Kooomo Platform Updates: Subscription Date Fields & Cache Improvements

It’s time for another helping of updates to the Kooomo platform that you need to know!

We’ve added a new field to the customer's panel in the Kooomo platform, so now merchants have even more visibility of the exact date at which customers subscribed to their email newsletter, as opposed to the date that they first registered as a user. It’s also a fantastic way to see if registered users are subscribed to your email database or not, and vice versa. If you click the Customers panel within the platform, you will now be able to see the new subscription date field.

Thanks to an update within the platform, users can see changes within categories much faster, without having to wait for the cache to run automatically. To use this new feature and flush the cache in your category pages, you simply need to go to the Catalogue > Categories panel within the Kooomo platform – choose the category that you wish to flush the cache for, and click the ‘Clear Cache’ dropdown, choosing the option ‘Refresh category cache’. Then, all changes to the category are visible immediately.

In a nutshell, cache is the memory that a program uses to store site data and speed up the loading of pages. 

So it might happen that as a user browsing a website, you don’t see changes immediately. To overcome this problem, which is quite common, all you have to do is empty your browser’s cache, forcing the program to download the most updated versions of the websites visited.

The Kooomo platform operates in a similar way when it comes to cache.

Whenever you open a product page, a request is made to the server, which asks various things about the product, to fill in and load that page. Once this is complete, you will be able to see everything on that particular page. 

The way Kooomo works is that it loads an empty page, then virtually asks the server for the info required. But, as we have to upload many pages in most cases, it means having to call the product from a database, where temporary information has been stored (i.e. cached), for a defaulted amount of time (typically 10 minutes, but depending on the client, this varies).

Then, it is automatically refreshed by the system in  the background, so customers are not aware of this process. What they see if actually the cache, rather than the live product. 

There is also a difference that’s important to note between logged in, and guest users. The system doesn’t use cache for logged in users (since promotions would be an issue if every individual user promotion were to be cached). 

If you don’t apply promotions per users in your merchant account, you can enable the option for logged in users to be subject to cache, meaning that they will be able to view the website at an acceptable speed. Doing this does mean that merchants aren’t able to create a promotion that is applied to product pages that are specific to users.

Instead, they can manage promotions by creating a coupon code or create a promotion that will be applied to the shopping cart of a specific user.

With this new update to the platform, flushing the cache for categories is now possible, meaning a better user experience for customers.

Want to find out more about any of these specific platform updates, or about the Kooomo platform in general? We’d be delighted to help! Get in touch with the team here!