Best Practices: plentyShop LTS

First, you should create a new Plugin set, onto which you can transfer the current settings of your plentyShop LTS shop. To do so, proceed as follows:

The plugin set copy now contains the exact same settings as the one used as your plentyShop LTS shop. At this point, both the original set and its copy are identical. It is advisable to repeat this process before any major update, so that the plugin set is up to date.

In the next step, you need to update the copied plugin set to the current plentyShop LTS version.

The copy of the plugin set is now at a more current stage than the plugin set of your plentyShop LTS shop. Click on the plugin set copy in the list of plugin sets on the left side of the interface. You can access your plentyShop LTS plentyShop in combination with the plugin set copy in preview mode via the button Plugin set preview. That way, you can assess whether the current changes to the plentyShop LTS plugin result in incompatibilities with external plugins, like a theme, that your are using. If the external plugins are functioning correctly under the new plentyShop LTS version, you can either activate the plugin set copy for the relevant client or Update the original plugin set, as detailed above.

We begin with an attribute.

The attribute with the two values Red and Black is created. You can also create additional values, such as Vermilion or Burgundy, and link them to the same Red facet.

You can link attributes with the main variation of an item when creating the item. When creating additional variations, you can link these variations with attribute values, too. You will now create variations in the Variations tab of the item. These variations have to be active in plentyShop, so that the filter will be available later on.

In plentyShop, our filters are realized by means of facets. Therefore we have to create a new facet and link the attribute values and the desired client to it.

Now you will deploy the plugin set in order to apply the changes. The filters will be available in the search and in the category view.

We begin with an property.

Your property interface should now look like this:

Characteristics are directly linked to the item. Proceed as follows:

Now you will deploy the plugins in a plugin set in order to apply the changes. The order property will be available in the Item view and the Shopping cart.

If the customer inputs something into the text field, the text is saved and the surcharge is added to the item price.

In this Best Practice we will create an order property that is displayed with a checkbox in the single item view. If the checkbox is checked, the surcharge for the product will automatically be calculated.

Go to Plugins » Plugin overview » plentyShop LTS » Configuration » Item lists. In this menu you can determine which type of item list you want to use in your plentyShop. Select the type of cross-selling relation that your item list should display from the Cross-selling: Cross-selling relation drop-down list (see box 1 in the image). You can choose from the options Similar, Accessory, Replacement parts and Collection. This cross-selling relation will apply to all cross-selling item lists in your plentyShop.

In the next step you determine which item list you want to use. Edit the First item list, Second item list or Third item list and select Cross-selling from the drop-down list. In the example below, the Second item list is configured as a cross-selling list (Box 2 in the image). Enter a German and an English name for your item list in the input fields Name of the second item list (DE) and Name of the second item list (EN), respectively.

Save the settings you have carried out.

After you have determined which item list you want to use for your cross-selling items, you now choose where the item list is to be displayed in your plentyShop.

Open the Shop » Container links menu.

Go to the item list that you have configured as your cross-selling item list, i.e. First item list, Second item list or Third item list. Choose the layout container in which you want to display your cross-selling item list. In the example below, the second item list is displayed in the container of the single item view.

The plentyShop LTS plugin offers you the possibility to choose between the Development mode and the Live mode. In the development mode, you can use debbuging options and the plugin files are neither minimised nor bundled, which can negatively impact the performance of your plentyShop. We advise you to operate your oplentyShop in live mode, in order to increase the performance. Take the following steps to activate live mode:

If you activate the live mode, the plentyShop LTS files are bundled and minimised, resulting in a quicker loading of the pages of your plentyShop.

With the release of plentyShop LTS v5.0.29, we’re introducing Vue Server-Side Rendering (SSR). SSR makes it possible that many components of the online shop are already processed on the server. Therefore, the browser receives pages that have already been rendered. The browser does not need to execute the received code again. This improves the rating of mobile pages in particular.

We added the setting Activate Vue Server-Sider Rendering to the plentyShop assistant and the plentyShop LTS settings in the Performance settings. You should initially activate this setting in a separate plugin set and test your shop thoroughly before you activate SSR for your productive system.

If you want to use SSR, you should also adjust the image widgets that you use on your pages. You have two important settings for image widgets at your disposal: Peloading and lazy loading. The following chapters explain how to optimise your image widgets.

Image files are one of the major culprits for low shop performance. You should, if possible, only include as many image widgets on your plentyShop pages as you need for your purposes. A lower number of image widgets per page will positively impact the performance of your plentyShop.

The number of widgets you include on each page is prone to negatively affecting the performance of your plentyShop. The larger the number of widgets per page, the slower the loading times. This is particularly applicable to image widgets and to widgets that necessitate a large quantity of item data. Each additional widget impacts the time to first full interactivity of the page.
We therefore recommend you use only as many widgets per page as is necessary for your purposes. On category pages, in particular, it is advisable to reduce the numver of displayed items, since category pages need to load large quantities of data and complex Javascript.

The Time to first Byte (TTFB) is also part of the parameters evaluated by PSI, albeit to a small degree. In order to improve your TTFB values, you can activate the additional ShopBooster module for a fee. By activating the ShopBooster, page contents of your plentyShop are written into the cache, so that a second access to the page will benefit from greatly improved TTFB times.

The use of ShopBooster is particularly fruitful in combination with Server-Side Rendering (SSR), since using SSR can slightly increase the TTFB of your shop.

You can find additional information about ShopBooster on the plentyShop manual page.

If you include custom fonts for your plentyShop and do not use the drsign settings of the ShopBuilder, it is possible that browsers try to display certain sections of text before the custom font is loaded. As a result, your plentyShop may be prone to a so-called Flash of invisible text (FOIT), meaning a short time during which the text you want to display cannot be displayed by the browser.

In order to avoit FOITS, you can use a CSS command to intermittenly display a system font instead of your custom font. to do so, you add the directive font-display: swap in your @font-face styles, for instance by using the Custom CSS/JS in the front end) plugin. You can thereby prevent annyoing FOITS to happen, which can have a positive impact on the PSI rating of your plentyShop.

The ShopBuilder provides a code widget via which you can integrate additional adjustments that are not covered by ShopBuilder itself. If you want to inplement a piece of code, we advise you to avoid using Javascript in the code widget of the ShopBuilder. Instead, you can, for instance, use the Custom CSS/JS in the front end plugin or include the Javascript in a theme. Including additional Javascript in code widgets negatively impacts the loading times of your plentyShop.
If you integrate additional Javascript via an external plugin or a theme, we recommend that you place the Javascript at the lower end of the HTML body.

If you use payment plugins for your plentyShop that involve larger quantities of data (such as AmazonPay or PayPal), it is imperative for the performance of your plentyShop to link these plugins to the correct corresponding template containers. We added new template containers with the release of plentyShop LTS 5.0 in order to load Javascript and CSS of payment plugins only in the places that they are needed for the successful order process.
The plugin guides of the respective payment plugins, such as PayPal, already include detailed descriptions on how to link the contents of the plugins to the corresponding template containers. In general, you should link the Javascript of the payment method to the container Checkout.AfterScriptsLoaded and no longer to ScriptLoader.AfterScriptsLoaded. This can positively impact the performance of your plentyShop.

The sorting value Relevance sorts search results in accordance with a numeric score that the PlentyONE system determines. The higher this numeric score, the higher the corresponding item’s position in the list of the search results. You can determine the calculation of the relevance score in 2 different places in the backend: The plentyShop LTS assistant hosts a slimmed version of this setting in the Search step under Priorisation of search values for the "Relevance" option. You can find the complete priorisation settings in the Setup » plentyShop » Global settings » Search settings » Settings menu.

Here, you can activate item data fields that you want to be considered in the calculation of the Relevance score. If you activate the fields Name 1, Description, and Keywords, for instance, an item that includes the entered search term in all three item fields will be considered to be more relevant than an item that only contains the search term in its name. The first item will thus be displayed higher in the list of search results than the latter item.

The boost of the individual data fields serves to determine the priorisation. The precise value of the individual boost fields is less important than the order of the boost values. If the boost value for the field Name 1 is higher than the value for Name 2, an item that includes the entered search term in the field Name 1 will receive a higher numeric relevance score than an item that includes the search term in the field Name 2.

The sorting by Relevance will usually list those search results first, that correspond to all of the entered search terms, followed by those results that only contain a part of the entered searchs terms.

The sorting value Recommended serves to sort search results in accordance to 3 values that you select and prioritise. You carry out these settings in the field Recommended sorting of search results in the Search step of the plentyShop LTS assistant.

The 3 sorting values interact with each other in the following way: Your items are first checked for the first sorting value; if 2 or more items would be sorted into the same position of the search results, the second value affects the sorting of the search results. If, as a result of the second sorting process, 2 or more items would be sorted into the same position, the third value becomes effective.

Example:
You’ve configured the recommended sorting of search results in your online shop in such a way that the first sorting value is Relevance, followed by Variation position as the second and Price (increasing) as the third value. A customer of your shop enters "Blue pants" as a search term. The search now goes over your entire item catalogue and assesses it according to the relevance sorting. The item data fields of your items are checked for both search terms ("blue" and "pants"). Depending on the item data fields you’ve activated for the Relevance sorting (name, description, etc.), multiple results may be returned that have the same (invisible) numeric relevance score. In the next step, the results are checked for their Variation position, which you either entered yourself or which is determined by the monthly sales. Finally, those results that have both the same relevance score and the same variation position are sorted by their price.

Currently, it is not possible to set up plentyShops in such a way that the search only functions as an "AND" search, i.e. that the search exclusively returns results that correspond to all search terms. However, the plentyShop search can simulate an "AND" search. For this, you need to select the sorting value Relevance for the setting Default sorting of search results in the Search step of the plentyShop LTS assistant. Alternatively, you can also select the sorting value Recommended, as long as Relevance is selected as the first value of the recommended sorting option.
That way, search results that contain all of the entered search terms are displayed first, followed by those that only correspond to parts of the search query. It is not possible to exclude the latter from the search.