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I am extremely excited to announce the immediate availability of our latest release: OXID eShop 4.4.0. It allows small, medium and large businesses to leverage innovative dynamic sales models on the Web and tap into the word-of-mouth marketing power of social networks. Oh yes, version 4.4.0 rocks :)

Innovative Dynamic Business Models

With the new release, you can create members-only shops, offer one deal a day, set a basket expiration time for live shopping sites, get products recommended on Facebook, and more. All of which in combination with the existing, typical eCommerce functionality, allows shop owners to more easily and better:

• Retain and attract new customers with persuasive social eCommerce
• Provide purchase incentives with limited time sales and restricting catalogue browsing
• Raise the visibility of your shop through viral marketing and minimize overall marketing spend
• ... and ultimately raise revenue by lowering costs with innovative new business models!

There are exciting times ahead of us and that includes not OXID eSales, the vendor of OXID eShop, but also you, the users of OXID eShop who constantly seek for new revenue streams or optimizing existing ones. Nothing stops you from starting right away:

• Freely available advanced eCommerce features: All new features, such as Private and Group Sales, Live Shopping as well as Facebook Integration are included in our Community Edition and thus freely available.
• Reliable platform for new business models: The new features make OXID eShop the Open Source eCommerce platform of choice for those who want to implement social commerce business models that are both radically new as well as ready for mass adoption.
• Speed up innovation while reducing risks: Now, you can significantly speed up innovation and separate your shop from the competition without the risk of huge upfront investment.

Modular Social eCommerce Features

Let me walk you through some of the highlights of the 4.4.0 release and I am sure, you'll share my enthusiasm:

• Private and Group Sales: Using the private sales feature, merchants can implement shopping clubs or group and event shopping. Registering to the shop, the member for example now can reserve products. He can see which products there are in the cart and when his product reservation will expire.
• Facebook: Using the Facebook integration in OXID eShop, customers can log in to the shop, recommend products, discuss and comment about them. They may share their most favorite products with their friends via the "Like" button.
• Promotions: The feature "actions and promotions" enables merchants to better respond to their clients preferences. In the administration panel, it is possible to configure discounts for certain products and to control time frames and addressees of the promotion.
• Invitations and bonus points: The invitation function includes a credit point system: merchants can reward their clients that recruited other online purchasers to leverage viral marketing tactics. He can individually and flexible configure how to refund this credit points.

These are just some of the great new features included in the latest release. You can combine all of them in multiple variations due to the modular, flexible and open architecture of OXID eShop. There's no need to decide whether you want a traditional Online Shop or a membery-only Shopping Club. Just take the bits and pieces of functionality that match your business model as well as target audience. Feel free to build custom functionality on top of the Open Source code to add unique value for your customers.

Start today with building a unique and innovative eCommerce site: Learn more about OXID eShop 4.4.0, download it, try it out.

New Quality Report

By the way: Along with the new shop release, we also published the latest Quality Report. It clearly shows that we never sacrifice quality for adding new features. The code coverage by automated Unit Tests for all editions of OXID eShop increased again at over 90%. Thus, our product's quality is significantly higher than the 80% advised by experts for critical enterprise projects. Download the detailed OXID eShop Quality Report for free.