Merx 2.0

[tobiasfabian]

Hello everybody,

Merx is now over six years old. We and you have built many web shops with Merx – thanks for your trust! Over the years, both we and (we’re sure) you have learned a lot about building shops and using Merx.

Now, we want to take everything we’ve learned in the past six years and put it into a major upgrade: Merx 2.0. In fact, we already started working on it some time ago. At this point, we’d like to hear from you as well:

• What features would you like to see in Merx 2.0?
• How can we improve the developer experience?
• What features are your clients asking for?

Planned Features

• Multi-currency support
• Improved asynchronous payments (hooks)
• Improved PHP classes
• New PHP classes
  • ListItem
  • ListItems
  • Price
  • ProductPage
  • Tax
• Integrated API
• Additional panel views (e.g. statistics)
• Improved documentaion

Merx 2.0 is being developed for Kirby 5. There will be several breaking changes, so upgrading from Merx 1 to Merx 2 won’t be straightforward. The latest version of Merx 1 (1.10.0) is compatible with Kirby 5.

We’ll also be increasing the price. To be honest, if we added up the time we’ve spent developing Merx and compared it to the number of licenses sold, the result would be a big negative number.

If you’re able to, we’d really appreciate your input on pricing from your side as well.

We’re looking forward to discussing all of this with you!

Tobias

[tobiasfabian]

We've received some feedback via email, and I'd like to share it here. These are not planned features but things we will consider during the development.

• Improved documentation
  • [Documentation/Recipe for a] multi-step product configurator
  • [Documentation/Recipe for] tracking e-commerce events with Google Analytics and/or Matomo.
• Metadata fields per product (e.g. nutritional values)
• Product attributes (e.g. size, color) [We will try to find a good, standardized solution]
• Dynamic price calculations (e.g. quantity-based pricing using a multiplier) [That’s something we did for Visplay already, might integrate it in Merx’s core]
• Customer login (to manage subscriptions, update details, etc.)
• Donations (choose the amount you want to donate)
• Basic sales insights (ideally with a calendar view to browse sales history)
• Delivery service integration (like DHL, GLS, UPS, etc.)
• More configuration options available directly from the Kirby Panel
  • Managing shipping prices and VAT for different countries via Panel
• More complete system for managing invoices
  • Refunds (including automatic mails) via Panel
• More complete system for sending mails (to customers and site administrators)

[manuel-fleig]

Already a very promising list! Something I struggled with in the past was international tax and shipping calculation inside the cart. With the help of @afbora i could realise www.

As a Designer an extended Documentation and cookbook would be a huge improvement. That's what makes Kirby so appealing for me and I would love to see that for Merx.