivered to all your existing business systems.
Want to know what else we’ve been up to?
Get a demo, by registering below. This is just the beginning…