Google intends for the trusted store badge to give consumers a boost of confidence when shopping online, and it comes with a $1,000 guarantee to cover the purchase… which should really help to increase sales in your online store when the program is up and running.

The way it works is when a visitor to your online store hovers their mouse over the trusted stores badge, a live “report card” type tooltip will pop up. Easy to understand grades like A+, A, B and C are awarded for quality of service features like customer service and fast or reliable shipping.

Right now it’s just a pilot program with a limited number of retailers, but all Spiffy Stores owners can apply to participate by filling out this form. There’s no guarantee that Google will accept your application… as it’s currently only in Beta, and you’ll need a great history of reliable shipping and great customer service for them to even consider your application.

Learn more by watching Google’s overview video below, or click here to watch it on YouTube.

JD Lighting are based in Browns Plains, Brisbane, but have brought their great range of lighting solutions to everyone in Australia… 24 hours, 7 days a week with their Spiffy Store.

Their online store is a full custom designed store, which was designed and built by 2plik8 Studios in Brisbane.

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Stripe is super easy to set up, and has some of the lowest fees, bringing the whole process of automating credit card payments within reach of small businesses… without the giant setup fees imposed by many banks.  Their fees are just 2.9% of the transaction plus a 30¢ transaction fee.

Stripe has no setup fees, no monthly fees, no minimum charges, no validation fees, and no card storage fees. There’s also no charge for failed payments.

What’s the catch you ask?  None except that it’s only currently available to ecommerce businesses based in the US.  We’re eagerly awaiting the release of their worldwide service though, and will let you know as soon as it’s available.

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The Soundhub online store is based on the Minimal ecommerce theme from Spiffy Stores.

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Worldpay’s Business Gateway Plus is an all in one payment gateway and Internet Merchant Account that includes advanced fraud screening and online management, giving you everything you need to start collecting payments online. With everything under one roof, it really is good value and easy to manage.

Existing store owners who have signed up with Worldpay can enable the Worldpay gateway in the “Preferences -> Checkout & payment” section of their store toolbox.  More information about payment gateways compatible with Spiffy Stores can be found in our knowledge base.

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In simple terms, a URL redirect lets you map from one web page address to another, and this is the kind of feature that you’ll find supported by most modern ecommerce and online shop builder software.

However, here at Spiffy Stores we like to provide our store owners with the best possible tools for running their online stores, so we decided to go just that little bit further to help you solve your problems without actually creating more work for you.

If you look at the URL Redirection solutions offered by other hosted e-commerce providers, you’ll quickly see that in most cases they don’t offer any form of pattern matching or wildcard support for the redirections. This means that for a large store, you may be forced to enter many thousands of redirection mappings to support the full range of possibilities. Even worse, some don’t even offer a bulk import/export feature, so you have to type in all your redirects by hand.

The Spiffy Stores URL Redirection feature not only offers you the capability of creating simple redirects, but also offers the full power of regular expressions to allow you to create complex patterns which can be used to match almost any incoming URL. Using regular expressions in your redirections can reduce thousands of redirection cases down to just a handful.

Furthermore, there’s also a bulk import/export feature that allows you to manage your redirects using a standard CSV file.

There’s more information about our new URL Redirection feature in our Knowledge Base URL Redirects article.

Quality is important when purchasing online, so rest assured they only sell excellent quality clothing. Great quality, great price and great service. What more could you ask for?

You can select this gateway in the “Checkout & Payment” section of your store’s preferences, where you’ll also find some handy setup instructions to get you up and running.

Their store is based on the Georgia Theme for Spiffy Stores, and they’ve added a super-cute custom designed logo, background and banners designed by Restored 316 Designs.

PayWay is a fully integrated merchant solution and payment gateway from Westpac, which means you only have to pay one organisation for both your merchant solution and your gateway solution to accept credit cards in your ecommerce website.

Existing Spiffy Stores store owners can set up the PayWay gateway in the “Checkout & payment” section of their store preferences. Unlike some other providers, we don’t charge a fee for an “add-on” to enable you to use PayWay…  it’s available for use with no additional charges from us!

For more information about the Payway gateway, please visit https://www.payway.com.au/core/AboutView

As with all payment gateway options, we recommend you shop around to get the best deal for your business. A full list of all of the payment gateways that can be used with Spiffy Stores is available in our knowledge base.

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So it is with great pleasure that we are now able to offer our online store owners an enhanced version of the Australia Post shipping rate calculator which supports the full range of Australia Post’s parcel shipping services.

Included in this release is support for the following new services -

• Parcel Post Satchels
• Express Post Satchels
• Express Post Platinum
• Express Post Platinum Satchel
• Registered Post International
• Pack and Track International

This new support comes from the recently announced Australia Post initiative to boost their support for the rapidly growing online shopping and delivery market. As part of this initiative, a new international tracked parcel product called “Pack and Track International” has been introduced, initially supporting parcels between Australia and the United States.

We’re pleased to be announcing this support as part of our ongoing commitment to support Australian small business and to provide them with the best tools available to help them run their online ecommerce ventures. We’re also proud to be offering this support to our Australian store owners, when other so-called “market leaders” just ignore Australian businesses and concentrate on the North American market.

We’re also introducing some exciting new technology into our Shipping Rate calculators that automatically splits up a customer’s order into multiple parcels. This is a real boon when you’ve got a mixture of heavy and bulky items to ship with your normal standard weight items, and it means you won’t have to worry any more about losing money because of incorrect shipping rate calculations.

This technology is unique to Spiffy Stores and is one of a range of advanced features that are designed to make running an online store as easy as possible.

Existing store owners can activate the new services by going to the “Shipping carriers” section of the Store Toolbox.  More information about the new services can be found in our knowledge base.

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Whether you’re ride is a Vespa or a ’49 Mercury… Whether you want to spruce up the old bomb or individualize your Derby Helmet … If you’re into cool graphics & stickin’ them up on the stuff you love.  Stickers, Decals, Posters, Postcards, Badges… Whatever your vice!  “Wildhart creates… Useable Graphic Art inspired by social rebellion, retro subcultures & the wild at heart…”.

The Wildhart Graphics Shop is based on the Showtime theme from Spiffy Stores.

To activate it, just go to the “Shipping & handling” page in your Toolbox and click on the “add a shipping agent” button to go to the “Shipping Agent Rate Calculators” page.

From here, you can add, delete and edit the shipping agent and the services that you want to support in your store. All our New Zealand customers will see a new entry on this page from today for the new NZ Post calculator. All you need to do is click on the “Activate” button, confirm the international services that you want to support and you’re done.

Existing store owners already using NZ Post for their domestic shipping should follow much the same process.  If you’re already using the New Zealand Post shipping calculator for domestic shipping, just go to the “Shipping & handling” page in your Toolbox and click on the “add a shipping agent” button to go to the “Shipping Agent Rate Calculators” page, and enable the extra international services.  You’ll also have to add rates for each country as well.

More information about our New Zealand shipping calculator can be found in our knowledge base.

One of the first online concept stores in Australia, Style Milk draws inspiration from European stores combining the very best in design for women, children and interiors… all in the one place!

Style Milk are celebrating by offering a 10% discount when you enter the code SPIFFY in the checkout.  If you want to take advantage of this offer… you’d better hurry as this offer is subject to change at any time.  Head on over to their online store or blog and check out their new Bec & Bridge or Arabella Ramsay Summer 2011 “Sunnylands” collections.

Remember… to take advantage of this offer, you need to enter the code SPIFFY in the checkout when ordering.

Unlimited colour schemes.

Easily choose one of the 6 built-in colour schemes in the Theme editor section of your toolbox… or make your own colour scheme by choosing colours for your titles, background, menus, footer, buttons… just about everything!

9 title fonts.

You have a choice of nine different fonts for your store’s titles and/or menus.  Hopefully you’ll find one that works with the look you’re trying to get for your store.  If not, we can easily add a new font to your store for a small fee.  Our technique for achieving native font display in browsers is tried and proven, and works on most modern browsers.

Upload your own logo.

Easily upload your own logo to your store.  It’s re-sized automatically for you.

Display a slideshow on your home page.

Your store home page can display a slideshow of up to 5 images.  You can choose how many to display, upload your own images, and select the transition you want the slideshow animation to display… as well has how fast you want your slideshow to run.

Social media integration.

Facebook “like” buttons and Facebook comments, Twitter “tweet” buttons, links to your Facebook and Twitter pages, link to your newsletter service provider (such as MailChimp), and even a new customer wshlist function (currently in Beta testing)…. they’re all included, and all configurable in your Theme Editor without you having to edit a line of code.

Plus more features!

You can easily edit your colour scheme, and choose the menus to display in your store with a few clicks!  There are so many options in this theme that it’s difficult to list them without going on forever.  For more information about this theme, head over to our Knowledge base and view the Seattle theme guide.

To preview the Seattle theme, head over to the theme’s demo store at http://seattle.spiffystores.com

The Love a Dog store design is based on the Georgia Theme from Spiffy Stores.

We think this makes it harder to edit and change your theme files than it needs to be, so we’ve added a bit of colour to the whole process.

Now, when you go to edit a theme’s Liquid file, you’ll see the text highlighted and colour-coded according to the syntax of the language. You’ll see HTML, CSS and Javascript as well as all the Liquid tags highlighted using different colours so that it makes it a lot easier to navigate your way around the file. In addition, strings, numbers and various other bits of punctuation are highlighted as well.

To round off this update, we’ve added line numbers on the left to make it easier to locate and refer to the code.

In technical terms, this is known as a syntax-directed editor, but we just call it easy to use.

The Arlington Milne store is based on the Minimal theme from Spiffy Stores, and features photography by Jedd Cooney.

To activate it, just go to the “Shipping & handling” page in your Toolbox and click on the “add a shipping agent” button to go to the “Shipping Agent Rate Calculators” page.

From here, you can add, delete and edit the shipping agent and the services that you want to support in your store. All our New Zealand customers will see a new entry on this page from today for the new NZ Post calculator. All you need to do is click on the “Activate” button, confirm the services that you want to support and you’re done.

Now, whenever you add a weight-based shipping rate and you switch to using a Shipping Agent rate calculator, you will now have the option of using the New Zealand Post calculator.

If your online store is in New Zealand, the best way you can currently provide postage prices for shipping your products worldwide is to use prepaid ParcelPost bags for shipping to Australia or shipping worldwide… but we’ve just been informed by NZ Post that their shipping API will be extended to incorporate international shipping in early to mid July.  Not long now!

More information about our New Zealand shipping calculator can be found in our knowledge base.