Release Notes

Keep up with Lula Commerce's Release Notes and Updates

October 14, 2026

Lula Direct

Loyalty, live on Lula Direct. Retailer loyalty programs are live on Lula Direct: Paytronix, PAR, PDI, and Patron Points, all on a single platform built to plug into the programs convenience retailers already use. Members open the store from their retailer's app already signed in, link their loyalty account with a phone number, and see rewards applied right in the cart. Learn more here.

Abandoned carts, won back automatically. When a shopper leaves items behind, Lula Direct can send a reminder email that brings them back to finish the order. Switch it on per store channel, pick the delay, and built-in safeguards prevent duplicate sends.

Search that finds what shoppers type. Exact word matches now rank first, and results, counts, and endless scrolling show only what the chosen store actually carries. The Trending rail on the home page shows only items that store stocks. Combo meals and 2-for deals open their option picker from any product tile, priced to match your delivery-app menus. "You might also like" recommendations are back on product pages and fill in as each storefront builds order history.

Improved storefront. Product photos are sized uniformly so shelves look tidy whatever the source image, tiles show pack size and price per unit, a reorder rail on the Discover page brings back past favorites, and shoppers can save items for later from the cart.

Built-in defenses against card fraud. Lula Direct now limits how many new cards and orders a single account can use in a day, asks for a billing ZIP code at checkout, and explains declines clearly to honest shoppers. Fewer disputes, cleaner books, and less exposure to chargebacks without putting friction in front of legitimate shoppers.

Every store gets its own shelf, prices, and rules. Shoppers now see what their chosen store stocks and, once per-store prices are set up, that store's own price. Switching stores triggers a warning before anything leaves the cart, pickup-only locations never offer delivery, and checkout requires a store choice so every order lands on the right tablet. Live on Lula Direct and switched on per retailer as each store's catalog is set up, so adding a store becomes a setup step, not a project.

Tobacco and alcohol, with state rules built in. Keep high-margin restricted categories selling online while the storefront enforces the rules for you. Lula Direct applies each state's tobacco delivery and flavor rules automatically, requires ID checks on alcohol and tobacco deliveries, and recognizes vapes, nicotine, and brand-name tobacco even when they're miscategorized, while everyday items like root beer stay unrestricted. An age restriction applied to an item is never undone by the next menu sync.

One store, more than one brand. A single location can now sell a second brand as its own channel on DoorDash, Uber Eats, Grubhub, and Lula Direct, with its own menu and logo (shown in Store Manager and on the store tablet in place of the delivery-app logo). The menu sync timeline labels every entry by brand, so you can see exactly which brand synced where. Service fees are set per channel: turn a channel off and its fee comes with it; second-brand menus on Lula Direct charge the fees you set.

Merchandising and promotions that publish themselves. Featured sections and banners you edit in Store Manager now appear on the storefront automatically, matched to each store's own stock and price. Banners can link straight to featured products, showcase specific products by UPC, and appear in new spots in search results and category headers. Promotions run exactly as configured (Buy X Get Y at the value you set, free delivery shown correctly), and the authoring experience got faster: automatic promotions no longer need a promo code, dates prefill from the campaign, ended promotions can be extended, and shoppers can type promo codes in any capitalization.

Insights

A new Storefront dashboard for Lula Direct merchants. For the first time, Insights shows what happens on your Lula Direct site before the order. Sales Performance tells you what sold; Storefront tells you why. The dashboard breaks down four things: an order funnel (visits → cart → checkout → payment → order) so you can see where shoppers leave; a closer checkout funnel where the biggest drop-offs usually happen; unmet demand, which lists searches that returned nothing ranked by how many shoppers made them and doubles as a shopping list of items worth carrying or making easier to find; and top products, the most-added items by number of shoppers. Available for Atlantis and Jacksons first, with more Lula Direct merchants coming.

A Storefront Brand filter for secondary-brand reporting. If you run secondary brands like Atlantis Cafe, f'real, or Krispy Krunchy, you can now filter every order-level report to a single brand. KPIs, drilldowns, and CSV exports all respect the filter. The channel list is simpler too: one DoorDash, one Uber Eats, no brand-suffixed duplicates. Earlier orders without brand attribution roll up under Main storefront, and item-level reporting per brand is coming soon.

Other Insights improvements. Catalog leaderboards now count completed orders only, so numbers won't be inflated by cancelled or denied orders. Rankings are unchanged, but expect figures to look a few points lower. Older payout columns are clearly labeled with their data cutoff so blank no longer looks like $0. Both Payouts Legacy tables now download every row matching your filters as CSV, not just the current page. The AI assistant in Explore shows a reminder to double-check responses, with a prompt to verify date ranges and store scope on anything you act on. And the Customers report was retired. Delivery platforms no longer send a consistent customer ID, and we'd rather drop a number than show one we can't stand behind.

What else is new

Back-office promotions, automatically. Promotions from a PDI back office now flow into Lula on their own and apply across every connected sales channel.

A store tablet that keeps up with your team. The tablet now tracks food prep and the delivery driver as two separate statuses. Assigning a driver mid-prep no longer takes away the edit button, locked orders explain why, and delivery orders show driver progress, including the driver's name and arrival estimate when the delivery partner provides them. Scheduled orders got their own flow: when a scheduled order's window opens, it moves into the active queue, staff get a Scheduled Order alert, and a new Scheduled orders section carries its own alert setting. Owners can once again fix item prices and UPCs themselves, even on items that were previously blocked. Ready Check now works per brand and survives an app refresh.

July 31, 2026

Lula Direct

Search and Discovery, Revamped

The fastest way to a sale is helping shoppers find what they want before they lose interest, so we rebuilt discovery from the ground up.

  • Search that understands intent: natural-language parsing and semantic matching surface the right products even when the exact keywords aren't there, so a vague or misspelled search still lands.
  • Shelves that match the moment: the Discover home leads with curated shelves that adapt to the time of day, so morning and late-night shoppers each see what's relevant to them.
  • Personalized recommendations: the storefront learns from shopper behavior to make every visit a little more tailored than the last.
  • Your real shelf, every time: it's all scoped to the store a shopper picks, so they only ever see what that location actually carries at its real prices, which means fewer surprises at checkout and fewer cancellations.

A Path Built to Convert

Once a shopper finds what they came for, everything from the product page to the last tap is built to move them to checkout, and to grow the basket along the way.

  • Upsell on the product page: product pages now suggest complements and popular pairings drawn from real purchase patterns, so shoppers discover the item they didn't know they wanted.
  • Now in Spanish: the storefront is fully available in Spanish, opening the experience to a much wider slice of the convenience shopper base.
  • A faster last mile: we added First Delivery as a last-mile carrier, giving stores another fast option to get orders out the door, with dispatch, tracking, and reconciliation wired in.

Checkout You Can Trust

We tightened checkout so the price a shopper sees is the price they pay.

  • What you see is what you're charged: the card a shopper actually enters is the card that gets charged, with the real brand and last four shown, tips included correctly, and empty guest checkouts stopped.
  • Per-store fees: each store can now carry its own delivery and service fees, applied cleanly at the cart with an honest minimum-fee floor.
  • Order updates by text and email: order-status text messages are now live, so shoppers get real-time updates with a track-order link, alongside confirmation and cancellation emails that carry the right store name, address, and totals.

Age-Restricted Ordering, Built to Comply

Selling age-restricted categories online only works if compliance is airtight.

  • Tobacco, with the right guardrails: tobacco is now orderable where permitted, with delivery blocked where it should be and pickup following per-state rules for flavored and menthol products.
  • Server-side age verification: verification now happens on our servers the moment an order is completed, not just in the browser, covering guest and signed-in shoppers alike.
  • SNAP/EBT split-tender: one order across SNAP, EBT cash, and a card, with FNS-compliant receipts, is live and switched on store by store as each completes certification.

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May 27, 2026

Lula Direct

Featured Sections & Banners — Cleaner Editing

  • Featured Sections now detect edit-mode changes before enabling Save, and let you fully clear an end date / end time.
  • Banner draft save + status UI is aligned with the new Featured Sections styling for visual consistency.

Fixes & Stability Improvements

  • Lula Direct checkout no longer double-refreshes auth on mount: eliminates the rare "spinner forever" loop some shoppers hit returning from sign-in.
  • Chunk load errors auto-recover on the storefront: after a fresh deploy, the app silently retries instead of throwing a JavaScript error in the customer's face.

Lula Hub

Insights Replaces Analytics

The Analytics page has been renamed to Insights and is now embedded directly inside Store Manager. Reports load in the same window with your existing login, and the "switch back to classic" option has been retired. Multi-company users will see the correct dashboard for whichever company they're scoped to.

New Financials Tab

A new top-level Financials tab in Store Manager surfaces your financial dashboard alongside Insights — same single-pane view, dedicated tab.

One-Click DoorDash Onboarding

Request a new DoorDash Marketplace listing for a store directly from the Store Details page — no support ticket needed. Submit the form, watch progress in-modal (up to two minutes), and get a success modal with the new storefront URL you can copy and share. Status badges and toasts show Pending, Live, and Blocked at a glance, and the success state persists if you refresh the page.

Item Catalog V2 — Items Tab + Sync Run History

  • A new Items tab gives you a full view of items by store, with a slide-in Sync Run Detail view so you can inspect each ingestion: what changed, what failed, by item.
  • CSV inventory uploads now report partial successes ("X items succeeded, Y failed") instead of all-or-nothing. The toast tells you when chunks fail so you can re-upload only the rows that need attention.
  • The Inventory Sync toggle is now in the per-channel drawer — flip it on or off per channel without leaving Store Details.
  • Bulk CSV export of items is now available.
  • Catalog rules can now target the Global Category subject in addition to existing subjects, so you can write one rule that applies platform-wide.

Promotion Authoring Polish

  • DoorDash promotion limits are now enforced in the authoring form so you can't build a promo DoorDash will reject.
  • BuyXGetY allocation is now correctly "each item" rather than "across cart" — matches the partner-side rules customers actually see.
  • Separate Create vs Edit buttons + a discard-changes confirmation prevent accidental loss of work.
  • Re-launching a published promo shows the right "Launch" toast; editing one shows "Update."

Larger Store Name Limit

The store name field now accepts up to 255 characters (was 50) — enough room for franchise + location descriptors.

Fixes & Stability Improvements

  • DoorDash order accept retried on transient 5xx errors: a brief partner-side blip no longer drops the order. The platform now retries automatically.
  • Inventory image enrichment now skips Lula-hosted images, removing the image flicker / duplicate processing some merchants saw.
  • V2 catalog accuracy: linked-product price + status now display the correct values; V2 inventory sync icon no longer gets stuck spinning on every row; "Unavailable" badge is no longer shown on linked modifier items where it didn't apply.
  • GrubHub menus correctly preserve a 0% store upcharge when configured (previously a 0% override could be lost in the fallback chain, causing unwanted upcharge math).
  • Insights now passes the correct company context when generating embed tokens, so multi-company users see the right dashboard on first load.
  • Menu Sync toggle can be flipped even if the partner is currently in an integration-failure state — so you can disable a broken sync while you fix the upstream issue.
  • Bulk-action dropdowns in Store Manager no longer get visually clipped inside scrolling rows.
  • Promo deletes correctly cascade to nested rule rows when syncing to DoorDash / UberEats. Previously a soft-deleted promo could leave orphaned rule rows on the partner side.
  • Alert messages that contained error objects no longer crash the Store Manager UI.
  • Store Items integrity: a fix to V2 catalog ingestion preserves item_id across upserts, removing a class of orphaned-record edge cases.

April 30, 2026

Lula Direct

New

  • Enhanced Banner Management — Banners now live under the Campaigns tab as measurable campaign objects. Link a banner directly to a category or specific UPC, schedule start and end dates, upload custom artwork, and launch or end a campaign with a single click. Supports priority-based delivery, click interactivity, and session-based revenue attribution.
  • EBT/SNAP Payment (Forage) — Eligible consumers can now check out using SNAP benefits, with seamless payment splitting between SNAP and other payment methods. Includes clear eligibility info and balance visibility.
  • Chat Support on Lula Direct — Customers can now chat with support directly from the Lula Direct storefront.

Fixed

  • Faster tax/fee calculation — Parallelized calls reduce cart-to-checkout latency.
  • Promo tags on cart — Red promo tags now appear immediately on the cart page (previously required a round-trip to checkout).
  • SNAP/EBT payment retry — Payment retries for EBT customers now work reliably.

Lula Hub

New

  • Secondary Brands — Operate multiple digital storefronts across marketplaces from a single store location and tablet. Unified inventory and order processing, separate brand presentation tuned to different shopper missions (e.g., restaurant-style storefront for prepared foods alongside a retail storefront for CPG).
  • Promotions — Now Everywhere — Unified promotions pipeline. Create a promo once; it syncs automatically to DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Lula Direct. Time-zone-aware scheduling, per-DSP deployment status, and support for order discounts, item discounts, BOGO offers, delivery incentives, cohort segmentation, and one-time-use-per-customer.
  • Product Enrichment — Enriched third-party datasets combined with the global catalog deliver comprehensive nutritional info, allergen data, and detailed product specs across all sales channels. Supports California compliance and reduces manual data entry during onboarding.‍
  • Order Routing and KDS (Fresh KDS) — Automatically route prepared food orders to retailer kitchens via Fresh KDS, eliminating manual receipt printing and reducing fulfillment time.

April 15, 2026

Lula Direct

New

  • Featured Product Sections — Build merchandising sections on your storefront with drag-and-drop product ordering, time-windowed activation (e.g., "Lunch Special" 11am–2pm), automatic inventory filtering, and per-channel scoping. Manage from the new Featured Sections area in Store Manager.
  • Save Cards for Faster Checkout — Customers can save a credit card during checkout. Primary card auto-selects on return; saved cards can be deleted with confirmation.
  • Store Timezone Support — Lula Direct now uses each store's local timezone for order scheduling, promotion windows, and availability.

Fixed

  • Service fee accuracy (multi-menu merchants) — Fixed a double-counting bug that overcharged customers on carts with items from multiple menus. Service fee now applies once per order at both the display and payment paths.
  • $0 price display on homepage — Items now consistently show the correct price on the homepage, matching the category page.
  • Faster homepage — Optimized product queries reduce first-load time.‍
  • Cart quantity buttons — +/– buttons no longer lag or revert when clicked rapidly.

Lula Hub

‍New

  • Smarter Store Status Controls — Pause a store for a specific duration (default 5 hours) with partner-level pause and resume — no more accidental overrides. New Onboarding and Paused statuses surface in your dashboard. When a store isn't Live, new orders are automatically cancelled and the store is closed on the partner's platform on your behalf.
  • Granular Upcharging for Delivery & Pickup — Set different prices for delivery vs. pickup at the item level. Prices flow cleanly to DoorDash, UberEats, GrubHub, and Lula Direct with no manual reconciliation.
  • Item Permanence — Mark an item as "permanent" so it stays in your catalog through sync cycles. Bulk action available in Store Manager.

Fixed

  • Order-item price accuracy — Rolled back a change that caused deleted items to surface incorrect prices in order history.
  • DSP auto-disable bug — Delivery partners no longer auto-disable after you toggle them back online.‍
  • Store Groups Renamed → Labels — Same functionality, clearer name for organizing stores across your company.

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