Guest checkout! New marketing tools! So many bug fixes!

November 1, 2016

Starting this week, shoppers no longer need to create (or have) Etsy accounts when buying from your Pattern site. Removing that barrier should help improve your sales, and we hope it does! The new marketing tools in this update should help with that too. You can get your own custom email address, let shoppers give you theirs, and then use MailChimp to create and send them beautiful email updates or promotions. We also stomped on a lot of pesky bugs, mostly blog-related. As always, let us know if anything seems to be acting up. Read below for the full rundown of our latest updates. Thanks in advance!

In this release

New

• Guest checkout: Buyers can now purchase from your Pattern site without creating or signing into an Etsy account
• Announcement banner: Add an announcement to the top of your site to let shoppers know about sales, new products, your latest blog post, or coupon codes. You can add a link and make the announcement clickable too, if you'd like.
• Custom email address: If you purchased your domain from Pattern, you can create an email address for it too. Emails sent to that address can be forwarded to any email account you'd like.
• "Marketing" menu: You’ll find all the marketing tools above and more in the new Marketing section of your Pattern dashboard.

Improved

• Better buyer emails: The transactional emails your buyers get now include the colors of your Pattern site, helping to reinforce your brand.
• Pattern dashboard: We added a few things to the left-hand navigation menu and tidied it up a little bit.

Fixed

• Cover photos in the Pearl theme weren’t high resolution
• Once published, blog posts weren’t editable
• The blog icon on the dashboard was the old design
• Blog post excerpts couldn't be published if they were too long...
• ...and there wasn't a character limit on the blog excerpt field. Doh.
• Inactive blogs weren’t redirecting to the member's Pattern site
• Animated gifs couldn't be published with blog posts
• In preview mode, links from blogs generated errors
• Blogs using the Pearl theme had some formatting issues
• Featured images in the blog list weren't linking to the associated posts
• The blog preview/publish button wasn't always working
• When a blog was simply updated, the date published would change
• Bold text in the blog was automatically changing to the site's accent color
• The search icon was acting up on wide screens
• On mobile devices, blog posts' published dates appeared over top of the menu
• On iPads, the blog tab overlapped with the release notes link on the dashboard
• In the Gingham theme, the About photo scroll arrows showed up when there was only one photo
• The Instagram link was broken in preview mode for the Gingham theme
• The slide-out cart style made shop icons disappear on sites using the Mosaic theme