What’s New in BakeSmart: July Product Updates, Customer Retention Tools & What’s Coming Next
July is here, and with it comes a fresh look at what the BakeSmart team has been building, releasing, and preparing for the months ahead.
This month, we’re highlighting the product developments released throughout June, along with a preview of our upcoming Mastering BakeSmart webinar. Mastering BakeSmart is held on the second Wednesday of each month, and July’s focus is feature releases and customer retention tools.
During the webinar, we’ll walk through the newest features live and take a deeper look at the customer retention tools inside BakeSmart, including our Loyalty and Promo/Coupon modules. These tools are designed to help bakeries bring customers back again and again, especially as you start preparing for the busy fall and holiday seasons.
July Is a Great Time to Work On Your Bakery
For many bakeries, July can bring a natural slowdown, especially in areas where hot weather impacts customer traffic and bakery sales. While a slower season can feel frustrating, it can also create an opportunity.
This is the perfect time to step back and work on your business.
That might mean refining your fall product lineup, tightening your internal systems, training your team, updating your online store, or making sure you’re getting the most out of BakeSmart before the busy season arrives.
It’s also a great time to connect with our team if you’ve been thinking about adding new tools, improving workflows, or finally tackling the software projects you’ve been putting off. A little work now can make a big difference when cooler weather, fall flavors, and holiday demand start picking up.
A Refreshed Online Store
Your BakeSmart eCommerce storefront got a visual refresh.
The updated online store includes cleaner layouts that make it easier for customers to browse, shop, and place orders. We’ve also added the ability to add a banner to your homepage, giving bakeries more flexibility to highlight seasonal items, important announcements, promotions, featured products, or ordering deadlines.
Check out one of our BakeSmart Bakery’s sites, to see it in action!
ACH Payments for Wholesale Customers
ACH payments are now available to everyone using the Wholesale Module.
This gives bakeries a lower-cost way to accept payments, which can be especially helpful for larger wholesale invoices where card fees can add up quickly. Bank account information now appears on wholesale portal invoices as well, making the payment process clearer and easier for your customers.
Review New Orders Before They Reach Production
BakeSmart now includes an order review feature that allows incoming orders to be reviewed before they enter your production workflow.
When turned on, this gives your team the chance to catch special requests, unusual quantities, missing information, or possible mistakes before the order reaches production. It’s a helpful checkpoint that keeps your bakers, decorators, and production team working from cleaner, more accurate information.
Duplicate Orders in One Click
Repeat orders just got easier.
You can now duplicate a past order across the app, eCommerce, and wholesale. This is a major time-saver for standing orders, recurring customer requests, and repeat purchases. Instead of rebuilding the same order from scratch, your team can quickly recreate it and make any needed adjustments.
More Improvements Released in June
In addition to the larger updates, our team released a number of improvements across the platform.
Invoicing & Receipts
BakeSmart now supports terms and a signature line on invoices, bulk invoicing from the customer orders list, the ability to print and reprint payment receipts, and the option to delete payment requests.
Products
Product management received several updates, including drag-and-drop reordering within product groups, the ability to duplicate decoration lists, next and previous navigation on product details, and new “Available Online” and “Available Wholesale” toggles on the product list.
Orders & Fulfillment
Order management improvements include bulk fulfillment status updates and new order list filters, including decoration tickets and eCommerce-only orders.
Wholesale
Wholesale ordering now supports multiple product variations on a single wholesale order, giving bakeries more flexibility when managing larger or more complex wholesale customers.
Reporting
Reporting updates include tax totals on the X/Z drawer report, a tax-exempt customer filter on the payments report, a custom-items filter on the ordered-items report, and a new CSV exporter.
Small Touches That Make a Difference
We also released smaller improvements, including case-insensitive discount code search, the ability to sort products by last updated, and a round of behind-the-scenes fixes across eCommerce, wholesale permissions, discounts, and payments.
Coming Up: Mastering BakeSmart
Our next Mastering BakeSmart webinar (free to join!) will focus on feature releases and customer retention tools.
Mastering BakeSmart is held on the second Wednesday of each month, and this session will highlight the newest features released across the platform, including order review, updated product and order management tools, ACH for wholesale customers, and more.
We’ll also take a closer look at BakeSmart’s Loyalty and Promotions tools and how they can support customer retention heading into the fall and holiday seasons.
Now is a great time to set up promotions, schedule your marketing, and make sure customers are earning loyalty points for every dollar spent. The work you do now can help encourage repeat visits, increase customer engagement, and create stronger habits before your busiest seasons arrive.
Join us by registering at https://bakesmart.com/mastering-bakesmart
What We’re Working on Next
While you’re planning ahead, so are we.
Our team is hard at work on two major upcoming developments designed to make BakeSmart even more powerful for bakeries.
The first is a new web-based POS. BakeSmart currently offers a POS, but the new version will give us much more flexibility and will fully integrate with the ordering platform. This will help create a more connected experience between front-of-house sales, order management, and the rest of your BakeSmart tools.
The second is Proof, our back-of-house formula costing module. Proof is being designed to help bakeries better understand their costs, protect margins, and “proof” their profits through data. Because it will fully integrate with BakeSmart, it will bring formula costing directly into the systems bakeries are already using to manage products, orders, and production.
There is a lot ahead, and we’re excited to keep building tools that help bakeries run more efficiently and profitably.
Keep Learning with BakeSmart
Be sure to join us for Mastering BakeSmart on the second Wednesday of each month, and visit our YouTube page to watch past Mastering BakeSmart trainings.
Wishing you a successful July at your bakery!
The BakeSmart Team