Most release-note posts are a feature list. This one's a walk through three changes you'll notice in the operational rhythm of your week — plus a few quiet wins we don't want to bury.
1. Address validation, everywhere your team or your customers type an address
Anyone who's run a shipping operation knows the cost of a misspelled address: a returned shipment 5–10 days later, an apologetic customer email, the carrier fee you eat, the reship you have to schedule. One typo costs you a week and your customer's confidence.
The platform adds Google-powered address suggestions and one-click validation everywhere a typo can hide:
- Storefront checkout — your customer's delivery address auto-completes as they type. The component fills street + city + state + ZIP + country in one pick.
- Dispatch and job creation — when your dispatcher schedules a job, the job-site address gets the same suggestions. The tech doesn't show up in the wrong town because someone typed "Maine" instead of "Main."
- Customer portal — when your customer updates their account, the new address is verified against Google before it saves.
Before the order or job saves, Business Dash text-searches the entered address back against Google and compares each component. Mismatches surface a "did you mean?" with the normalized version. Your team approves; the bad address never makes it to the carrier or the field tech.
You don't set anything up. The platform handles the Google Cloud connection, the keys, and the per-call billing.
2. Customer-controlled shipping notifications across four channels
The most predictable support call in any business with physical products is "where is my order?" Multiplied across a busy week, that's hours of your team answering a question the carrier already knows.
The platform puts the customer in control of their own tracking updates, across four channels:
- In-app — the customer's portal feed shows shipped / out-for-delivery / delivered as it happens
- Email — from your verified domain, with your branding (logo + theme color) automatically injected
- SMS — for customers who want the text-message version
- Webhook to their own systems — for B2B buyers piping shipping events into their own automations
The customer picks which channels and which events from your site (the SDK exposes the read/write surface; you render the preferences UI). SMS and email destinations require verification before they send — so the platform can't be tricked into spamming a random phone number.
The "where is my order?" call becomes "I already got the notification, thanks."
3. Promotions that fit how retail runs — BOGO, BXGY, free shipping
The previous coupon system did two things: flat dollars off, or percent off. Most retail promotions need more shapes than that:
- Buy one get one — the simplest retail promo of all time, impossible to express until now
- Buy three for the price of two — same shape as BOGO, different count
- Free shipping — separately, or stacked on top of a subtotal discount
- Bundle gifts — "free item Y with the purchase of item X"
You author all of these from one form. Standard discounts flow through Stripe Promotion Codes (so the customer can type the code on the Stripe checkout page); BOGO and bundle-gift are computed at the Business Dash cart-math layer because Stripe doesn't natively support buy-X-get-Y semantics — the customer just sees the right discounted total.
Promotions that used to require a custom-built page or an emailed manual discount are now first-class.
Plus, quietly
- One-click payment — every Stripe Checkout Session now offers Stripe Link, so returning customers pay with a saved card in one tap
- Refund policy templates — 5 platform-supplied templates (30-day return, satisfaction guarantee, services no-return, prorated subscription, digital final-sale). Clone, customize, attach to specific products. Renders next to the buy button via the SDK so customers see the terms before they commit
- Org branding everywhere it matters — set your theme color and logo once on your company profile; every transactional surface (shipping emails, vendor-invite emails, customer notification templates) renders with your branding without per-template configuration
What ties this together
Each of these is small in isolation. Together they shift the customer rhythm of your week — fewer reships from typos, fewer status-check calls, more promotions running. The kind of changes that compound quietly over months.
Your team stops fielding "where is my order?" calls, because the customer already had the notification. Misspelled addresses get caught before the shipment leaves. And the buy-two-get-one promo your store has wanted for a year finally runs, without a spreadsheet behind it.