Pre-1.0 Release Notes (2021-22)
Version 0.99.0
September 19, 2022
- NEW: Bloom now has a public API for Customers and Memberships. If you're interested in using it for third-party integrations, let us know!
- UPDATED: When members add or update their billing address, Bloom will now display all states, including US Territories. Before, addresses were limited to just the shipping states, but some members have billing addresses in other states, so that is now supported. You'll see this update on all sales channels, including the POS.
- UPDATED: When shipping to Colorado Bloom will send the fee as a line item to ShipCompliant. The SKU we had selected to use may have been too long for some configurations. We shortened it to "CO_DELIVERY_FEE".
- BUG: If you're using ShipCompliant to calculate taxes for batch orders you may have been using our ShipCompliant Brand Key field in Product Specs. When batching orders, Bloom wasn't correctly using the value of this field, instead, the Vendor field in Shopify was used. This could cause the batch order to fail with a ShipCompliant error. You shouldn't see this issue anymore.
- BUG: You may have noticed our Finance report would show an error if you tried to load it. That is now fixed.
- WORKING ON: This release .99. We're one release away from our first major release 1.0. The team is almost done with an all-new batching system, as well as major upgrades to the My Memberships view when members log in. There are too many changes to list. More to come in early October!
Version 0.98.0
September 6, 2022
- NEW: If you're using Stripe for stored credit cards Bloom will now automatically retrieve any updates made to the card, either manually or from Stripe's auto-update feature. This means that the card status in Bloom should accurately reflect the status in Stripe.
- UPDATE: We've made improvements to complex inventory reporting errors when ship orders from the POS are being shipped from multiple locations. Now, Bloom will properly notify admins on orders that need to be shipped from a single location, when inventory is only available from multiple locations.
- UPDATE: On Bloom's Clubs view, each level displays a number for Current memberships and Failed memberships. The Failed memberships number was including Archived batch payments, making this number seem larger than it should be. We've updated the feature so only failures from active batches are calculated.
- UPDATE: Our Sales Tax report overview was calculating the total for only the 50 orders that were displayed on the first paginated view. Now, this overview will total all orders for the entire date range.
- UPDATE: We are always making performance improvements. This time we've focused on the loading of website homepages. Bloom includes a lot of scripts when the website homepage loads. Now, if those scripts aren't required on the home page Bloom will not load them, potentially making the home page load faster for website visitors.
- FIX: In rare cases, Bloom's Check Compliance tile on the Shopify POS would display an error, if the customer didn't have a membership. This has been fixed.
- FIX: We were alerted of a POS bug where custom products added to the cart would make Bloom's Members & Benefits app crash. This is now fixed.
- FIX: A new bug was introduced when batching club orders, where if one or more batch orders returned a "Shipping rate not found" error on the Confirm your batch view, that view would crash. This was a rare issue but is now fixed.
- WORKING ON: We're only two releases away from Bloom 1.0! The team has been working hard on big improvements to membership order batching, and final development on Bloom's new My Membership views that were designed first for mobile devices. Stay tuned over the next several weeks as we roll out more features.
Version 0.97.0
August 23, 2022
- NEW: Bloom now has an Orders API that can be used for finance integrations. It includes bundle details, as well as a lot of other fields Shopify doesn't provide. Contact us if you want to integrate!
- NEW: Bloom now supports Preferred Ship Date when creating a shipping order from the POS. When using the Check Shipping Compliance feature, there is a new feature where you can set the date. This date will get passed down to the order, then on to your compliance integration.
- UPDATED: We now support the Requested Ship Date if your warehouse is using Fort Systems. When a preferred date is added to an order, and Fort is integrated, the order will be tagged properly.
- UPDATED: When exporting Memberships from Bloom, you'll see a few new fields: Last order date, Group ID, and Group Name. The group fields are to support our new version 1.0 of Bloom Commerce, due to be released in the coming weeks.
- FIXED: If a subscription membership was edited by a member, the shipping frequency may have reverted to the default Every Month. This is now fixed.
- FIXED: Related to the above issue, the subscription renewal date that displays on the customer record in Shopify might reflect what Bloom had stored for the subscription. This didn't impact shipping dates but may have caused confusion since they didn't match. This is fixed.
- FIXED: When trying to edit Level settings in Bloom, a server error may have occurred. This is now fixed.
- WORKING ON: The Bloom team has been hard at work, putting the finishing touches on some major Bloom Commerce 1.0 features. Including all new Batching, Bloom Orders, Subscriptions, and an all-new membership portal. Keep your eyes peeled for upcoming announcements on 1.0, and join our webinar this Thursday at 11 am PT to learn more.
Version 0.96.0
August 8, 2022
- UPDATED: Orders created by Bloom batches, and shipped to Colorado, will now include the Colorado Retail Shipping Tax of $.27. This tax will also be sent to ShipCompliant if you are using that service.
- UPDATED: Bloom now supports subscriptions that use ShopPay or PayPal as the initial payment method.
- UPDATED: States that appear in the Shipping State drop-down customers will see when joining a membership can now be mapped to shipping profiles in Shopify. This means you can have shipping profiles that use states you don't want members to use for their memberships. We need to turn this feature on and configure it. Please contact us if this is something you need.
- UPDATED: When viewing a membership in the POS using the Members & Benefits tile, you'll now see the membership status in a colored badge, so it is now easy to see the status and act accordingly.
- FIX: We discovered a bug where when subscription orders were automatically batched, they shipping frequency that was displayed in Shopify might not be accurate. It was common to be set as a monthly subscription even though the membership would have kept the original, correct frequency. This was likely going unnoticed, as it didn't have any real impact on subscription orders, but is now fixed.
- FIX: When changing the expiration date of a gift membership, the date may have silently caused a validation error that likely wasn't noticed, where the date would not be updated. This has been fixed.
- FIX: On rare occasions, when members logged in and attempted to access their membership information, they would be redirected back to the log in view. Now, when this happens, an error message will appear. But this should be a very rare case.
- FIX: When applying member discounts using the Members & Benefits tile in the POS, you'll now find they can't be applied to members who are canceled or waitlisted. Before this fix, you could apply discounts to any membership status.
- FIX: When viewing a cart in the POS Members & Benefits tile, you may have noticed some line item subtotals were not accurate. This was due to some updates Shopify made to their APIs. We discovered the issue in testing and fixed it in this release.
- FIX: Pickup and in-person orders would get tagged with the customer's default shipping carrier. This was irrelevant information and could affect order filtering. This is now fixed.
Version 0.95.0
July 26, 2022
- NEW: Now in the POS, when fulfilling pickup orders using Bloom's Members & Benefits app there are two new features. First, you can now change the pick up location of the order. This comes in handy if your club orders use the default fulfillment location, but your customers are picking up from a tasting room. Inventory will also get reconciled when the location is switched. Second, you can now ask members to sign for the pickup order. Just tap the Mark as Picked up button on the order, then you'll see the signature at the bottom.
- UPDATED: Refunded or voided orders won't appear in the POS when viewing orders through the Members & Benefits app. These were appearing as Unfulfilled, which was confusing. Since the app is designed for fulfilling or viewing paid orders, it made sense just to hide them. You can still access them through Shopify's POS Order interface.
- UPDATED: We removed the calendar icon from the Date of Birth field on Bloom Cart. It looked like it was clickable, which created some confusion with users. Less is more.
- FIX: Using the Members & Benefits app again, if you're viewing a customer with a cancelled or waitlisted membership, the Apply Discount button would appear. It shouldn't. Now, the button won't appear for memberships with these statuses.
- FIX: If a membership was added through the POS, and a staff name was added as the referral, it would successfully be saved to the membership, but it would not appear in the membership export report. This is fixed.
- FIX: If you've been trying to use the Bloom Inventory report lately, you may have seen an error when trying to load the report. This has been fixed.
- FIX: Bloom's new Bundles feature nicely adds bundle line items to the Bloom finance report for accurate accounting. There was a bug if the bundle item prices were changed after orders were created with the bundle product, historical orders would also change in the Finance report. Now, historical orders will not update, as expected.
- FiX: In some cases, trying to view a saved batch in Bloom would result in an error. Now all saved batches should load.
- WORKING ON: We're putting the finishing touches on our performance improvements to our background processing via a new polling architecture, as well as finishing up preflights and batching in the new Bloom 1.0 app. Additionally, our design team is almost done with the new My Memberships and Join forms that will fully work with the new version of Bloom.
Version 0.94.0
July 13, 2022
- NEW: Bloom has fully completed our integration with Shopify Subscriptions. This means subscriptions no longer need to use Bloom Checkout and will flow through Shopify Checkout instead. Both shipping frequency and quantity will be defined in the Bloom app, so the use of product variants is no longer needed in many instances. Saved cards can still be added or changed in Bloom on existing subscriptions. There are lots of cool updates here. Contact us if you'd like to move your legacy subscriptions to our new system based on Shopify's latest-and-greatest features.
- NEW: Some states don't allow for the use of the term "Free" on shipping rates. Bloom now has a new field in Bloom/Settings/Shipping that provides the ability for you to define your own free shipping rate name. This will override any rate that comes from the Bloom Shipping Service, which includes any free rate rules on membership levels that could be used on club orders or for members purchasing online.
- NEW: Shopify added the Colorado delivery fee as a tax line for all orders shipped into CO. If you're using ShipCompliant, that fee will now be added as a line item to the ShipComplaint order, and the $0.27 tax will be subtracted from the tax amount. Adding the fee as a line item was the recommended approach by Sovos. When they update their APIs to fully support this new tax, Bloom will be updated accordingly.
- WORKING ON: Final updates are being made to our new background processing that will greatly improve the performance of batching and compliance checks. Also working on an all-new batching system for Bloom 1.0, and many other game-changing features for managing releases and membership packages.
Version 0.93.0
June 27, 2022
- NEW: If you need to set a requested ship date on orders with specific products on the order, now you can. The Bloom app will automatically create a new Collections metafield called "Ship date". If you open a collection and scroll to the bottom of the Edit page, you'll see it. When a date is added to this metafield, any order with a product in that collection will have its ship date added to the order. This is mainly useful if you're using ShipComplaint or other fulfillment integration that uses our ship date field. In any case, Shopify metafields are powerful and we'll continue to build features that use them. You can learn more about Shopify metafields here.
- UPDATED: If your shop is using our ShipComplaint polling architecture, orders will now be synced using a "concurrent" process, meaning more orders will be added much faster than before. This should speed up batch processing if using ShipC.
- FIX: Bloom's Membership report would often not accurately reflect the provided date range, but it does now.
- FIX: When syncing orders to ShipCompliant, if the phone number starts with a "1" or other country code, the phone number doesn't get translated correctly. This has been fixed, and any country code is now just ignored.
- FIX: A bug was found with Bloom's bundle feature, where selling a bundle and taking a tip on the POS would result in the bundle inventory not being reconciled properly. This is now fixed.
- WORKING ON: We're still working on a lot of Bloom 1.0 features, including getting our Join and Membership views working with our new Tier Preferences feature, better membership package management, and digging into preflights and all-new batching.
Version 0.92.0
June 15, 2022
- UPDATED: Bloom's Subscription features have been fully migrated to Shopify's latest APIs. If you are already using subscriptions with Bloom Payments, we can now move you over so you can use these latest updates. What is different? The big change is subscriptions now use Shopify Checkout and not Bloom Checkout. Subscription credit cards are stored in Shopify and not Bloom Payments, but admins or members can choose to create new cards in Bloom Payments if they would like. Cool stuff.
- UPDATED: The new Bundles feature we announced in the last release has some new updates. Nothing major, but the line items that appear on the order are easier to read and we are also including the "__bundle_item" attribute on the order to make it clear that the order includes a bundle item.
- UPDATED: If a shipping rate shares the exact name with a Shopify fulfillment location, Bloom will treat that order as a pick-up order and tag it accordingly. This allows you to create a pick-up location that uses that location as a local-pickup location in Shopify.
- FIX: If there were special characters saved in the Footer message on Bloom Cart, then it could cause the cart not to function as expected. This has been fixed.
- WORKING ON: The team is continuing to make improvements to Bloom 1.0. One area of focus has been getting our join flow hooked up to our new groups and preferences. This will allow for many flexible options for your new members. Stay tuned to our release notes and future Bloom Studio Live webinars for more info.
Version 0.91.0
May 22, 2022
- NEW: If you sell bundles, you'll want to read this. Bloom now supports bundle products natively. We've always recommended the Bundles app, which did a good job and providing core features like product and basic inventory management. There were a few downsides though. First, the bundles app calculates inventory based on all locations, which can make for difficult inventory management. Next, you can't set the price of the individual items in the bundle. It only calculates the average discount when the items cost more than the bundle price. Lastly, the app doesn't provide a way to report on the items sold in the bundle. Shopify and Bloom reports could only report on the main bundle product, which has proven limiting. That has now changed with Bloom's new bundle feature. We've expanded our old bundle feature to include a product picker, item price adjuster, inventory calculator, as well as reporting on the bundle items. Any new shop will get this interface. If you're interested in changing out your old feature for this new one, just give us a shout. We'd be happy to turn it on and give you a quick training.
- NEW: If you've been using Bloom for over two years, there is a good chance you were using our "legacy" join form at some point. We know many of you still are, which is fine. If you've been moved to our new join form, we've added a way for you to redirect the site visitor if they somehow reach the old join form. When you edit the club, you'll now see a checkbox for "Enable legacy join form". When this is checked (and it will be by default) then your legacy form is available to users if they know the URL, like maybe they found it on Google. When it is unchecked, you'll see a message that users will be redirected to the home page. If you want this functionality, uncheck the box and save. This will prevent users from gaining access to the form, and tell Google that it should be permanently redirected.
- UPDATED: We've added multiple performance updates. First, when product specs were saved, those new specs might not appear in certain areas of the app, if there were other, higher-priority processes occurring. Now, they will be immediately available. Next, if you're using ShipCompliant, the updating of shipping status to Fulfilled might take longer than expected, again if there are other high-priority processes occurring. Our latest update improves the performance of this fulfillment status being updated.
- FIXED: If using the Pay with saved card feature on the POS, and you change the order total to a greater amount after the initial authorization, then Bloom would send an email notification telling the administrator that the order amount was greater than the authorization. Now, we'll create two authorizations totaling the full amount of the order, fixing this issue and ensuring the admin does not receive an email notification.
- FIXED: If you were using the Product description field on Release options, that description was not displaying on the new My Memberships view. This only impacts customers who are using this new view, and have product descriptions. This bug has been fixed, so descriptions will now display as expected.
- WORKING ON: We had a successful test launch of Bloom 1.0 with one customer. Things ran exactly as planned. We did discover areas we can improve, and are continuing to develop new features. We'll continue to keep everyone up-to-date on our progress.
Version 0.90.0
May 5, 2022
- UPDATED: We've added performance improvements to batching, specifically if you're using ShipComplaint. In the past, orders would be committed after all of the batch orders were created in Shopify. Now ShipCompliant orders will be committed at a preset interval as orders are being created. This ensures that orders are committed to ShipCompliant much faster than before. For now, this is a feature we turn on when a shop requests it. Let us know if you'd like it turned on. Next will be working on bulk syncing of orders to ShipComplaint, which will improve performance even more. Stay tuned for more on that update.
- BUG: Product variants that loaded in the new My Memberships view were only displaying the main product information, and not the additional variant information. This bug has been fixed, where now members will see the full variant name like "2019 Vineyard Reserve Merlot - 1500 ml."
- BUG: When members would receive and respond to an Update your Billing Information email from Bloom using the new My Membership view, their billing information would not save completely without the member being logged into their account. This was a bug, since the new My Membership view doesn't require log in to access and use the features. This bug is now fixed.
Version 0.89.0
April 18, 2022
- NEW: Gifting wine is complex since two customers are involved -- the gift purchaser (the member) and the gift receiver (the recipient). Notifications can occur to both customers when the member creates the gift, then gift orders are created, and when the gift expires. These automated emails have been upgraded. The gift purchaser will receive a confirmation they signed up successfully, and notifications when their card is charged for the recurring gifts. The gift recipient will receive a message when the member joins only if the member adds a gift message. Then the recipient receives an order notification from both Bloom and from Shopify when the gift order is created and shipped. Both will receive a notification when the gift expires. Now, Bloom has customer messaging fields for all of these emails. Just go to Bloom/Settings/Email and you'll see a new setting and fields for all of these emails. Check it out and let us know if you have questions or need training on how to use these new features.
- UPDATED: If shipping orders from the Shopify POS, and using ShipCompliant, the orders will be created as type "In person." Before this update, these orders were being treated as "Internet." Now your ShipC reporting will be more accurate.
- FIX: There was a rare bug discovered on the My Memberships view that was fixed in this update. If a member attempted to update their credit card, but their membership didn't satisfy the minimum/maximum quantity rules for the release, their new card information would not be saved. Now, the saving of a card and the release requirements aren't directly connected.
- FIX: We've finally squashed a bug that was preventing date of birth values from pre-populating the form fields when joining a club on the website. We want the dates to automatically populate the member, shipping, and billing fields to make joining faster. If a birth date is added in the website age gate, or as the member birth date, all other fields should now pre-populate so the user doesn't have to fill them in up to two more times.
- WORKING ON: We're getting ready to launch the beta version of Bloom 1.0. The team has been working hard and we're all excited to see it perform in the real world. Stay tuned for more info over the next few months as we finalize the final features.
Version 0.88.0
April 7, 2022
- NEW: When members log in and view the products in their membership, there is now a clear "View details" link under the product title that when clicked will load a pop-up displaying the product details, including a large image, description, and product specifications.
- NEW: If you want membership shipping instructions to be added to the Shopify Notes field on batched orders, there is now a setting for that. Just open Bloom/Settings/General and find the Order notes section, then check the box for Include shipping instructions on orders. New batch orders with shipping instructions will display those instructions in the Notes field on the Shopify order.
- UPDATE: When exporting memberships from Bloom, the spreadsheet will now include a new column for Pick up location name. This you to see how many memberships are pick ups from a particular location.
- FIX: The POS will now display shipping rates for Canada and other non-US countries. There was a bug that would only display US countries from profiles set up in Shopify, but this has now been fixed.
- WORKING ON: The first version of Bloom 1.0 will be rolling out for alpha testing in a week or so. We're buttoning up some final updates and fixes now and things are looking great. After this first launch, we'll immediately move into finalizing our new batching features and prepping for a wider beta testing phase in June. Stay tuned for more details on the rollout.
Version 0.87.0
March 14, 2022
- UPDATE: Bloom has had product subscriptions for over a year. This past winter, we started updating features to use Shopify's new subscription APIs. Bloom now can utilize Shopify Payments, as well as the native integration with Shopify Products and Customers. We currently are supporting new subscription tiers, and will be working with our customers soon to migrate their current subscription memberships to this new system. Stay tuned for more info soon.
- FIX: If you're using ShipComplaint and the Shopify POS, then you may have noticed in-person orders that weren't shipped were being tagged with SHIPCOMPLIANT-ERROR. This was because the order didn't have the required shipping address. We've fixed this issue, and are skipping compliance checks on all POS orders that are fulfilled at the POS and aren't being shipped.
- FIX: When new memberships are created on the POS using Bloom's new Members & Benefits tile, site administrators will now receive the New Member email. Before this update, that email wasn't being sent. If you're wondering where to manage these emails, check out Bloom/Settings/Email.
- FIX: When updating membership product selections in bulk, the process could timeout if you have more than 10 wines your members can select from, and you were trying to update more than 500 memberships at once. This bug should now be fixed and update the selections much faster.
- WORKING ON: The team continues to work hard on the new Bloom admin interface we've been calling "Bloom 1.0" The team making amazing progress. After almost two years of planning, design, and development, it is exciting to see come together. The transformation is incredible and we're excited to say it will be rolling out early this summer.
Version 0.86.0
March 1, 2022
- NEW: Bloom now integrates with Gliding Eagle, the industry's leading international wine shipping service provider. If you're interested in shipping overseas and want to learn more about how the integration works, let us know!
- UPDATED: If a membership is in the Abandoned tab, they don't have a membership, but the customer may have an email address. Before this update, if you tried to create a membership for that customer, you'd see an error "The email is already taken." Now Bloom will find the matching email and successfully create a membership for the customer.
- UPDATED: If you're using the Shopify POS, you may have seen canceled or voided orders when viewing orders in the Members & Benefits tile. With this update, we've removed canceled orders from being listed. This hopefully will reduce confusion when quickly looking at customers' orders. Only "real" orders will be displayed and available to view.
- FIX: Sometimes, when an Expired membership is changed to Current, the expired date would stick around behind the scenes, making the membership not available to batching. This happened in rare cases, but one that we fixed with this update.
Version 0.85.0
Feb 15, 2022
- NEW: If you're using the POS, and shipping to a customer, Shopify will by default, select the primary fulfillment location for your shop. This may not be desired, as the order may be shipping from the POS location or some other location. When you tap Bloom's Check Shipping Compliance tile, you'll now see the location where the order will be fulfilled, and a link to edit that location. Tapping Edit will launch a view where you can select from all of your fulfillment locations and pass that location on with the order.
- NEW: The Add Membership feature on the POS will display products and quantities for customer choice release options. If you don't want to display these products and force the membership to the default products and quantities, you can now switch them off. Just open the Edit Level view in Bloom Admin, and change the Visibility setting for the POS release options. You can set this on a per-level basis.
- UPDATED: When adding a shipping address to Bloom's Check Shipping Compliance tile in the POS, you'll now see the address will auto-complete, making adding addresses much faster, and more accurate.
- FIXED: We've updated the logic on the Join form, where users sign up for a membership on the website, that more accurately auto-populates the member's name and date of birth, making joining easier for your customers.
- WORKING ON: The design and development teams are making major improvements to the Membership views in Bloom Admin, as well as finishing up our new Tiers and Preferences views. We're getting closer to launching Bloom 1.0!
Version 0.84.0
Feb 1, 2022
- NEW: If using Bloom's Check Shipping Compliance feature from the POS we can now provide the ability to set a default fulfillment location that will be applied to all shipping orders. This is only needed if you want to fulfill from a different location than what Shopify provides as the default. Let us know if you need this, as it is a hidden setting.
- FIX: There was a syncing bug found in our Vintegrate sync. Products should be syncing again.
- FIX: If a pick up location name had a slash (/) in the name, that would keep pick up delivery method from working properly if using Bloom Checkout.
- WORKING ON: Lots of stuff! Our new Subscriptions are now in test and will be rolling out in the next two weeks. We're also testing a new background processing architecture that will greatly improve performance. Signing for orders or club memberships in the POS will be added in the future, and Bloom's new allocation builder is coming along nicely.
Version 0.83.0
Jan 19, 2022
- NEW: If you are using Bloom's ShipCompliant integration, you can now check compliance on orders in the POS before the order is finalized. As a POS admin, add the new App tile "Check shipping compliance" to your smart grid. Select a customer and add products to the cart. Tap the new compliance tile and you'll need to select or enter the shipping address for the order. Now you have all the data needed to check compliance: a customer, products and a shipping address. The POS app will check for shipping compliance and report back if the order is ready to ship or not. Once back in the POS cart interface, you'll also see the order status in the Additional details section. From here, select the Ship to customer tile and continue with the process. You can find more information on POS features in Bloom's Help Center.
- NEW: The Bloom POS app now provides the ability to edit memberships. When loading the customer view, if the customer has a membership you'll now see an Edit link. If you tap the link, it will load the Edit Membership views, where you can change level, preferences, bottle selections, shipping and billing info. This will allow tasting room staff to make updates when members are visiting. Remember you need to click the Submit button at the end of the flow in order to save the updates.
- FIXED: Large batches (over 1000 orders) will now load much faster on the batch confirmation view. Before, large batches would make that view load slowly, or even crash. That issue should now be fixed.
- FIXED: There were a handful of small bugs on the new My Memberships view that were fixed. You probably didn't notice them, so we won't list them here, but trust us... we made improvements.
- WORKING ON: We're wrapping up our POS updates for now and shifting focus back to the new Bloom Admin features, specifically our all-new Members listing and Membership Detail views.
Version 0.82.0
December 22, 2021
- NEW: All new Add Membership interfaces for the Shopify POS. First note that this feature is only available when using the new Members & Benefits tile. This app tile should replace the old Club Memberships tile and the Member Discounts tile. Our team will be publishing extensive POS training videos in the new year. There is too many new features to note in this release email. Just know the updates are extensive and provide many new improvements over the old interfaces. It has also been designed to work with the new Bloom 1.0 features due to roll out in 2022.
- UPDATED: If your products have a lot of variants, the Bloom Products Specifications view will load faster. Before, having over 20 variants would keep the view from loading. Now, even 30 or more can be handled.
- WORKING ON: These new POS features have taken a lot of effort from all our team members. After the new year, we'll be focused again on Bloom 1.0 and new allocation features.
Version 0.81.0
December 14, 2021
- UPDATED: Bloom's order report now includes Batch ID, if one exists on the order. When orders are exported, having this new field will make it easy to sort the data by Batch ID. You can use this if you only wanted to view orders in a specific batch, or set of batches.
- UPDATED: The Membership report, when exported, now includes country name and country code for the shipping and billing address. This will assist wineries who want to view members by country when looking at their data.
- UPDATED: Bloom now has better error messaging when a member is missing required data. For instance, if a member has a phone number that is already been taken by another customer, Bloom will provide an error message alerting admins of the missing or incorrect data. This feedback will allow admins to fix the issue before trying to save the membership, and provide context for when errors do occur when saving memberships.
- FIXED: When using "Canada Post" as a shipping carrier, ATS and other shipping reports will now load and export properly. Before, a carrier with two word names was blocking the loading of the data.
- WORKING ON: We're putting the final touches on the new Add Membership feature in the POS app. Expect to see this roll out before holiday break.
Version 0.80.0
December 1, 2021
- NEW: As promised, there are several new POS app features that we released today. Both Pick up and Unfulfilled orders now have action buttons that allow you mark the orders as picked up, or fulfilled. Tapping the action buttons on the order will change the order's fulfillment status in the POS and in Shopify. Additionally, credit cards can now be added and edited for customers. When you load a customer, you'll see the new Add credit card link below the card list, and a new Edit link on each card. Finally, we've improved the payment creation process when using saved cards. Now when the Use card button is tapped, Bloom will only authorize the transaction, it won't be fully captured. This allows POS users to change the order after the initial authorization, and will protect from payments being captured before the order is complete. Once Shopify receives the final order from the POS Bloom will immediately capture the pre-authorized payment. Along with this new process, we've improved error messaging and notifications, making the user experience even better.
- UPDATED: If a customer or admin adds a new card on file that is identical to an existing card, we don't replace the existing with the new card. Instead, we allow the duplicate card. Doing this makes it easier to troubleshoot potential payment issues, since Bloom isn't removing cards that may have been used for past payments.
- FIXED: Clubs that have thousands of members with a large number of customer choice products, Blooms Selections report can be slow to load. This issue is now fixed and the report loads much faster.
- WORKING ON: We hope to include the new Add Membership interfaces in the POS app in our next release. There you'll see an entirely new, and very slick interface for creating new memberships for customers. And, we're continuing to make good progress on the new version of Bloom Admin and our allocation features.
Version 0.79.0
November 16, 2021
- NEW: Sometimes with large batches you can end up with a lot of failed payments. Bloom now provides the ability to reprocess all failed payments with one click. If a batch has failed payments, look next to the Archive icon you'll see the Reprocess icon. When clicked, Bloom will start a background process that tries to successfully complete payment for all of those orders. Note that every failed payment will be reprocessed and if the payment fails again, customers will get a Processing Failed email if you have that setting enabled.
- NEW: The Bloom POS app (Members and benefits tile) now has a new tab for Orders. This will allow you to search for orders, and focuses the filtering on Pickup and Unfulfilled orders. This is the first step in building our Mark as picked up feature, which will be introduced in an upcoming release. Though, next up for the POS app is our all new Membership creation interfaces. Stay tuned.
- NEW: If you use the Bloom Product Form (we call it the "Ledge"), then there are new settings in the customizer. First you can toggle on the display of a sale price, which will strike through the Compare at price, and show the sale price. Secondly, there is a new toggle for displaying the per-bottle price under the total price. This is handy if you are selling pack variants (like 3, 6, and 12 packs) that each have discounted pricing. Per-bottle pricing will only display if you fill in the Base container per sales container quantity field with a value that is greater than one, in Product specifications.
- NEW: In Customer/More Actions/Edit customer settings, there is a new customer type for Employee. If you want to track orders to employees, make sure all your employee customers are set to this type. Then all orders created for the employee will be tagged accordingly.
- UPDATED: The Order report export now has product SKUs as columns. This will allow you to run an order report across a date range, and easily see products sold across all orders, organized in a nice matrix. You can then easily sum up your SKU columns to get total product counts for the date range. For club orders, you'll also now see a new column for Source Name providing the ability to sort the orders by source—Bloom Batch for example. The report could also be used for fulfillment pick lists. These additions make the Orders report much more powerful and useful.
- FIXED: Performance improvements to the Members and benefits POS app, improvements to the My Memberships view, and small fixes you probably won't notice.
Version 0.78.0
November 3, 2021
- NEW: Bloom now integrates with ActiveCampaign. After adding your site URL and API key to the new setting, Bloom will sync a few extra custom fields related to your customers: Shopify ID, Date of birth, and Link token. Additionally you'll see a new tag that represents the customer's club membership and status. The tag will first have the club level, then the status. It might look like "Gold tier : Current". Now you can create new customer segments and expand on the great features that already exist in ActiveCampaign. Note: Bloom doesn't yet use the Link token value, but we plan on getting this working with campaigns in the near future.
- NEW: The Bloom POS app has been updated with a new tile name and a Customer Search interface. Now, both the Pay with Saved Credit Card, and the Apply Discount app tiles have been merged into a single Bloom app tile, titled "Members & Benefits". If you haven't added a customer to the POS cart, when you click the new tile it will load the new Customer Search interface. Here you can easily filter by customer type, and link to customer details. We recommend removing the old Pay with Saved Credit Card tile, and the Discount app extension tile, and only use this new tile. In a future release the new POS tile will include a brand new Add Membership feature. Contact us if you have questions.
- NEW: Memberships can new be uploaded directly into Bloom. This, in combination with a new club level setting that won't charge batched orders, allows Bloom to be used for corporate orders. And, of course, anyone can now help with migrations when moving from other platforms.
- UPDATED: Bloom Finance report now includes a few new advanced fields that calculate shipping refunds and discounts at the line item level.
- UPDATED: If you use the Promo code feature in Bloom/Settings/General, the promo field will now appear on the Join form. This allows you to provide promo codes that can be used during signup, tagging the customer with the code. Once tagged, you can search customers, or create automations in your marketing platform.
- FIX: Performance improvements when updating member selections in bulk. Before this fix, if you were updating more than 400 memberships at a time, the app might timeout. These timeouts should not happen anymore.
- FIX: Bloom's Join Form will now pre-populate all three date of birth fields after the first date is entered. This will customers time when joining a new membership.
Version 0.77.0
October 18, 2021
- NEW: If you are using the new My Memberships view, members will not need to log in when responding to emails sent from the Bloom app. For instance, if you send the Missing Billing Information email, when the member clicks the Update Billing button in the email, they will gain secure access to that Edit Billing view without needing to log in.
- NEW: The Bloom POS app tile, Pay with Saved Credit Card has received a facelift! We're planning some major updates, and these are the first sneak-peak into where the app tile is headed. You'll see new styling that better matches the Shopify POS, you can swipe through multiple credit cards, and see/apply member discounts from this tile. There are a lot more updates coming soon, including member and order searching, pickups for club orders, and a whole new membership signup process.
- UPDATED: We've wrapped up our ADA updates for Bloom Product Form and the Bloom Cart.
Version 0.76.0
October 6, 2021
- NEW: The member portal, we call My Memberships, is being rolled out to a short list of beta testers. New features include the display of product thumbnails and product details. The edit next shipment form is now on the main page, so members will no longer be required to click the edit button to update their next shipment. Line item total and subtotals will update in real-time as quantities are updated. These are just a start. Many new features are coming once we have this new foundation in place and working smoothly.
- UPDATED: We're continuing to make updates to Bloom Cart and our Add to Cart ledge, to better support ADA features. Both the cart and the ledge will accurately announce quantities, price updates, and more when using screen readers. We're committed to making our products work as best we can for users who use assistive technologies.
- UPDATED: When using Bloom's Create Order feature from a membership, the product picker was displaying archived products. Now it won't, making it easier to find the products you want to add to your order.
- FIXED: In rare cases, when deleting a product or variant, that product wasn't being removed from Bloom's local data warehouse. This would cause deleted products to continue to show up in certain Bloom interfaces. This is now fixed.
- WORKING ON: We are actively designing and developing Bloom's new POS tile. We're planning on some big improvements. Also our new Subscriptions architecture is very close to moving into beta testing. Just a few more additions and testing before we open it up to a handful of customers.
Version 0.75.0
September 21, 2021
- NEW: Email campaign links are now ready for both MailChimp and Klaviyo. This means that in your emails to members, you can add links that will load the My Memberships view without the need for them to log in. There is one important dependency, which is that your website is also using Bloom new My Memberships application. All of this is new, and we'll be rolling it out slowly. If you're interested in using campaign links, let us know and we'll put you on the list!
- NEW: In Bloom/Settings/Shipping there is a new advanced field called Carrier Service Configuration. This will allow complex shipping rules to be applied online orders. Note, this doesn't yet work for club orders. An important detail is that you can use the Base Container value in Bloom Product Specs when calculating quantity. For instance, if you're shipping a bundle SKU, say a 6 bottle pack, Bloom will count this as six bottles and not one pack. This makes online order shipping rules much more flexible.
- UPDATED: The Pay with Saved Credit Card view in the POS app tile has been simplified, made mobile friendly, and now is a solid foundation for more features coming to this view. Stay tuned.
- FIXED: The Bloom Help widget was appearing on the Edit Payments view, which was covering up the Save button. This has been removed.
- WORKING ON: Our new subscription features using Shopify's new APIs are getting closer to beta. We plan to extensively test over the next few weeks, and roll these out to a handful of customers. Additionally, as mentioned above, the POS features are undergoing a refresh. Stay tuned for more as we get closer to holiday season.
Version 0.74.0
September 8, 2021
- NEW: Bloom membership levels now have two new shipping rates that you can use for web or club orders: $20 flat rate or free if 12+ bottles and $25 flat rate or free if 12+ bottles
- NEW: We've added new fields for Wine in Bloom Product Specs: Fruit and Vineyard. If your site is currently using product specs, these will automatically display if you add values to these fields.
- UPDATED: The Score field in Bloom Product Specs was changed from a Number field to a Text field. This means you can have values like "94 Points" instead of just "94".
- WORKING ON: We're putting the final touches on campaign links, the new My Memberships views, and new Bloom Subscriptions using Shopify's new APIs. Allocation features are also shaping up. Bloom will be finishing 2021 with a lot of new updates!
Version 0.73.0
August 25, 2021
It has been almost a month since we publicly released new features. The Bloom team has been busy working on some core updates to improve many important areas of the application. We aren't announcing any new customer-facing features, but have made several improvements, and are working on some exciting updates you'll see very soon.
- UPDATED: Bloom's site-wide age gate and cart is now ADA compliant and thoroughly tested to ensure it works great on screen readers. We believe that ADA isn't just about a legal obligation. We also want to ensure our features work as expected for people who use assistive technologies. ADA updates will continue over the weeks on our membership Join Form as well as Bloom Checkout.
- UPDATED: When using Pay with Saved Credit Card in the POS, we have made it so you can't accidentally create another payment using the same cart.
- UPDATED: Bloom will now add club tags to memberships who don't complete Shipping. Before this update, it was required that members have set shipping options before we consider their membership valid. Since we have more customers using a simple signup that only requires a name and email address, we wanted to make sure those customer were treated as full members in Shopify.
- FIXED: If you used GSO or DHL and ShipCompliant, Shopify wasn't recognizing the shipping carrier codes sent over from ShipC. We've mapped the codes so now your shipping carrier will appear correctly in Shopify Fulfillments.
- WORKING ON: Campaign links! These will allow you to use a special customer token on your links from MailChimp or Kalviyo that will auto-log in your members and direct them right to their My Membership page, or any page for that matter. We're doing some final testing (a lot of testing is need to make sure we get it right, and our links are secure) but hope to have them ready for use with our next release.
- WORKING ON (STILL): We are very close to getting our new My Memberships views fully tested and ready for a handful of beta testers. Soon, you will be able to provide the new views to your members when they log in, where they will see some basic improvements like accessing details on their wines, product thumbnails, and more. This update is a new foundation that we'll build an entirely new Membership Portal upon. Stay tuned.
- WORKING ON: We have some rough proof-of-concepts that allow us to use Shopify's new Subscription APIs with Bloom batching. This isn't a public feature yet, but it is looking very promising. Bloom will hopefully move subscriptions to Shopify's recurring payment contracts and Shopify Payments sometime this year.
Version 0.72.0
July 28, 2021
- NEW: Inventory report! Shopify's inventory report is missing one bit of important data: the Sales Channel that the products were sold on. For example, you can't report on inventory sold on the POS vs Bloom Batches. Now you can. In Bloom/Reports there is a new tab for Inventory. Our report does include the sales channel. Hopefully some of you will find this extra report helpful.
- NEW: You may know that Bloom extends the Shopify customer with extra settings. One of those settings is Default shipping carrier. Bloom can now use this default shipping carrier by targeting your Shopify rate names and only using rates that match the customer's Default shipping carrier setting. For example, if you set a customer's Default carrier to "FedEx", then Bloom will only use rates that include "FedEx" in the rate name. If you had both UPS Ground and FedEx Ground as rates in Shopify, the customer's orders would only ever use the FedEx ground rate. If you want this setting turned on, contact us.
- NEW: When changing a member's status from Current to either Cancelled or On Hold, we are now providing a new setting to turn off the member notification email before you save the status. Next time you select On Hold or Cancelled you'll see a new check box labeled "Notify customer". If this is checked Bloom will send the proper notification defined in Bloom/Settings/Email.
- UPDATED: Exported reports now include the date range in the file name. An example file name might be: orders_06-01-20212_to_07-01-2021. This is helpful if you're downloading multiple reports with different ranges at the same time.
- WORKING ON: The team continues to work on the foundations for our new membership features. In our next release we will be rolling out a new My Memberships portal for members. This is mostly a plumbing update (all new code) but we are adding a couple features for customer choice options 1) Product image thumbnails and 2) links to the product detail page. Both of these updates will provide extra information that will help members pick the wines they want in their next shipment. Also, we're working on magic links that will allow members to access their My Memberships page without logging in. The first version of this update will only work with email campaigns from applications like Mailchimp. Look for more info on these features in the next release.
Version 0.71.0
July 14, 2021
- NEW: Bloom has improved our shipping option feature when creating new club levels. When selecting options, there are now two drop-downs instead of just one. You'll see "Web orders" and "Club orders", each with their own list of shipping options for members. Splitting web and club orders will allow you to have more flexibility when defining shipping rules. For example, members can now get Free shipping on club orders, but half-off shipping on web orders. The possibilities have more than doubled!
- UPDATED: If your website is using Bloom's new Join a Club form, then you may notice that the form labels may change when you select a country. For instance, Canada will use "Province" instead of "State" for the state field. Some countries use "Postal code" instead of "Zip code". Our forms are now smart enough to know the correct labels, making the experience better for your customers.
- UPDATED: Now members who have an on-hold status will receive a club discount when shopping online, if you have discounts turned on for that club level. In the future we will make this a setting you can turn on or off. For now this is a fixed rule.
- UPDATED: We have been working hard on our Wineshipping integration over the past few weeks. Refunds, exchanges, cancellations, and other order actions that affect inventory are now handled probably. Your inventory should even be more accurate now.
- UPDATED: There are new gateway messages in Bloom Batches that come from ShipCompliant. In the past you may have seen "Standard error..." or similar. With this update, you should see detailed messages as to why a batch order failed, if it was due to a ShipCompliant error.
- FIX: When viewing or selecting countries in a drop down, they are now in alphabetical order. This should make it easier to scan/find a country.
- WORKING ON: Normally summer is a slower time of the year for us, but not this year. We have just launched a few large wineries and have more in the pipeline (check out @bloomdotwine social feeds for announcements) as well as continuing work on our new allocation and subscription features. We're incredibly busy, but the team is doing an awesome job keeping up with the demand. Go team Bloom!
Version 0.70.0
June 29, 2021
- NEW: If you don't want Bloom to display additional details, like Date of Birth, Compliance status, Gift Message, etc. on orders, Bloom now has a setting to turn them off. The primary reason to turn these off is if you're using ShipStation and the Notes field is being populated with these additional details. Contact us if you want this turned off.
- UPDATED: Bloom's Compliance report has two new updates. First, all orders are displayed by default. In the past Bloom only displayed fulfilled orders that contained alcohol. Second, there is now a filter for Fulfillment Status. This makes the report more flexible. You can view/export all orders, or just orders that have been fulfilled. You are now in control.
- UPDATED: When a new member creates a gift membership and doesn't check the box to Send a Message, then this becomes a setting on the membership that tells the system not to send any notifications to the gift recipient. These notifications include the welcome to the club email, as well as future processing emails. The gift recipient will still receive the order confirmation and shipping emails from Shopify.
- UPDATED: If you're using Bloom's Pay with Saved Credit Card feature on the POS, and you don't accurately create a payment transaction, Bloom will send administrators an email letting you know the order was created, but the transaction still needs to be captured.
- FIX: When using Bloom Checkout to create a membership with an initial order, it was possible for the membership to be created without the initial order being created. Now this isn't possible. Only if the initial order is created will the membership be created.
Version 0.69.0
June 17, 2021
- NEW: We're happy to announce our new Products API and integration with Vintegrate. This is a big step forward with our new data architecture, which will allow other applications to integrate more directly with Bloom data. If you're familiar with APIs, you probably know Shopify already a very robust and well-documented API for just about anything you need. What is missing though, is the extra data Bloom provides for products, which we call "Product specs". Now, using our new Product API, you can add/read full Shopify product, that include wine data like ABV, Vintage, Tasting Notes, and the other 30+ fields Bloom provides. Additionally, Vintegrate can update product inventory keeping Vintegrate as the single-source-of-truth for your inventory counts. Let us know if you're interested in learning more about this exciting update, or if you're already using Vintegrate and want to utilize our API for product and inventory syncs.
- NEW: When batching gift memberships, new tags will be created that provide some extra data on your customers and orders. Gift recipient customers will be tagged with the gift giver's name. And, the orders that are created will also be tagged with the gift giver's name.
- NEW: Bloom now has a Price Note field in our product specifications. This will allow you to add a new under your price like "$300 per case", or for subscription products ($59.00 each shipment). If you're interested in using this field, let us know. We need to add it to your website on a per-request basis.
- UPDATED: We've added some new features to Bloom Cart. If you are using Bloom Cart, open the customizer, add some products to your cart, then click on the Bloom Cart section. You'll see a) Show shipping fees, b) Button border radius, and c) Continue shopping URL. These updates make Bloom Cart even more customizable.
- UPDATED: Our development team has been working hard to improve the new Bloom Form feature, which we typically call the "Product Ledge". I know only a few customers are using this feature right now, but it is a foundational piece for many new features that are in the works. The primary updates we've completed have to do with subscriptions, and how the user selects their quantity. Namely, if there is only one quantity for the selection, we won't show a preselected "Quantity 1" button (since it is useless as that is your only option). We've also fixed some styling bugs that we were seeing pop up from non-Bloom themes. More to come on this in the future.
- FIX: When selecting wines for your batches, Bloom will no longer display Draft or Archived products. This will make your selection lists smaller, and help prevent issues like this one below.....
- FIX: When creating customer choice release options in Bloom, there wasn't a default "Select a product" option in the list. This resulted in a rare issue that we saw occur a couple times, where if a selected product was delete in Shopify, Bloom would select the first product in the list as the selected product, which would change everyone's selection to that first product. Now that we have this default "Select a product" option, it will default to that, which will ensure that option is empty vs. randomly assigned. This would only affect wineries that are actively deleting products that have been selected by members (we rarely recommend deleting previous products from Shopify).
Version 0.68.0
May 25, 2021
- NEW: If you're using Kalviyo for your email marketing you know that Kalviyo already does a great job bringing over customer data, but there were two fields we thought were missing: Shopify Customer ID and Date of Birth. Bloom now integrates directly with Klaviyo and will sync these two fields. This is just a start. More fields specific to club member information will be added in the future. If you want to connect, just open Bloom/Settings/Integrations and add your API keys. You'll start to see these fields appear after customers are created or updated.
- NEW: This one is a small addition that will help our ShipCompliant users: we've added a ShipCompliant Brand Key to Bloom Product Specifications. Why? Well, Bloom has been using Shopify's Vendor field for the value, but we have some customers who have multiple vendors they need to support (like. a wine retailer) so we've added this new field so you can have the best of both worlds. Only customers who have multiple brands and use ShipC need this. Let us know if that is the case and we can provide training on how to use the new field.
- NEW: When you create batches you'll now see a new bit of data on each membership: Gift. If a membership is a gift membership you'll see the gift package icon. Hover over the icon to see the gift recipient and expiration date. This will help segment your batched by gift membership if you choose to do so.
- UPDATED: Bloom has extended our container and size fields in Product Specifications. We used to only have Container Type and Volume. Now you can set a Base Container Size, the Sales Container Size, Number of Base Containers in Sales Container, Sales Container Volume, and Number of Sales Container per Case. Did you get all of that? If not, just know there are now almost limitless options for defining your products, regardless if you sell cases of wine or six-packs of beer.
- UPDATED: We have two new tasting profile fields that are ranges, like the sweetness field we added a few weeks ago. You now can also add ranges for boldness and acidity. We're excited about how data like this can be displayed using information graphics. This will be cool.
- WORKING ON: The view members use to edit their membership information is getting revamped. We'll be providing more information about your products, and plan on displaying member's discounted pricing.
Version 0.67.0
May 12, 2021
- NEW: We have completed our first version of the Wineshipping integration and it appears to be working great. Once configured orders will be sent to Wineshipping with information on the correct warehouse to fulfill from, and the inventory pool at that warehouse location. Orders are updated in Shopify when Wineshipping changes the shipping status or provides a tracking number. This integration also keeps Shopify's inventory in sync on a nightly basis. Bloom provides an inventory report, making it much easier to keep inventory levels the same between the systems. Let us know if you're using Wineshipping and want this integration configured.
- NEW: If you want to include membership notes on club orders, there is a new setting in Bloom that allows for this. You'll find it in Bloom/Settings/General in the Order Notes section. Check the box and notes that are stored on memberships will appear in the Notes field on orders.
- UPDATED: Bloom new supports multiple fulfillment locations in ShipCompliant. Meaning, if an order is created that needs to be fulfilled from two different locations, Bloom will create two shipments on the order in ShipCompliant, one for each fulfillment location.
- UPDATED: Bloom now supports close to 30 countries for billing information. If you have international club members, you'll want to open Bloom Settings and check the countries you want to bill to in the Billing and Taxes area.
- UPDATED: When gift orders are created from Bloom, instead of the order belonging to the member, the order will belong to the gift recipient. This is done by creating a new customer for the gift recipient if they don't already exist, then applying the order to them. The benefit of this is that the gift recipient will now receive the related order notifications, like shipping updates.
- UPDATED: Bloom Cart now has built-in min/max quantities for alcohol products, along with settings for styling the messages that will display in the cart if quantities aren't met. Let us know if you're interested in turning on Bloom Cart for your shop.
- WORKING ON: We're continuing to work design and develop our new allocation platform as well as revamping Bloom's authentication system (member log in) which will allow members to access their club info without logging in.
Version 0.66.0
April 29, 2021
- Bloom now has two new reports. Compliance and Orders. The previous Gallons and Products reports were very similar, so we combined them into one, and added some fields that will assist with compliance reporting. Additionally, there is a new Order report that provides a report that includes an order-per-row, vs. broken into products like Shopify's report. We're also working on an Inventory report that improves upon Shopify's, so stay tuned!
- NEW: Bloom has a new setting where you can turn off the creation of draft orders when a batch payment fails. Batch order creation can be helpful if you want to capture payment manually, or create an invoice for the member to pay online. But, you might not want draft orders created, especially if you expect a lot of failed payment. The new setting can be found in Bloom/Settings/General in the Batch order creation section.
- NEW: If you need to update your customer settings in bulk, Bloom now provides the ability to import those settings via a spreadsheet. For example, when migrating from another system, if you have a lot of wholesale customers, or distributors with IDs, you can provide the Bloom team a spreadsheet and we can update those setting with a simple import.
- UPDATED: We have added some additional information to the Selections Report that will help to better understand membership product selections. You'll now see the Release Name as well as the number of members who have selected the products.
- UPDATED: We've been working on making improvements to our Gift Membership feature. The first update we made in this release is the customer on the order is now the gift recipient, and not the gift giver. This means that the recipient will receive order and shipping notifications. More updates are coming!
- UPDATED: You can now use ShipCompliant and Avalara at the same time. For instance, you can use ShipCompliant to handle your fulfillments and Avalara to handle taxes and compliance. Before, Bloom only allowed one system to be integrated per shop.
- FIX: If you're using Shopify Plus, and the Flow app, you may have seen Bloom and Flow racing to create tags, but only one app will win, resulting in missing tags. Now Bloom will wait 60 seconds to let the Flow app complete tag creation to keep these race conditions from occurring.
Version 0.65.0
April 12, 2021
- NEW: Bloom can now import full products into Shopify, including the Bloom product specifications. This is most useful when creating a new Shopify storefront. But, if you need to update product specs for all of your products, we can do it with this new import feature.
- UPDATED: When using Bloom's rich text editor, there are two new features. First is the ability to enter an image URL, second is the ability to enter a link URL after highlighting text.
- UPDATED: When searching members, you can now search for partial names. This is helpful when you have users with two names in one field. Like Bill and Mary Smith. Now, if you search for "Mary" it will find this member. Before you'd need to search for "Bill and Mary".
- UPDATED: If you're using both ShipCompliant and Avalara, we can set up your store to use ShipCompliant for just fulfillments, and Avalara for taxes and compliance.
- FIX: When removing members from a waiting list, using the Bulk action feature on the Members tab, the customer tags were not updating to current status. This is now fixed.
- FIX: We've made several other small fixes to make Bloom more stable, performance, and accurate.
Version 0.64.0
March 23, 2021
- NEW: Bloom now has the ability to import your product specifications from a spreadsheet. If you need to do bulk updates to your products, let us know. We can provide you the spreadsheet template and get your products updated for you. This will is a major time saver.
- NEW: When creating a batch, you'll now see the product price next anywhere the product is listed. This allows you to make sure your pricing is accurate before you run a batch.
- UPDATED: When using the selections report, you can now filter by fulfillment type (ship or pickup). Once you filter, you can now click the Memberships button and the filter you select will stay activated, allowing you to also filter that memberships view.
- UPDATED: We made a few updates to our 205 Shipping report so it is more universally compatible. Date formats are now consistent, we've added Shipping Phone Number field, and removed the Bloom Batch number field. If you were using this and want us to add it back, let us know. We can turn it on just for your shop.
- FIXED: Member-specific shipping options would intermittently not appear in checkout, even if logged in. We rebuilt how Bloom sends member shipping rates to Shopify, which solved this odd problem for good.
- WORKING ON: We're continuing to work on Bloom 1.0. Progress has been slower than planned, but it is steadily moving forward. After trying out the new Wineshippping app for Shopify, we've realized that Bloom needs to have its own integration. We'll be working on that over the next several weeks. Stay tuned. We're also building some great new websites for some very forward-thinking wineries. Watch our Twitter feed for launch announcements @bloomdotwine.
Version 0.63.0
March 9, 2021
- NEW: When using bundles or kits for club orders, Bloom will now add the child products in the bundle as part of the line item on the order. For example, if your bundle is "Box of three reds", you'd also see the three reds in the box listed on the order. For this to work you'll need to have those items added to the product in Product Specifications. This is a great extension to the Bundles app that we always recommend--it completes the circle!
- NEW: Since members can now use their saved credit cards in Bloom Checkout place orders, we've added a new setting in Bloom/Settings/General where you can require log in before accessing checkout. This will ensure the member is logged in, and we can connect them securely to their cards-on-file.
- NEW: When Gift Membership orders are created from Bloom, the orders are now tagged as a Gift, and with info on how many gifts are left to be given. For instance, a gift tag might look like "Gift 2 of 4".
- NEW: There is a new filter on the Selections Report, Filter by Fulfillment. Now you can see selections by Pick up or Ship, which will make it easier to plan inventory allocations for each fulfillment type.
- UPDATED: Orders will no longer include the VARIANT and ABV tags. These used to be used for reporting purposes. Now that all of our reporting data is coming from Bloom's data warehouse, we don't need to include them on orders anymore. Now your new orders will have a much cleaner tag list.
- UPDATED: When you load Bloom's Product Specifications feature, you'll notice some new fields. We've added Score, Rating, Sweetness range, and moved Sensory Profile under Notes.
- UPDATED: In the Bloom Admin, when adding Additional Options to a club level, you'll now see the Display Name instead of the Product Name, if you set the Display Name in Bloom Product Specifications. If you aren't familiar with Display Names, they are designed to allow you to override the product name, in case you need to. Your members will see the display name when managing their club membership, but you'll now see them when in Bloom admin as well.
- FIXES: We fixed a bug where discount codes with spaces wouldn't work, and continue to make a lot of performance improvements to Bloom reports and our background processes.
Version 0.62.0
Feb 23, 2021
- NEW: If you are using Bloom Checkout, your customers can now use their saved credit cards to place an order, without having to re-enter it. This does require that the customer is logged in. If they have saved cards in the system (they are a club member, or have saved a card in Bloom Checkout in the past) their card(s) will appear as payment options when checking out. Customers will still have the option to enter a new card, if they desire.
- NEW: You can now edit the headers and button labels on Bloom Emails. When you click the Email tab in Bloom, you get to what we call Proactive Emails. These are emails you sent to your members for things like Missing Billing, or Activate your Account. Now, when drafting these emails, you can change the email header and button call-to-action.
- UPDATED: When editing a customer choice release option, you can now choose to hide that option on the My Membership view. This is the view members see when they log in to edit their membership. You might want to hide the option when you're running low on inventory, or for any reason you no longer want that option to display as a selection for customer choice options.
- UPDATED: Bloom reports are now fully using Bloom's data warehouse, and no longer rely on Shopify data. Why would I care, you ask? Well, reports load about 10 times faster now. Sweet!
- FIXED: When you receive an email from the Bloom app, like "A new member has joined.." the CTA button will now take you directly to the membership view in Bloom. You'll need to be logged in of course. We've also fixed a handful of other small bugs that you probably didn't notice, but hey, we're always trying to improve our app.
Version 0.61.0
Feb 08, 2021
- NEW: After a lot of feedback from our customers, we have our Pay with Saved Card feature in beta testing. We are very excited about this new feature. It is built as a tile in the Shopify POS. All you need to do is 1) Add tile, 2) Select Apps, 3) Tap Bloom, 4) Pick Pay with saved credit card. Then the new tile will appear. When building an order, instead of clicking "Checkout" tap the new app tile. That will load a new view where you can confirm the order and pick a saved card to use. Once selected, the order will be created. All you need to do after that is complete the checkout and select Bloom as the payment method. A few notes:
a) You first need to create a new payment type in the POS under Settings/Payment Settings/Custom Payment type. Just click "Add a custom type" and create a "Bloom" payment type.
b) This will only work for wineries using the Stripe payment gateway for saved cards. It is not yet supported for Authorize.net or Moneris. We're hoping to support those in the future. - NEW: We have updated our Product Specs page to include sections. You'll now see have sections for General, Wine, Champagne, Spirits, and Notes. There are also several new spec options that support the natural wine industry. Sweet!
- UPDATED: If you archive a batch with failed payments, then those memberships will be available in the next batch. We had some complaints that it took too much time to delete the failed payments, so we fix that issue for everyone.
- UPDATED: A new batching feature was added last release that displays all the shipping rates on orders for that batch. In rare cases, you may see "No rates found". We now highlight this with a warning color, so it is obvious that you may have an issue with a shipping address.
- FIX: In some cases, when a member updated their shipping address and Bloom sends an email notification to the shop admin letting them know about the update, the updated date would be inaccurate. We fixed that (we hope).
- WORKING ON: We've continued to make improvements to our new Join flow, as well as forward progress on Bloom 1.0 (Allocations).
Version 0.60.0
Jan 25, 2021
- NEW: Avalara AvaTax compliance integration. We're pretty excited about this one. Our tax settings for a while now. Avalara released their compliance features in late 2020 and we've been working with their team to get Bloom dialed in. If you're using Avalara and want both tax and order compliance, let us know. We'll get you set up.
- NEW: If you'd like your members to have the ability to cancel their membership themselves, now you can turn that feature on. Head on over to Bloom/Settings/General and at the top of that view you'll see a new 'Allow members to cancel' section. Check the box to turn the feature on. If you'd like to add info about the cancellation process, or your contact information, you can add that content right below the checkbox. You members will see a 'Cancel membership' link under their Edit or add options button when they log into their membership view.
- NEW: For ShipCompliant users, if you want Shopify to send your Shipping Confirmation emails, we now have a new setting for that. Open Bloom/Settings/Email and scroll down a bit to the 'Shopify notification options' section. Check the box if you want Shopify to send the email notification. Leave it unchecked if you're using your shipping provider's email system.
- UPDATE: Our new Join flow continues to improve. In this release, we've turned on the Gift membership feature. If you are setting default quantities on your customer choice release options, then those defaults will be set on new memberships. And you can now redirect a new member to a custom confirmation page after they sign up. Sweet!
Version 0.59.0
Jan 11, 2021
- NEW: If you are using the new Bloom Sales Channel app, you likely are using Bloom Checkout to sign up new members. In this release, there is a new option that doesn't require a checkout experience, rather a simpler signup form. There are a few advantages to this new signup. First, $0 orders are not created. There are new controls in Shopify's Customizer that allows you to configure the signup flow. Finally, you don't need to create products that represent the club the member is joining. Overall, it is just plain better. Note, if a customer is making a purchase as part of signup, they will still use Bloom Checkout. Contact us if you're interested in learning more, and want our team to implement this new join flow for your website.
- NEW: We have extended Bloom's credit card manager to include two new features: Edit and Delete. When you click on a member's billing info, and open their card details, you'll see links for Edit and Delete. When editing you can update the cardholder's name and card expiration date. Click the red Delete link to delete the card from the system. Now administrators have full control over member's credit cards.
- NEW: Some customers would like to hide releases from the join flow and from members. When releases are over and orders have been shipped, you might want to hide the old release while you are getting the next one configured. Hiding is simple. Open the Edit Release interface by clicking the pencil icon on the Clubs view, then check the first box "Hide this release on storefront." This will simply hide the release when customers are joining the club level, or when they log in and view their membership details. Sweet!
- FIX: Filtering memberships by "Ready to process" was displaying some memberships that weren't ready to process. This has now been fixed.
Version 0.58.0
Dec 24, 2020
- NEW: Customer Choice release options now has two new features. First is a field for default quantity. This will allow you to set a quantity on each wine, which will display as the default quantity when new members are joining the club. This doesn't mean the new member is forced to use that default quantity, it simply pre-populates the quantity field instead of displaying it as an empty quantity. Second, there is a new field for quantity values that lets you define what the quantity options are for that wine. Before you had to click "Add quantity" and add a new option for each value you wanted. Now, simply type in your values into a single field. For example, if in the quantity drop down, you wanted to display 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 12, you'd just type "1-6,12". This will save a lot of time when setting up or editing customer choice release options. If you have customer choice release options, just click the edit icon (pencil) and you'll see the new fields for each of your wines.
- NEW: If you want to display a message to a member when they log in, you can now add a custom message to a membership. Just open their membership in Bloom, click on the Member details tab, and you'll see the new Custom message text box. Enter your message and when that member logs in to view/update their membership details, they will see that message above their membership details.
- NEW: Bloom admin now has an improved interface for managing member's credit cards. When you click on a member's billing information, the first thing you'll notice is that the credit card information is now above the billing address. You'll see the member's card info with an edit link. When you click edit, you are presented with an interface that allows you to pick a card to use for the membership, or add an additional card. Members can now have multiple cards saved and share those saved cards across multiple memberships. Currently, this feature is only available to admins. It will soon be available to members when managing cards on their My Membership view.
- NEW: If you want to display a different product name to members who are joining a customer choice club, or editing their membership, you can add that new product name to the Display Name field in Bloom Product Specifications. Example uses of this are if the product name in Shopify doesn't have the level of detail you want, like appellation, vintage, or producer, you can simply add what you want it to read in the Display Name field.
- UPDATED: Bloom's Avalara integration is getting an upgrade. We've now completed the first phase, which provides the ability for orders to be sent to AvaTax as transactions. We support new orders, order updates, and refunds. Next up, we'll be adding support for Avalara's new compliance features.
- FIXED: We discovered a handful of bugs recently that we have fixed, including subscription renewal dates being accidentally erased when members switched release options on a subscription, performance improvements to Bloom checkout, and more.
- WORKING ON: Our new join flows didn't quite make this release. Our hope is it will be in our next release in January 2021.
Version 0.57.0
Dec 02, 2020
- NEW: When batching you can now set a preferred ship date on all orders in the batch. You'll see the new interface on the final screen when creating a batch right before you process the orders. If ShipCompliant is integrated, you'll also see two additional fields, one for setting the Order Type and another to set the Fulfillment Type. These are typically used when you want to create orders of "Club" type in ShipCompliant.
- NEW: We've completed Version 1 of our integration with SoundCommerce, a reporting platform that brings together data from all of your sales channels. They specialize in DtC businesses that offer subscription services. The actionable reporting they make available is amazing. And, they are located right here in Seattle!
- UPDATED: Bloom now handles discounts differently in ShipComplaint. Since they don't support order-level discounts, we're now calculating the discounts on each line item and reducing the line item price. This makes for a much cleaner order in ShipCompliant and doesn't require the "Discount" product to be created.
- WORKING ON: Soon we'll have an updated version of Bloom's Join a Club flow. Currently if using Bloom Checkout, it is integrated and feels like a checkout. We've received feedback that this isn't the ideal customer experience. So, we're breaking out Join and making feel more part of the Shopify Club page. We think this is going to be a much nicer customer experience.
Version 0.56.0
Nov 11, 2020
- NEW: Many Bloom customers have had to contact us when memberships needed new default selections or moved from one release to another. Bloom now provides an interface where membership updates can be made in bulk. Head over to your Members tab in Bloom and first filter down to a specific club level. Using the checkboxes, select the memberships you want to update. Then, click the Bulk Actions dropdown and select "Update member selections". If you have multiple releases in your level, you'll first need to select what release you want to update the members in. If you have more than one release, or if you have memberships that are missing selections, you'll see an option to select those members to migrate. In most cases, you'll just select the memberships with selections. After you select the release, then you can pick specific members to migrate, where you can update/change their selections and/or quantities. This new feature also provides the ability to delete a release option from your level, even if memberships are assigned. There are more cool things you can do with this feature -- more than we can write about in release notes. Contact us if you want assistance with your migrations.
- NEW: In order to reduce emails sent from Bloom going to users Spam folders, we provide the ability to add SPF and DKIM records to your domain's DNS. In order to complete that setup, your DNS updates need to be verified. If your sending email address hasn't been verified, we're now showing a notification badge on Bloom/Settings/Email. If it is verified, we also show a verified badge. This will be a nice visual queue that provides an easy way to see if your email sending email address is set up properly or not.
- NEW: For our Shopify Plus customers, or if you're using Bloom Checkout, there is now a new content section in the Shopify Customizer for Shipping Notice. If you need to let your customers know there may be shipping delays or other shipping-related messages, they can now show in the checkout. Just go to the Shopify Customizer, click Theme Settings, then Bloom and you'll see the new content section.
- NEW: If you have a club level that only allows for pick up orders or just ship orders, you can now have a setting for that. Click the pencil icon to edit the level, scroll down to the Shipping Options section, and you'll see a new Delivery Options dropdown. If you select Pick up only, then your members won't see any ship options when joining a club, or when they view their membership profile.
- UPDATE: If you're using ShipCompliant, orders now won't be marked as fulfilled in Shopify if the order in ShipC only has a tracking number. The order needs to have a status of "Shipped" before Shopify will auto-mark it as fulfilled. We made this change because it is common to print a label, but not ship it for a few days. Now, shipping confirmations won't be sent until the package is actually shipped. Nice.
- FIX: When ship orders were created, Bloom was using the first and last name of the member for the shipping address. This ended up being an issue for gift memberships. Instead of using the gift member's name, the club member's name was on the shipping address. This has been fixed.
- FIX: A recent release of Safari broke login authentication when trying to access Bloom on a mobile device. This is now fixed.
- FIX: We had a couple of customers point out rounding errors when taxes were calculated. Sometimes an order would be a penny off from what was expected. These rounding errors can be hard to track down, but we think we have it fixed. Let us know if you are still seeing any rounding issues on taxes.
- FIX: There are some page sorting bugs that occurred after updating our core software packages. These sorting issues have been sorted out.
Version 0.55.0
October 29, 2020
- NEW: When using the Pay with Saved Credit Card feature on a Shopify Draft order, you'll now see one or more cards you can select to use for the payment. Before, we'd simply use the card attached to the membership. As part of Bloom Payments, customers can now save multiple cards. They might be saved on a membership, or could be simply used in Bloom Checkout on a website order. Any card that is saved in Bloom Payments will be available to administrators when using Pay with Saved Credit Card. We'll continue to expand on this feature, where you'll be able to add and edit cards, add memberships, and more.
- NEW: It is easy to forget to add specifications or select a type for your products. Forgetting can cause problems when creating orders, especially if you're using ShipCompliant, Avalara, or other integration that expects certain data to be available on products. Now, you'll see in the Shopify admin, a callout alerting you that "Products didn't publish to Bloom." What this means is that the products are either missing ABV or Product Type. If the product contains alcohol, make sure ABV is set in Product Specs. And, while you're at it, make sure the Shopify Product Type field is set. Once all of your products are set up, the callout will disappear.
- NEW: You can now define Bundle products in Bloom Product Specs. This isn't a replacement for the Bundles app, think of it as an extension of the app. Currently, the Bundles app can't add Order Note Attributes to an order that has a product bundle. If you open Product Specs on a product, you'll now see a new interface to add multiple fields for the items in the bundle. You can add whatever you want to the field to describe what is in the bundle. When an order is created with the product that has bundle items defined in Product Specs, then we can use that data in order note attributes so they can display on packing slips, order notification emails, or many other areas in the platform.
- NEW: Related to #2 above, Product Specs have a new drop-down for ShipCompliant Product Type. You don't have to have ShipCompliant to use this. We actually recommend using this to define your product type, as it pertains to alcohol. For instance, if you select "Wine" for this new product type, you don't need to set ABV or have a Shopify Product Type of "Wine" in order for Bloom to know it is an alcohol product.
- UPDATED: You can now add Bcc emails to Bloom's automated emails. Just go to Bloom/Settings/Email and under the Admin Email field, you'll see a new Bcc field.
- FIX: Refunds will now be reflected correctly in ShipCompliant. Before, when you created a refund or exchange, those changes would not be reflected in a committed order in ShipCompliant. Now your orders will stay in better sync with Shopify. Your reporting will be happier now.
- OTHER FIXES: We've been busy on a lot of other fixes to the POS, ShipCompliant data syncing, Bloom Checkout, and much more -- too much to mention in this email. We'll continue to make a lot of impressive improvements in the coming months.
Version 0.54.0
October 8, 2020
- NEW: Bloom Age Gate is now free to all Bloom customers. We've built a very slick content management interface in Shopify that allows for a lot of customizations. If you need it, we just need to add one line of code to your theme. Let us know if you want us to turn that on for ya.
- NEW: If you're using ShipCompliant and need to recheck compliance on an order, you can now use the More Actions drop-down on the order and select Recheck Compliance. If you need check orders in bulk you can still use the recheck compliance tag.
- NEW: When creating a draft order for a member in Shopify, you can now select the special member shipping rates available in the club level. For instance, if you offer free shipping for all club orders for members, that free shipping rate will appear in the draft order Shipping feature, along with any other rates that might be available for the order. Remember, you'll need to save your draft order with the customer and products before these new rates will appear.
- NEW: Bloom Checkout now supports Pickup as an option. If using Bloom Checkout for club signups you can set your membership to Pickup or Ship depending on what you select when you join. Sweet!
- FIX: In our Batch reports, we display the gateway message for each payment. We fixed a bug where our reports were showing a different message than the corresponding payment record in the batch.
- WORKING ON: We've been very busy launching a number of really cool sites over the last several weeks. Our design and development team continues to push the limits of Shopify's content management system. We're also seeing some sites get Shopify's new customizer, so keep an eye out for it. We're continuing our work on new Clubs, Levels, and Allocations. Stay tuned.
Version 0.53.0
September 19, 2020
- NEW: Bloom has a new method of membership signup we all "Simple signup". The customer will only see one form with fields for name, email address, phone number and birth date, if required. Simple signup is used when you just want to create an email list, but still create a membership profile in Bloom. This is the first example of how we're moving Bloom into Shopify's pages system, providing wineries total control over the look and feel, and flow, of the membership journey. The next version of this feature will be full signup, where members provide shipping and billing information. If you're interested in Simple signup, let us know. It does require us to assist you with building the right customer experience.
- UPDATED: If you're using Bloom Payments, you can now create a draft order and use the customers saved credit card to pay for the order, regardless if they are a member or not. This does require that you are also using Bloom Checkout, and the customer chooses to save their credit card during checkout.
- UPDATED: On the POS, when creating a new club member, the credit card field has been updated to use Stripe's latest interface, making entering a card easier and even more secure than before.
- UPDATED: When running batches, you should see some speed improvements. We'll continue to make batching faster, as we're looking closely into a "bulk processing" option which may make a dramatic difference. Stay tuned.
- WORKING ON: Now that we have our first version of Subscriptions live, the concept of Clubs and Levels is getting blurred. This is forcing the design team to do a bit of re-thinking. We've taken every thing we have learn and pivoted towards a new architecture which us more flexibility to build the features you've been asking for. Progress is moving quickly. We'll keep you up-to-date as we progress.
Version 0.52.0
Aug 23, 2020
- NEW: A lot of wineries want to ask for the customer's birthdate on the cart, before they checkout. Bloom now has a new section in Theme Settings to control turning this feature on or off. Plus, you can set the desired age limit from 18 to 21, or set it no ignore age all together. NOTE: In order to enable the birth date control the Bloom team needs to implement it on your cart, as each theme is different. Let us know if you want or need this feature and we'll get it working for you.
- UPDATED: If you are using the Gift option with Bloom memberships, the gift recipient name, email and gift duration will be included in Bloom's membership report. Just export your members from Bloom/Members and you'll see the new columns. Also, regarding Gifts, you can now edit the gift expiration date using the Bloom admin.
- UPDATED: We've been very active on the new Sales Channel app. If you're using it already (you'll know if you navigate to Bloom using the left nav under Sales Channels and not under Apps) you may have noticed, Members is now the first, and default option. We know members is the most used screen, so we just made it first in the list. Additionally, we completely rebuilt how discounts work for the Sales Channel app, which will open the door for new discount options in the future.
- UPDATED: In previous releases we've announced updates to how Bloom processes payments. We're continuing to work on, and improve, both card authorizations and payment capture routines. These updates make for fewer false errors and better error handling/reporting.
- WORKING ON: We're continuing to work on our new interfaces for Clubs and Membership Levels. This will set us up to start on Allocations in the coming weeks. Stay tuned.
Version 0.51.0
July 29, 2020
- NEW: We have had a lot of requests for this report, and the first version is finally here: Email sending report. If you navigate to Bloom/Reports/Email you'll see a listing of all the emails sent from Bloom. These include new memberships, batch orders processed, cancellations, and more. On the report you can search by email address and filter by email status. Because of the way we're retrieving the data, the report might be slow to load when filtering. We're working on performance improvements for version 2.
- UPDATE: We have added new merge tags for emails sent from Bloom. In case you don't know what a merge tag is, these are short code snippets that allow you to dynamically insert data into your emails. For example, {{club_name}} will insert the name of the club that a membership belongs to. Read more about merge tags in Bloom's help content.
- UPDATE: New product specs have been added for champagne and spirits. If you need new fields for specs that don't exist, please let us know.
- UPDATE: You won't see this new feature, but the development team has been working hard rebuilding our payments architecture. These updates solve a lot of issues we were seeing with orders being marked as successful, even though there was an error in the final step of saving the order. And provides a foundation for all customers to consider moving to Bloom checkout later this summer. Stay tuned for more on that.
- FIXES: We squashed numerous bugs in July and will continue working on incremental improvements to Bloom.
- WORKING ON: The design team is continuing to refine our designs for Bloom 1.0, specifically how Clubs and Membership Levels will integrate with Shopify products. You can see this in action on Empathy Wines website, where Club Empathy is a product you add to the cart, which loads Bloom checkout. This is only one, of many ways we'll be able to sign customers up for a membership.
Version 0.50.0
June 26, 2020
It has been almost 5 weeks since our last release. A lot has been worked on, and we're excited to announce that our new Bloom Sales Channel app is going into beta testing on July 1, with a select group of customers. Our plans are to make it publicly available around August 1st. With the sales channel app, you'll see Bloom will no longer be located in the Apps tab. Instead, you'll see Bloom under your Online Store as primary navigation in the Shopify admin. Additionally, you'll have the choice to use Bloom Checkout, which is a new club signup and product checkout experience. There are too many features to list here but expect to learn more as we get closer to the public launch. Other than that, here are the other updates we've made:
- NEW: On the Member report in Bloom/Reports, you'll see a new column for Declines. You'll see a number (could be a zero) which tells you how many payments have been declined for each membership. You can quickly see how many membership payments have been declined, and act on them accordingly. Sweet!
- UPDATE: Bloom will now send gift messages, or special instructions to ShipCompliant, which allows your fulfillment center to add these notes to packing slips or gift cards. This does require a bit of custom development work, so let us know if you are interested in this feature.
- UPDATE: Since Shopify has updated tax interfaces, you no longer need to provide a zip code for Bloom tax presences or overrides. If you have zip codes today, you can leave them. They just aren't required anymore.
- BUGS: Some of you may have experienced bugs with ShipCompliant status, and batch payment status. These were do to a major update to how member payments are processed, as well as almost doubling the different status to now have for ShipCompliant. We still know of one issue that we're working on to correct, where in rare cases a payment will be marked as failed, when it actually succeed. Please continue to report issues and we'll attempt to address them as quickly as we can.
Version 0.49.0
May 20, 2020
- NEW: Tiered discounts for web purchases are now available. Many wineries want to offer better discounts, the more wine customers purchase. For club members only, you can now offer different discounts based on the quantity in their cart. You'll first need to define your discount tiers on the club level in Bloom. Then the Bloom team will need to implement the update on your cart. Contact us if you'd like this feature added.
- UPDATE: Our FORT integration is now complete. If you are using a warehouse using FORT software, you can now have a direct integration for fulfillments. In Bloom/Settings/Integrations there is a new checkbox where you can activate FORT Systems. When activated, every order will have a new order attribute called "Fort Fulfillment Type". The values can be "Ship" "Pick up" or "in Person". Any order marked as "Ship" will be sent to your warehouse. Contact us if you're interested in setting this up, as it may require installing the FORT app onto your shop.
- UPDATE: Our ShipCompliant integration will now skip compliance checks if the order doesn't contain products with alcohol (doesn't have an ABV set). Meaning, it is more important than ever to make sure your alcohol products have ABV values set, if you want orders to be compliant.
- FIX: We fixed an issue we uncovered with our ShipCompliant integration, where in some cases, new products were being synced with "0" for ABV.
- WORKIN ON: The new Bloom Checkout and Sales Channel is getting closer to complete. We will be testing it with a handful of customers in early July. Stay tuned.
Version 0.48.0
April 30, 2020
- NEW: Bloom has always had minimum and maximum quantity values for customizations. We've now added minimum and maximum pricing as well. So, if you want to ensure customizations reach a certain price threshold, just added your values on the Edit Club Level view.
- NEW: If you want to add a gift message to an order before you checkout, we can now easily add To, From and Message fields. These message can then appear on packing slips, if printed from Order Printer, or any app that uses Order Note Attribute fields. This feature will require custom updates to your site's cart view. Contact us if you're interested.
- UPDATED: We've added new shipping options on Bloom club levels, for both club and web orders:
- $7 if less than $100, Free over $100
- $12 flat rate or free shipping on 12+ bottles
- $15 flat rate or free shipping on 12+ bottles
- $17 if less than $100, Free over $100 - FIXES: Many Bloom customers experienced duplicate orders in certain situations. This was due to a major change we made to our payment gateway API, and wasn't caught during testing. That fix, and many other small fixes have been made since the last release. Hopefully Bloom is more stable for everyone.
- WORKING ON: Continued work on Bloom 1.0, specifically merging a lot of new, soon-to-be-released features, into the existing code base. This will ensure our customers can easily move between the current version of Bloom (we'll start calling it the legacy version) and Bloom 1.0. Next up is finalizing and releasing our new join process and checkout.
Version 0.47.0
April 14, 2020
- NEW: There is a new report in Bloom! If you need to see when your members last updated their membership status, just head over to Bloom Reports and you'll see the first tab is now Memberships. Sweet!
- UPDATED: We've greatly improved some of the Join a Club flows, particularly those rare, complex flows like you're already a customer, with an account, and you want a club membership. Before, Bloom required customers to verify themselves via an email. Now, through some fancy coding, new members will just flow straight into the Shipping Options view without needing to verify.
- UPDATED: In addition to improving the flows, we've also made vast improvements on the performance of the Join a Club flow. This is particularly evident for those customers who might have hundreds of new members joining at the same time. No more application timeouts!
- FIX: We fixed a bug where some refunds weren't completing fully, as well as a bug that would make the Sales Tax report error out when certain data was loaded into it.
- WORKING ON: We're knee-deep in the design and customer experience for our new allocation checkout. It is going to be amazing.
Version 0.46.2
March 31, 2020
- NEW: Bloom has always added Order Notes to new orders, which provide information regarding compliance checks, payment gateway messages, and more. Some of our customers use the Order notes field for very specific purposes, and the notes Bloom adds may clutter things up. Now, you can turn notes off. Just go to Bloom/Settings/General and uncheck the Order notes feature.
- UPDATED: We've added email addresses to the Gift Recipient report in Bloom. This will assist in creating contact lists for email marketing, etc.
- UPDATED: Our Avalara integration that uses the AvaTax tax rates for club orders is now complete. We'll continue to build out this integration and required by our customers.
Version 0.46.0
March 25, 2020
- NEW: Discount codes can now be added by new members when joining a wine club. Why you might ask? If you are a winery who collects payment and ships a new member's order upon signup, you can incentivize them by providing a discount on this first order. When a discount code is added by a new member during signup, we simply tag the customer with a new "Promo: " tag. You will need to check the customer's tags before giving them a discount when creating their first order. You can turn this feature on in Bloom/Settings/General. The Promo Code field will appear on the Billing view for members and in the Bloom admin. This feature is a work-in-progress and plan to integrate it more seamlessly in the future. Let us know if you have questions.
- UPDATED: "Keg" is now a container size option in Bloom Product Specifications. This will allow our customers who pour beer or wine from Kegs to track inventory using Keg as the container.
- FIX: The auto-updater in Authorize.net stopped updating credit cards in Bloom, which meant you might have cards in Bloom that marked "Expired" they may have actually been updated in Authorize.net. Since this service has been flaky, we've built our own. Every time you log into Bloom, it will run a quick check all cards stored in Bloom, and sync them with Authorize.net data.
- FIX: If you reprocess an order in a failed batch the "Processed date" will now reflect the date it was reprocessed. Before, it was only displaying the date the order was initially processed.
- WORKING ON: With our amazing growth, we're still seeing some customer get certain processes "stuck" in a queue. For instance, running a report might take longer than expected because there are other jobs ahead of yours. Like we've already completed for batching orders, we're moving other background process to our new queuing job service.
Version 0.45.0
March 16, 2020
- NEW: If a customer has requested a preferred ship date, you can now add a date on the order. There are two ways to achieve this 1) add a tag to the order "Preferred ship date: 03-15-2020" or 2) Preferred ship date should be an option to edit on the Additional Options box on the order, right under the Notes box. The date will appear on a 205 report in the Requested Ship Date column. Sweet!
- NEW: Smart links can be added to emails you send to members which will load the Activate Account view if they don't have an account or will load the login page if they do have an account. This means you don't need to send separate emails for each segment, but send one with a smart link and Bloom will take care of the rest. If you want to use smart links, just give us a shout and we'll get you set up.
- NEW: When a new member is creating a membership, the billing view where they enter their billing information has an empty space to the right of the form, where you can now add custom content. You can use it to provide information about recurring billing, security, or anything else you might want to tell your members in this context. You'll find the new rich text box in the Edit Club Level view.
- UPDATED: Birth date is no longer required when signing up a member in the POS. We're assuming your tasting room staff will check for age in person. This will make club signup a bit faster on the POS.
- UPDATED: "Can" is now a container type you can select in Product Specifications. "Keg" will be coming soon for those wineries who are using kegs for glass pours.
- UPDATED: We've updated our entire software stack to the latest Ruby gems and Shopify APIs. If this doesn't make sense, it just means we're using the latest and greatest code Shopify has to offer.
- WORKING ON: The Avalara integration is almost complete. We're in final testing. It may be released as a hot-fix this week. Our developers are continuing to work on the new membership signup designs and allocation memberships. We've built some great tools to help us migrate faster and more easily from other platforms, which we'll continue to improve. At the Washington Winegrowers Trade Show, we demoed a beta version of the new Shopify Point of Sale, and we're excited about where that is headed.
Version 0.44.0
February 21, 2020
- NEW: We've added the ability to use merge tags in Bloom emails. There are currently only two tags available, but the infrastructure is there to easily add more. You can display the member's last 4 card numbers or their shipping address. If you'd like to learn how to use these, just check out this short help article.
- NEW: In our last release we added the ability to select Residential or Commercial for a shipping address. Now you can also add shipping surcharges to either of these address types. This is useful if your shipping carrier charges you more to ship to one type vs. another. Currently, this only works for wine club orders. The surcharges will not be applied to web orders.
- NEW: If you want (or need) extra birthdate validation, we can now add a birthdate field on the shopping cart, before the customer enters the checkout. This update does require a couple of hours of extra work from the Bloom team. Let us know if you'd like us to implement that feature for you.
- NEW: Bloom is now integrated with the Shopify app Advanced Shipping Rules. For only $9 a month, you can add very complex shipping strategies to your store and club shipments.
- UPDATED: When viewing your batch details, you'll now see a new column for "Processed Date" for each attempted payment. This will help you compare the last attempted payment date to the date billing was last updated.
- FIX: When creating batches, members with failed payments weren't being excluded from batching as expected. That is now fixed.
- FIX: Bloom shipping reports are now generated much faster.
- FIX: Dates on Orders and Products reports now use the order date, and not the order created date. We saw this issue after importing orders from legacy systems, and should now be fixed.
- WORKING ON: Integrating Avalara with Bloom club orders for Shopify Plus customers, and continuing to work on the new designs for Bloom 1.0.
Version 0.43.0
February 4, 2020
- NEW: Added the option to select whether a shipping address is residential or commercial. This will appear when you edit a member's shipping address in the admin, and when new members are signing up on the website. A shipping type of 'residential' or 'commercial' will appear as a note on batch orders now. It will also be added as a tag for easier order filtering in Shopify, and as a column when you export the shipping report.
- UPDATE: We made some major performance upgrades to reports in Bloom, so now loading or exporting reports is much faster.
- UPDATE: We removed the 'Bloom' tag on customers and orders. We got feedback that this was confusing to some people.
- UPDATE: Improvements in Safari, the install page should no longer show up every time Bloom is loaded. Note that you will still have to accept cookies in some instances, due to Safari's security protocols.
- FIX: In Shipcompliant, the customer phone number is now passed as the customer key if the customer didn't have an email address associated with them.
- FIX: In rare cases, if a wine was deleted from a collection, an empty space would appear in the additional wines selections. This is now fixed.
- WORKING ON: We're continuing work on the build out of our new Sales Channel in Shopify, as well as the redesign of Bloom admin interfaces.
Version 0.42.0
January 13, 2020
- NEW: Bottle deposits are now available for Bloom orders. You will still need to use an app to take bottle deposits for web orders for the time being, but for all club orders bottle deposits can be added automatically for each order line item that has a bottle (defined by having a Volume in product specs). You can find the bottle deposit feature in Bloom/Settings/Billing & Tax
- UPDATE: When creating tax overrides in Bloom Settings, you can now distinguish between alcohol and merchandise. Some tax jurisdictions have different tax rules for different product types. You can now dial in your override rates if needed. Contact support if you need assistance setting up tax overrides.
- UPDATE: In the case where a new club member is signing up for a club, but their email address already exists in Shopify, we show a message letting them know they need to check their email and respond to a verification notification. The message that displays can now be managed in Bloom/Settings/General
- FIX: On the POS app, there was a bug that was hiding the "Select" button when trying to select a level for a new member. This is now fixed.
- WORKING ON: The development team is rebuilding our order background processes so that each shop (your store) will get it's own, dedicated processor. Batched orders will begin to run automatically. The design team is knee-deep in redesign Bloom's admin interfaces and getting it ready for our new Sales Channel in Shopify.
View previous release notes...