Store of the moment: Aromatix

aromatix-online-store

Spurred by the birth of her first baby, Aromatix owner Amanda set out on a mission to find truly pure and natural products for her family from local suppliers. She even studied beauty and skincare in her journey to find solutions that reduced exposure to potentially harmful ingredients.

Amanda has scoured the length and breadth of the country to bring you Australian natural & organic products to delight your body, mind and home. And she knows you’re going to love them as much as she does.

Many of them are based on the principles of Aromatherapy, which means they are not only good for you but they smell great too!

Check out her Spiffy Store at www.aromatix.com.au

Vintage: a fully responsive theme from Spiffy Stores

We’re proud and delighted to announce we’ve given birth to a new theme for Spiffy Stores. And it’s a cracker!

Vintage-theme-devicesVintage, our most flexible theme yet, is a fully responsive design. The layout will automatically adapt to the screen size it’s viewed on, whether that’s a smart phone, a tablet or a laptop. In fact, it will always look its best on any screen width from 320 pixels to over 2500.

The Vintage theme gives you 6 elegant styles to choose from: Cupcakes, Fresh Linen, Natural, Vintage Velvet, Mellow Yellow, plus a bonus “Not So Vintage” style.  You can re-colour each of these styles to get it looking exactly how you want too!

And we’ve included a bucket load of customisable features such as…

  • 4 levels of drop-down menus so you can make really specific product categories
  • Cool 5-image homepage slideshow, with 3 different transitions, captions and links, so you can tailor each one to a different message
  • 24 funky heading typefaces and unlimited colour schemes so you can style it just the way you like it
  • Customisable product pages with custom product fields, dynamic image zoom and related product up-sells
  • Display featured collections on your home page with support for collection images (new feature!).
  • Featured collection pages with support for collection images (new feature!) so you can show off your different product categories on one page.
  • Social media integration to grow your audience on your Facebook, Google +, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Flickr, YouTube and LinkedIn pages
  • Newsletter integration with MailChimp, Campaign Monitor or Mad Mimi so you can sign up visitors to your email list through our simple form.
  • Built-in icons for payment methods like PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, AMEX, and Bank Deposit.
  • Matching checkout styles with your logo and colours.

Sound good? Why not take a look around this baby in the Vintage theme demo store we’re building. While you’re there, try clicking and dragging the bottom right corner of your browser window in and out. You’ll see the seamless and dynamic resize in action!

If you want to apply the Vintage theme to your store, just navigate to the “Design & Assets > Theme gallery” section of your Toolbox and update your templates with one click. Don’t forget to save your current theme by downloading it first so you can restore it later if you’d prefer to use it instead.

Instructions on how to make changes to the Vintage theme to get it to suit you perfectly, along with previews of the different built-in styles and fonts can be found in the Vintage theme guide in our Knowledge Base.

4 new payment gateways supported by Spiffy Stores

ecommerce payment gatewayDon’t say we don’t spoil you!

We’ve connected up 4 extra payment gateways to give you even more choices for processing credit card payments.

You can now add the following gateways to your online store. Yay!

Pin Payments – Australia’s first all-in-one online payment system. You don’t even need a merchant account to make use of their solution. You’re up and running right away.

Merchant Warrior – An Australian–based payment gateway that caters for all sizes of business from SME to the big end of town.

SwipeHQ Checkout – New Zealand-based SwipeHQ payment gateway also allows you to send invoices with credit card payment links, create ‘buy now’ buttons and run MOTO transactions.

… and already supported, but now available in Australia…

Braintree – An all-in-one platform from the US that provides a merchant account, payment gateway, recurring billing and credit card storage in the one spot.

You can select these providers, and many others, in your store Toolbox, under “Preferences > Checkout & Payment”.

More information about payment gateways compatible with Spiffy Stores can be found in our knowledge base.

How to start a business blog and bring more traffic to your store

start-a-business-blogA blog is an important part of any business’s online marketing toolkit. If your posts are frequent, interesting and well-written, they’ll help you build a relationship with your visitors and attract new traffic to your site. What’s not to like about that!

Lucky for you, every Spiffy Store comes with a blog section already installed and ready for action. All you need to do is start using it. This article will show you how to get cracking with confidence.

But, before you begin to write, you’ll need to do some prep…

Decide who’s going to help you – blogging takes up a big chunk of time. Rope in as many helpers as you can to help you research and write.

Know your audience – visualize your reader as a real person just like you or me; you’ll want to be talking to them when you write.

Mix up your content – blog posts generally fall into three categories:

  • Useful content: educational and informative pieces like “how to” articles, news and advice that present you as a trustworthy business. Most of your blog posts will fall into this category.
  • Entertaining content: funny videos & stories that build emotional connections with your readers by revealing your brand’s human qualities.
  • Promotional/sales content: news about a new product, sales event or service should be kept to a minimum. Your blog is not a sales channel and you’ll lose return visitors if you spruik your wares too much here.

Gather ideas for your posts – finding something interesting to write about on a regular basis can be the most difficult bit. Believe me, I know! The following list should get your creative juices flowing:

  • Relate to a topical or trending news item
  • Write a post for each of your most frequent customer service question
  • Write about an interesting fact or new data relating to your industr
  • Share company news such as an award, or an important mileston
  • Take readers on a look behind the scene
  • Illustrate different uses for your product
  • Write ‘best & worst’ posts – how, and how not, to do something
  • Review a new product or service you’ve see
  • Write a top 10 list
  • Give away some tips

Create a content calendar – this is the best way to avoid getting distracted or overwhelmed. With your blog topics in mind, plan out a calendar for your blog posting and keep to it. I’d recommend scheduling at least one blog per week.

Still with me? OK, now you can start writing!

My ten tips for writing a good blog:

  1. Be clear about your objectives when you begin. What do you want the post to do – inspire, promote or inform?
  2. Optimise your blog for search with keywords in the title, content and tags
  3. Create a strong, powerful headline to draw the reader in
  4. Make the post lively, interesting and useful
  5. Write like you’re talking to another person and call them “you”
  6. Write in short paragraphs so it’s easier to read
  7. Use sub headings to lead your readers through the content
  8. Aim for around 500 words in length
  9. Always add an image to support the theme
  10. Try making a video or audio podcast sometimes instead of a written piece

Promote your post – don’t forget to announce your new post on your social media channels. It’s a great way to encourage web traffic, sharing and linking.

Rinse and repeat! Once you start blogging, keep it up. The more blog posts you publish, the more web pages search engines can display so your regular efforts will start to bring new, qualified traffic.

Finally, keep an eye on your website analytics for which posts get the most traffic, links and shares. Use these insights to help you create further popular posts.