Enabling Paypal Express Checkout in your store should help decrease the number of abandoned carts/orders that store owners experience who rely on PayPal to process transactions, as it takes the customer directly to the PayPal checkout from the shopping cart page to place their order.

We’ve been hard at work adding a little tag to everyone’s store to support the new feature, and it’s been included in all of the Spiffy Stores e-commerce themes.  If you’ve somehow missed out, and want to add the button to your store, there are instructions on how to do this in our knowledge base.

• A choice of 32 different backgrounds and the ability to upload your own background image easily
• Customisable slide shows on the home page and collection pages
• Upload your logo and it’s re-sized automatically to fit into the top banner
• Icons for sharing on Facebook, Twitter and other social media built into the product pages and blog articles
• Built-in css styling for adding in comments to blog articles using html comment box
• Support for <!–more–> tags, so your blog page can have a short introduction for each article that leads into the main article
• Icons for payment methods that your store supports
• Built-in drop-down store menus
• Easily choose which store menus to display (with built-in support for up to 3 different menus)
• Lightbox support for images in blogs and articles
• Full built-in support for related products
• Matching checkout.css file that uses your logo and custom background

The preview above shows a small range of the backgrounds available for this theme.  To preview them all, check out the demo store at http://showtime.spiffystores.com

They are offering a low annual fee, and a 40¢ transaction fee.  Comparable services have a higher annual fee and/or transaction fee.

The Camtech Payment Gateway provides an easy and cost-effective way to accept real-time online payments.  Camtech integrates with Australia’s major banks, and is now fully integrated with Spiffy Stores, allowing merchants to process real-time transactions in their checkout.

Camtech have a simple signup process, and can even help with your application for a merchant facility at the bank.  They are undoubtedly the best value payment gateway in Australia, and if you find a better advertised rate they will beat it by 10%.

For more information about Camtech, and to take advantage of the exclusive deal for Spiffy Stores owners, visit the Camtech site at http://www.camtech.com.au

To receive this special pricing offer, make sure you select the ‘Custom Pricing Plan’ option when signing up with them.

The best thing of all is that all of your colour changes are also reflected in your checkout, which also exactly matches the colour scheme you’ve created.

It comes with a few different colour schemes built-in as well, which you can see by clicking on the image to the right.

As you’re probably aware, email marketing is an important part of  running an ecommerce site. At Spiffy Stores we’re always on the lookout to find new and better ways to help you run and promote your online store.

The first of these changes is a feature to help you create an email marketing mailing list. To recognize the importance of Email marketing, we’ve added a whole new section under “Marketing” in your store toolbox for the subject.

You now have the option of enabling an additional option to ask the customer whether they would like to be added to your mailing list at checkout time.  This option takes the form of a check box and a message that appears on the second checkout page of your online store.

You can enable this option and choose whether to have the option ticked or unticked by default. You can also change the default text that appears, and replace it with your own text.

If the customer agrees to accept email marketing, this fact will be recorded in a new customer record that we’ve created for email marketing purposes. If the customer places another order in your online store at a later date and doesn’t agree to accept email marketing, then their most recent choice will be recorded as the default for that customer.

Once you have some customers who have agreed, you will see a section in the side-bar of the “Email marketing” page where you can download a CSV file of all the customers who have agreed to receive email marketing. You can use this file to import into an email mailing list manager, such as MailChimp or Campaign Monitor.

This marketing page also includes some well known Email marketing service providers, and we include links to their sites so that you can signup for an account if you’re interested.

Finally, at the bottom of the page is some information about Web Hooks, which is another of our new features.

Stay tuned for another blog entry on how to use Web Hooks to automate stuff and link to external services. We’ll also give you all the information you need to link up your Spiffy Store to MailChimp or Campaign Monitor and have new email addresses added to these services automatically.

Basically, now an encrypted token is generated and inserted into every form on the store web pages. This prevents a hacker from copying a form from the site and tricking you into executing the form from a fake site, thus giving the hacker access to your account.

Whilst it was extremely unlikely that this sort of attack would work because of the way in which the Spiffy Stores software is designed, it never hurts to improve security wherever possible.

However, it turns out to have an unintended bonus effect!

Spiffy Stores is one of the few ecommerce solutions that has a “Contact Us” form built into your store. This form is generated for you automatically and you don’t need to use a third-party online form service to get something as essential as a contact form.

Now that we have added the Cross Site Request Forgery code, we are seeing instances of spammers who have “copied” the contact forms from various sites and have built them into scripts to try to spam our store owners with fake contact form submissions. All of these attempts are now failing because they are all detected as forgeries, and this means that your inbox will contain less of the spam generated by these pests.

Reward your customers for their loyalty by giving them free shipping. We’ve added a new type of shipping rate that makes this possible for every Spiffy Stores customer.

Until now, shipping rates have been weight-based. We’ve added the capability to define rates based upon the value of the shopping cart. You can define a range of values for the value of the shopping cart and if the cart falls within that range, you can provide a fixed value for the cost of shipping. This value can be $0.00, which is how you specify free shipping.

For example, you can create a rule that provides for free shipping if the customer spends $50 or more.

If no shopping cart value range applies, then the normal weight-based rules will apply.

This new type of shipping rate complements our other promotional tools and fills in the gap between shopping cart discounts and coupon codes.

Here’s a quick summary of the various ways in which you can offer free shipping and other discounts.

You can specify that an individual product variation has free shipping by defining the variation with a zero weight. No matter what other rules or discounts are applied, this item will always have a zero shipping cost.

Shopping cart discounts provide an extremely flexible way of providing discounts and free shipping and the rules can be based on a whole range of conditions. For example, you can offer free shipping based upon cart value, the number of products purchased from specific collections and the discount can be specifically applied to selected products. These rules can also be combined to produce specific promotional offers as required.

Shopping cart discounts are only available on our Business and Enterprise accounts, so until now, there was no simple way to provide a basic free shipping offer.

Another problem with providing Free Shipping combined with other shopping cart discounts is that the value of the cart is determined before any other discounts are applied. In some cases you want to calculate the Free Shipping offer using the amount the customer actually pays, rather than the value of the products ordered before any other discounts have been applied.

In this case, using a shopping cart value based shipping rate is the perfect solution, as it uses the value of the cart after all shopping cart discounts have been applied.

Finally, for custom special offers that may be tied to some specific promotion such as a newsletter or advertising campaign, we have coupon codes. Coupon codes provide for a wide range of discounts, but do not provide for Free Shipping.

For more detailed information on our comprehensive range of promotional discounts and offers that can help you increase your sales, please refer to our Knowledge Base articles at http://www.spiffystores.com.au/kb

When payments are made using PayPal, we are given some information about the status of the customer’s PayPal account. In particular, we are told whether the customer is using a PayPal verified account or not to make the purchase.

This account status is now available from the Order History payment link whenever a payment is made.

You will normally see an item in the Order History like,

10:38am The customer successfully paid....

Received payment from gateway - Payer Status verified

Although the Spiffy Stores Themes have always been highly configurable, this configuration necessarily required some knowledge of HTML and CSS.

Not any more.

The new Theme Settings ability means that theme designers can now create a custom settings form that allows the end-user to simply choose from basic theme configuration options such as colour scheme, custom logo configuration and design layout.

The settings are created using a simple settings configuration file which includes some industry-unique and innovative features such as colour filters which give designers the ability to create varied colour schemes from a single base colour.

More developer information is available in our Theme Settings Knowledge Base article.

For users who are not interested in designing and modifying their own themes, we’ve updated all themes in the Spiffy Stores Theme Gallery (except Zesty).

If you want to take advantage of these new customization options, please reload a new copy of the theme you are currently using from the gallery. It might be worthwhile downloading a backup copy of your current theme first. Also, you may want to take note of any customizations that you’ve made to your current theme so that you can apply the same changes to the new copy of the theme.

Theme Settings opens up a whole new world for creative and interesting theme design and modification, so look forward to some future updates in this area!

During the past month, we’ve been working on adding new features here and there to improve the functionality.  One of the biggest features we’ve been working on is adding new options to customise our themes.  If you have any ideas about what we could do to improve our theme customisation, or what we could do to make it easier to set up your store… please phone us on 1300 727 334 to discuss, or you can email us at studio@spiffystores.com.au

To apply this theme to your store, just navigate to the “Theme gallery” section in your Toolbox (in the Design & assets section). You’ll see the Antiqua theme there.

If you want to try it out on your site, remember to save your current theme by downloading it first. This means that you’ll be able to restore it at a later date if you’d prefer to use your old theme.

This theme is very easy to customise and has instructions in the demo store at http://getminimal.spiffystores.com

Oh… and before anyone asks… the Antiqua theme will be ready on the 16th of April.

We couldn’t have gotten this far without the input from everyone that’s been using the software in our Beta trial over the last 2 years, so thank you to everyone!

Tomorrow we’ll have a new site online and you’ll be able to contact us through a new support area.  There are also new FAQ’s and a rather spiffy feature tour.

Our new plans are detailed in the image to the right.  The new plans don’t affect anyone that signed up before today, so there’s no need to worry.  Your current Plan has been discontinued, but you can stay on it for as long as you like.

I’m pleased to announce that this is now possible, both from the Store and the Toolbox. We hope this is a big help to those customers who have large inventories.

We’ve added a small improvement to our Theme support by defining a new header variable which can be used in the Theme.liquid file as part of the section.

Rather than hand-coding author, copyright, description and keywords meta tags, you can just code

{{ header.author }}
{{ header.copyright }}
{{ header.description }}
{{ header.keywords }}

These variables will automatically generate the appropriate meta tags for your page’s content.

The advantage of these automatically generated tags is that they structure the description information in a way that makes it easy for the search engines to extract the relevant information about your product or page and this will appear as the snippet in the search results.

For details have a look at our Knowledge Base documentation

Liquid Template Variables – header

Now inventory management might not be the most exciting topic in the world, but it’s one of the essential aspects of running your own online e-commmerce store. We’re constantly trying to do is to find innovative solutions to the problems you face as a store owner. We believe that we’ve come up with some unique enhancements to the way that we deal with inventory management that you won’t find anywhere else.

This image shows a product with a couple of variations, both under inventory management and you can see under the quantity heading how many items are available for sale. This is the level of inventory management that you will normally see.

However, this is not really the full story. Inevitably you will actually have more items sitting on your shelves than is show in the quantity field. These will be all the items that have been ordered, but not yet shipped. For example, you may be waiting for a bank deposit payment or a cheque to be cleared. So all these unshipped orders represent items from your inventory that are being held in reserve awaiting shipment.

Here you can see that the list of products now shows the items in stock and the items that need to be shipped. For the Large Dog there are 4 items available for sale, and 4 items that have been ordered but not shipped.

If we look at one of the unshipped orders, then we can see that it shows the total inventory for each item. So for this item, we have a total inventory of 8 items, representing the 4 items available for sale and the 4 unshipped items. As you can see, you now can see an accurate inventory level when you process each order. When you go to the shelf to pick up your Large Cute Dog, you should see 8 of them sitting on the shelf.

When an order can’t be completed because you haven’t received payment, then you need to cancel the order. This means that the unshipped inventory gets transferred back to the inventory quantity that is available for sale, so you don’t need to manually adjust these levels when orders fall through.

The New Hidden Inventory Option

We’ve introduced a additional option for inventory management, and you’ll see this when you go to create or edit a product variation.

When you choose to track your inventory, the options have been to either allow or deny purchases when there is no stock available.

There is now a new option, Archive, and this option says to deny purchases when out of stock, but to also archive the product.

When a product is archived, it will no longer appear in any collection, search result or in the related products list. The product still exists and you can go directly to the product page if you know what the URL address is, but for a customer browsing through your store, the product will not appear. Once the stock level is back above zero, then the product will appear normally.

This feature will be useful for products that have a limited supply, such as hand-made or unique items. Once the item has been sold, then it automatically gets transferred to archive status and your customers won’t be constantly finding out of stock items that they can’t purchase.

Our Super Collections contain an Archive attribute, so you can build a special “Archived products” collection which will contain all the archived products. This can be used as a gallery option to display products that are no longer for sale.

One word of warning. If you have multiple variations, then if any of the variations have archive status then the whole product is archived. This means that the archive option is most useful for unique products with only one variation.

These discounts allow you to provide discounts for wholesale purchases, plus a huge range of other offers such as “buy one item, get another free” type discounts.

Another great offer that you can easily set up is that you can offer free shipping on orders over a dollar amount that you specify, or free shipping on products purchased from a specific collection.

Discounts are applied on the shopping cart page of your store.   If your specified conditions have been met, then items are shown on the cart page at their discounted price.

Here’s a preview of what’s to come…

The dashboard (home screen) has new built-in statistics that show you how your store is performing at a glance. I’ve mentioned these some time back so won’t go into much detail here.

The orders overview screen has been re-designed so you can quickly see which orders need to be fulfilled, which orders have been paid and also open, close or cancel orders in bulk. You can now also download your orders using all available filters as an Excel document or a standard CSV file. This allows you to import them into most accounting programs.

The order view screen has also been re-designed, so that you can easily see what you need to do next when processing your orders. Functions that were once hidden have now been moved so that they are accessible in one or two clicks – without having to re-load the page.

The products overview screen now allows you to see a list of all of your products, their variants and their stock levels. You can selectively disable and enable products in bulk on one screen… plus you can also download and upload your products in bulk.

We’ve also added a new screen so you can add, edit & delete your email accounts and email forwards right from within your toolbox. I’ve done a little research on this, and couldn’t find another e-commerce solution that allows you to do this, so this is truly ground-breaking work!

Our goal has always been to keep things simple, and incorporating this into the software means that the is only one place you need to log in to manage all aspects of your store. Normally you would have to log in to a different control panel just to set up email accounts. We couldn’t see the sense in this, as it just makes things more confusing for people.

We’ve also added the ability to customise the design of your email templates, allowing you to present a consistent brand across the board. You can now add your logo, change the design and content… anything you want! The automated shipping confirmation emails, order confirmation emails and shipping update emails are now in the theme section of the toolbox, so everything to do with customising the design of your store is in one place.

We’ve had a lot of great feedback from you during our Beta program, and we’ve tried to take on board as many comments as we can. There are a few things that are still in the works, but I believe that this update is a major step forward, and hope to get feedback from you when we go live with the updates.

This update includes a complete re-design of the interface, with a lot of attention paid to consistency… so that once you’ve learnt how to do one thing, it’s pretty easy to work out how the rest of the interface works.

There are also a lot of additions to functionality, including the ability to manage products and orders in bulk, as well as the ability to download them.

With this new version, we can also now release the Showtime and Antiqua themes that we’ve mentioned previously. We haven’t been able to release them earlier, as they include functionality that isn’t available in the current release. There’s also a new theme… Minimal. A screenshot of the theme can be seen to the right.

We’re just working through the final testing phase, so it will probably be about two weeks. We’ll post more info here in the coming days/weeks, and send out an email to all store owners when we get closer to the date.