Our goal is to make it much easier to set up your plentymarkets system.

Assistants

With the help of assistants we were able to facilitate the setup of individual areas. However, we’ve encountered a few limits with this technology. Not all areas that needed setup could be mapped well with assistants. We decided not to continue using the assistants. We’ve already replaced a few assistants; the rest will be replaced step by step. In the transitional stage, the remaining assistants are moved to their thematically fitting menu entries in the side navigation. Additionally, assistants that are created by plugins will receive their own menu entry.

Rebuilding the setup menus

Instead of using assistants, we will adopt a dual strategy in the future: On the one hand, the setup menus will be rebuilt; on the other hand, our tours will help you carry out all necessary settings faster and step by step.

Since we were not able to implement everything at once, we decided to focus - in a first step - on those areas that bring you the greatest value: The setup of the three sales channels with the highest turnover across all our sellers. These are Amazon, plentyShop, and OTTO Market.

By rebuilding the user interfaces, adding guided tours, and removing the assistants, we’re creating a uniform and clear image for the setup of plenty. We’re thereby fully utilising the possibilities provided by the current user interfaceframework and, at the same time, provide you with the necessary help to set up the system in a targeted manner.

The release of these changes is scheduled for today, 31 May, 2023. From then on, the changes will be visible in beta systems. The release for early systems will follow one week later, with the stable release happening one week after that.

Guided tours for setup (new feature)

The guided tours can be accessed in the Setup » Guided tours menu.

We achieve two goals with the guided tours: On the one hand, they help you find your way around setup menus because the tours explain the individual user interfaces step by step. On the other hand, we’ve assigned these tours to higher goals, which we have internally called “journeys”. One of these possible journeys is, for instance, Setting up Amazon Fulfilment by Merchant (MFN). In this way, we make it easier for you to find your way around our setup menus and you also know exactly what needs to be done to fulfil the purpose of the journey. The tours are marked as completed as soon as you have finished them. However, you can also mark tours as completed without having to go through them; you can also reset tours. Tours can be started as often as you like and in any state; you can also close tours and come back for them later. When you open a tour you closed before, the tour is started again from the beginning.

If you need to switch to another menu during a tour (e.g. the Orders menu) because you are, for instance, interrupted by an important phone call for which you need to look up some information, you can return to the tour by clicking the Setup tab.

We will continue to gradually expand the guided tours in order to support you in more and more setup processes.

Guided tours for user interfaces in daily use

The guided tours have allowed us to complete a big first step towards facilitating setup. As a second step, we would like to use this technology to make user interfaces that are used on a daily basis, such as the menus for managing items or orders, more accessible and easier to understand for users. We have already started the planning phase for this endeavour.