2024-02-22 February 2024 Updates

Happy Thursday! I just deployed a good amount of new updates today, and have been churning out a ton of stuff so far here in 2024. I thought a little list might be helpful for you.

This isn't a complete list, but I think it covers a good amount. The last code commit in 2023 was number 23,238 and so far here in 2024 I just pushed out code commit #23,380- 142 commits already for January & February... so far.

The general theme of this year has been improving the customer UI, improving the shop, and trying to increase add-on purchases.

From today's update:

  • New, all new mobile menu (I based it off amazon's mobile menu and re-coded the our menu from scratch. We have three new shop categories, shop departments that you can 'see more'/'see less', content handled the same way, and it's just beautiful. This is probably the 5th or 6th iteration of mobile menu I've built now in the 14 years of Kiva and I am really proud of this one and what it can do)
  • New, 'bestsellers' shop page, shows the bestsellers from each shop category
  • New, 'new releases' shows the newest products in your shop
  • New, 'movers & shakers' just shows your featured items, but it has a peppy title
  • Updated, cleanup of mobile/tablet/desktop, numerous improvements, fixed some major framework issues. This took going through every Kiva customer one by one to get right after the major base changes. Huge undertaking, I'm very happy with the results so far.
  • Update, to use the latest FontAwesome Icon sets, and I finally changed the twitter icon to use the stupid new 'x' icon
  • New, fixed headers for everyone now

From before today's update, last few weeks:

  • New!!! Huge- you can enable a whole new part of the customer interface by going to your Business Information page on the admin. This allows for new features for customers like 'report feedback', 'leave review', and 'track order' which displays a very nice google map of the customers' address, and a few other little things. Try it out.
  • Updated the customers page and split out all the 'sort by' filter options into a new modal popup so that multiple of the filters can now be used together
  • New buy again section at the top of each shop category shows products the customer has purchased previously
  • New, buy again page shows all products
  • New, browsing history feature records what products the customer looks at
  • New, navigation tray at the bottom of the screen on mobile
  • New, setting to show all your categories as tiles instead of a scrolling horizontal bar (not recommended though)
  • Update, billing process freezes transaction record to prevent multiple processes from grabbing the same record
  • Update, to how shop buttons are displayed on mobile/tablet
  • Fixed, on the main shop page, the meta 'title' tag displayed 'Shop Shop'
  • New, you can change the name of any emails that are admin created (not system emails)
  • New, admin page called 'shop searches' where you can see what people are searching for in your shop.
  • Fix, if a distributor name was less than 4 chars, it wouldn't show up as an option
  • Huge project whitelisting IPs for our content delivery network, updating CloudFlare firewall blacklist
  • Fix, xml and kxml didn't know how to get the right classifications for products, shop categories reported now too! Try: https://www.yourdomain.com/shop/some-category.xml (add .xml to the end of one of your shop category urls)
  • New, AI product description generation (we use chatgpt api)

Looking towards the next couple of weeks:

  • Updated to shop item detail page, total revamp for mobile, so much better
  • Updated the 'cart' page, total revamp. Instantly change quantities/delete products for customers
  • New 'save for later' feature to move items from a customer's cart/order to a 'save for later' list (and back the other way too)

Looking towards the next couple of months:

  • AI recommendations using AWS Personalize. I have a working version of this that creates the user, products, user interaction datasets, creates everything on aws, trains the model, and the creates the recommendation engines. One thing to note- this stuff is EXPENSIVE. There's no way we can have this running 24/7 (the aws bill would be more than you pay Kiva Logic...) so I'm experimenting with turning the recommendation engine on once a week (for each Kiva business customer) to update user/item/item interaction data and get new recommendations for each customer. This should work ok, but I'll know more after testing it further. I'll have more when this gets closer to launch. We will see if it's affordable.
  • AI populated carts for add-ons
  • shop for next day delivery
  • shop, then sign-up and choose box
  • checkout/signup process to use latest Stripe checkout page (equivalent/better than shopify's checkout page)
  • experimenting with removing the popup after adding a product and instead having a response right where the 'add to order' button is

Thanks for reading, hope you have a great rest of your day. If you see any bugs or anything weird, just let me know. Thank you,

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