FastSpring changelog fastspring.com

New

Our Q1 product update was released on April 8, 2021 and includes the following improvements to the platform:

• Mailchimp Integration - Sellers can now use Mailchimp for features like cart abandonment more reliably. Previously, the Mailchimp v3 API was experiencing intermittent gaps on our platform and Sellers were not able to get all of the marketing data they expected. We’ve now improved validation to better determine if and when a cart has been abandoned.
• New Reseller Store Experience - Resellers and Split Payees now have access to the newest version of the FastSpring App. These users will be able to access their store and accounts via app.fastspring.com and use the new user interface. By migrating our reseller experience, we can begin adding new features and enhancements based on your feedback.

Changes based on your feedback:

• We extended the session timeout interval on app.fastspring.com to 12 hours. Previously, the FastSpring App would time out very quickly and require users to log in again if they briefly stopped activity.
• We changed the payment method we used to call “PO” and “Purchase Order” to “Invoice” across our checkout and the FastSpring App to reduce any confusion around this payment option.

Fixes in our Contextual platform:

• A small number of non-US Sellers were seeing incorrect calculations on volume-based discounts, which was leading to higher discounts than intended. We quickly fixed this issue and customers should now see appropriate discounts when a volume discount is being applied.
• Stores in non-US countries were not able to purchase products as gifts through our platform. We improved validation to ensure that a postal code is collected for gift purchases for all supported countries.
• Web Storefront content was cutting off footer content. We improved the styling to ensure the footer renders as expected.
• Custom Orders of Digital Only products were incorrectly showing price when Buyers switched countries. The platform will now recalculate custom order tax after the customer has entered their payment address to ensure we are calculating price and tax accurately.
• Fixed a bug that caused certain credit cards to get blocked for 24 hours after receiving a soft decline from the card-issuing bank on both the original attempt and backup attempt through our backup processor. This impacted transactions from February 23rd through April 8th.
• Secure call discounts were being calculated incorrectly, causing products to be discounted at higher rates and prices to be lower than intended. We added validation to ensure prices are correct after a discount is applied.

Fixes in our Classic platform:

• Classic Stores in gross pricing mode were adding tax to digital and physical products for Buyers in the United Kingdom, Australia, and European Union. The platform will now recalculate custom order tax after the Consumer has entered the payment address.
• Sellers trying to use Create Order/ Option 6 style links were unable to complete sales because it referenced an insecure URL using the http protocol, which was leading to a 400 (Bad Request) error. We’ve fixed this by replacing the http protocol with a secure https protocol.

Digital Invoicing Early Access Improvements:

• Quote webhooks tags were labeled as "attributes", which many Sellers noted were confusing. We updated the label to now say “tags”.
• We improved how we display VAT exemption (zero-rated tax) on our Buyer Quote and Seller Quote views. Previously, the tax was subtracted from the Gross subtotal resulting in the total value. Based on your feedback, zero-rated tax is now displayed as a zero line item.
• Quote webhooks were not supporting coupons and discounts as they were being applied to quotes, which created the possibility for incorrect reporting information. Quote webhooks now include the correct payload on coupons and discounts.

New

New Features & Improvements

Taxes and Tax Exemptions

• We made improvements to the mobile experience. When viewing our VAT/GST tool-tip, it was getting cut off on smaller screen sizes. This has been fixed.

• We fixed an issue where buyers who were checking out with a free trial product weren’t able to enter their VAT ID.

• We made changes to taxes for India on Classic. Orders in India, but in USD on the Classic store were charging unusual tax amounts. This was causing pain for our buyers, and driving cases to our Support team. This has been fixed. Indian orders in USD should assess appropriate tax.

• We fixed the taxation in South Africa and Russia. We were allowing users to enter their VAT # and were then exempting their tax. However, those two locales do not allow tax exemption by the seller; instead, it is handled internally between the buyer and their taxing authority. This has been fixed, we now assess taxes for South African and Russian buyers appropriately.

• If VAT Exempt buyer also has a discount on their cart, their tax is being displayed incorrectly. This has been fixed.

• VAT Exemption was not being applied to subscription add-ons. When a customer has a subscription addon AND should be exempt from VAT, we are still charging VAT. This has been fixed.

• Buyers with orders that were VAT Exempt and in Gross pricing mode who then made a negative change to their order were having incorrect pro-ration. This is now fixed and the proration amount should be correct.

Update on Fastspring Quoting Functionality

• We made searching for products simpler when creating or editing a quote. It used to be that you couldn’t search by the product path. We have enabled search by product path to give sellers more flexibility when creating or editing a quote and searching for the right product to enter into the quote.

• We updated the max quote length. When creating a quote, sellers were limited to only 1000 in the notes field. We have expanded that to 5000 and added an indicator of how many characters are in the field.

• Users who have Quotes enabled can now filter their Orders by Quote Based or Non-Quote Based Orders, or All Orders. This provides sellers the ability to see their quote-only orders, their non-quote orders, or all their orders.

• When generating an invoice via our dashboard from an open quote, fulfillment upon quote acceptance wasn’t working as expected. Fixed. Now sellers can hit “Generate Invoice” for stores that Fulfill upon Quote Acceptance and use License Generator. This unlocks the capability for sellers to confidently use “Generate Invoice” for their customers when they want to fulfill on quote Acceptance.

• We have updated some of the look and feel of parts of our quote flows, including the products drop-down when sellers are creating the quote; as well as the language selector when buyers/prospects are looking at their quotes. This will result in a better experience for both our sellers and buyers.

Bugs & Fixes

• We fixed an issue where manual subscriptions were not offering Wire/PO as a payment option. In our continuous drive to provide our buyers with the most options to pay in order to increase our seller conversion rate, we wanted to remove any roadblocks that were preventing buyers from completing a sale. We had identified a case where when there was a manual subscription, buyers were not presented with Wire or Purchase Order (Invoice) as a payment option. Now that this is fixed, buyers will see Wire or Purchase Order (Invoice) as a payment option - even when their order contains a manual subscription.

• We fixed an issue for Buyers using Firefox were experiencing difficulties when purchasing a .zip or .bz2 file. There was a bug where the download would not start. Fixed - Firefox users can now purchase .zip or .bz2 files and the download will begin upon completion of checkout.

• When a buyer checked out from the Account Management Portal, we would say “You will be charged XXX for the upgrade”; however that was not taking into account pro-ration logic. We have updated the verbiage to now say: “You will be charged the prorated amount for this plan change today and xxx upon rebill”. Should reduce confusion at checkout.

• In the Popup checkout experience, bundles were not displaying accurately on the cart. Products were being added to the cart individually, instead of as an entire bundle. This would cause fulfillment to not work as intended. This has been fixed.

• Some Taiwanese orders were not receiving the email receipt of their purchase. This is especially important in Taiwan, as the receipt can be used to enter a lottery sponsored by the Taiwanese government for Taiwanese taxpayers. Fixed - now all buyers in Taiwan should receive email receipts for all of their orders.

New

New Features & Improvements

• Starting Jan 1, 2021, all ecommerce transactions in the European Economic Area (EEA) will be eligible for Strong Customer Authentication (SCA). European buyers will only be affected if their issuing bank requires them to go through the SCA flow for a specific transaction. If this is the case, they may be required to enter 2-factor authentication to complete their purchase.
  
  FastSpring is fully prepared to support these changes on the seller’s behalf and deliver a seamless experience for buyers. FastSpring sellers do not have to take any additional action to be compliant.
• On January 6, we released code that allows our seller onboarding experience to respond much more quickly to things sellers do in Dashboard. Now, when a seller creates a product, our system is updated almost immediately. It used to take 15 minutes or more. This led to a disjoined experience. Now, with immediate updates, our seller onboarding experience stays aligned with the seller’s actions.

FastSpring Quoting Update

Improvements

• Quotes will now display your store's logo in the top right corner, similar to invoices.
• The Notes field will now respect line breaks and display proper formatting on the buyer-facing Quote.
• Added a sources filter to the Orders list so that you can filter for only quote-driven or only ecommerce-driven orders.
• When creating a Quote, the product dropdown is now alphabetized to make it easier to find specific products.
• When creating a Quote, the product field will now ignore special characters when searching (so you can search for “FastSpring Maintenance” and “FastSpring® Maintenance” will appear in the results).
• Postal Code is no longer required to create a Quote for a buyer in the US or Canada. Instead, we will check for complete address information when clicking “Generate Invoice” since this is when the postal code is actually required to calculate tax for the order.
• When creating a Quote in a non-USD currency, we will now update the product price to reflect the product list price in that currency. Note that if a list price isn't defined in the desired quote currency (see below), we will default to the USD price.

Fixes:

• Fixed an issue causing the Quote page to show "You haven't created any quotes" when there are no quotes that fall within the default date range (past 7 days). We also updated the default date range to show all dates.
• Fixed an issue causing “Invoice” not to be displayed as an option when checking out on a quote that contains a subscription. Invoice will now be displayed as an option, as expected.
• Fixed an issue causing some email variables not to be populated in some customer-facing emails (i.e. nextChargeDateDisplay and nextChargeTotalDisplay)
• Fixed an issue preventing tags from being passed from the Quote to the resulting order. Custom Tags should now work as expected on Quotes.
• Fixed an issue causing “null” to be displayed in the address fields on checkout if they were not provided on the quote. Now the fields will simply be blank, as expected.

Coming Soon:

• Automatically apply product-level discounts when creating a Quote.
• Fix for Net/Gross pricing display issues for some country/currency combinations.
• Fix for pricing display issues when adding a VAT ID to remove tax from a Quote.
• Fix for Fulfillment on Quote Acceptance not working when generating invoice via dashboard.
• Increase character limit of Notes field to 5000 characters.

Bugs & Fixes

• We have made several Japanese translation improvements for the Popup and Web Storefronts.
• If we go to Sales → Subscription → and then the Charges tab in the app and create a report with one of the following filters; Created, Live, Product or Date Range, a bug was discovered that prevented the results of the report from reflecting the selected filters. This bug has been fixed.
• We have removed the ability for customers to change their settings. This should only be done by a FastSpring admin, and that ability remains.
• We have updated the verbiage under the logo to now reflect the correct verbiage "Sold and Fulfilled by FastSpring an authorized reseller", with a link to the Purchasing through Fastspring page.

New

New Features & Improvements

• Starting Jan 1, 2021, all ecommerce transactions in the European Economic Area (EEA) will be eligible for Strong Customer Authentication (SCA). European buyers will only be affected if their issuing bank requires them to go through the SCA flow for a specific transaction. If this is the case, they may be required to enter 2-factor authentication to complete their purchase.
  
  FastSpring is fully prepared to support these changes on the seller’s behalf and deliver a seamless experience for buyers. FastSpring sellers do not have to take any additional action to be compliant.

Bug Fixes

• We discovered a bug that caused Wire Transfer and Purchase Order payment methods to be displayed on checkout when a seller created a custom order with a subscription, even though these payment methods are not supported for automatic subscriptions. This bug has been fixed.
• A bug caused the FastSpring Payouts button in Classic to display twice after the seller had activated the Payouts account. When a Seller activates their Payouts Account, the button should display “FastSpring Payouts Portal”. If the seller has yet to activate their account, the button should display “Activate FastSpring Payouts Account”. This bug has now been fixed.
• We have made several Japanese translation improvements for the Popup and Web Storefronts.
• If we go to Sales → Subscription → and then the Charges tab in the app and create a report with one of the following filters; Created, Live, Product or Date Range, a bug was discovered that prevented the results of the report from reflecting the selected filters. This bug has been fixed.

Improvement

New Features & Improvements

• We are excited to announce the Early Access launch of FastSpring Quotes! FastSpring Quotes allows sellers to create and manage quotes for their customers directly within the FastSpring App, enabling them to seamlessly process and collect payments on B2B orders. Please contact us for more information.

Bug Fixes

• A bug caused classic orders to fail due to being generated as “accepted” instead of “order complete” in Springboard. TNP-8219

Improvement

New Features & Improvements

• To better position the product to support the new B2B functionality coming in 2021, we renamed the “Activity” section in the navigation bar “Sales” and made “Orders” the default page. Additionally, we moved “Custom Orders” to the right-most tab on the Orders page, and made it so that the “Pending Approval” tab only shows if the store has orders that are pending approval.

Bug Fixes

• In the Popup and Web Storefronts, we discovered a bug that caused the VAT amount to display as $0 although tax was calculated on both the invoice and checkout. VAT should now display correct tax information.
• We discovered a bug that caused pricing to be displayed incorrectly in the checkout flow. The bug affected orders with ten units or more when a discount was applied. This bug has been fixed.

Coming Soon

• We are continuing to make progress on the highly-awaited B2B initiative! We plan to release the MVP to a handful of strategic sellers in early December.

Fix

Bug Fixes

• For custom orders generated from Reseller stores, changing the quantity of a product to zero during checkout did not remove the product from the order, as expected. Additionally, if the product had a license associated with it, the zero quantity item was also being fulfilled. This has now been resolved.
• We discovered a bug that caused subscriptions with trial, discount on price, and via coupons to produce a negative price. The problem existed in both pricing modes (net and gross). This bug has been fixed.
• Our system has been known to send the same webhook twice, we have identified the root cause and duplicate webhooks should not be firing. We have identified a use-case/situation in our system where we inversely sent duplicate webhooks.

Coming Soon

• We are continuing to make progress on the highly-awaited B2B initiative! We plan to release the MVP to a handful of strategic sellers in early December.

Fix

Bug Fixes

• In some cases, custom order links on Classic were displaying inconsistent pricing. This has been fixed.
• When copying an order to a new custom order, we discovered an issue that caused the modal to continuously spin in the loading state. This has been fixed.
• We have made some improvements to increase the reliability of Alipay orders. Alipay orders should now be processed and completed as expected.
• We discovered a bug that caused subscription prorations to sometimes result in a negative tax value, which would cause the subscription to go into dunning.
• Fixed a bug that caused Colombian taxes to be added to a product that was sold in gross pricing mode.

Improvement

New Features & Improvements

• We are excited to announce that our upgraded tax management service, Avalara, is now live. With this upgrade, sellers are now able to select a more accurate product tax category in the FastSpring App by specifying a product tax category that best describes the product they are selling. They will do this by filling out a multi-level questionnaire for every product they intend to sell.
• We will now collect first name, last name, and email from the buyer before they are redirected to Paypal or Amazon for payment completion. This enables us to assess the buyer for risk/fraud before attempting to collect payment.
• To ensure FastSpring is compliant with Taiwan e-Invoicing regulations, buyers in Taiwan will now receive a secondary e-Invoice generated by the Taiwan Ministry of Finance. Additionally, the FastSpring-generated invoice will now include a unique GUI number that matches the number on their e-Invoice.

Bug Fixes

• For buyers paying with iDeal, our system would sometimes collect funds but fail to complete the order, resulting in a confusing buyer experience and the order getting stuck in the “pending payment” state. This issue has now been fixed.
• When creating a new custom order with buyer address information, the “State” field was not persisting after saving. This has been corrected.
• We recently updated invoices to include the original order date, but this field was not populating for specific orders. This has been fixed.

Improvement

New Features & Improvements

• To improve the buyer experience, we updated invoices to include the original order date. Going forward, all invoices will now show the order date as “Issued: [date]” under the order ID and above the due date (if applicable).

Bug Fixes

• We discovered a bug with FastSpring Payouts which ignored the seller’s preferred currency and displayed funds in USD for all sellers. This bug has been fixed, and the correct currency is being displayed accurately in the seller's account.
• When creating a new custom order, the title field was highlighted in red as soon as the user clicked outside of the field, regardless of the validity of the input. The seller was still able to save the custom order, but it created a confusing UX. Generally, the title field should only highlight red when input is invalid or title has been used by another order before. This bug has now been resolved.
• In the Web Storefront, we discovered a bug that caused product images with long text to display in bad resolution. This bug has now been fixed and all product images should display in correct resolution and good quality.
• We fixed a bug that caused data to be missing in some data exports.
• Fixed a bug in Classic which caused checkout to calculate the wrong tax amount for some non-US customers purchasing subscriptions.