Limited Use Coupon Code Discounts

Coupon Code Discounts are one of the best marketing tools around for your Spiffy Store. Customers love using coupon codes to get a special deal on their next purchase.

We’ve just added some new options to our Coupon Code Discounts that we know will help you increase your sales and gain new customers.

Firstly, you can now create a coupon code that is limited in its use based on the email address of the customer. In other words, you can now create a coupon code that can be used only once for each customer. You might be having a promotional sale on a new line of products, and you want to be able to offer a 10% introductory discount to your customers when they purchase these new products.

The new limited-use coupon code allows you to do exactly this. Any customer can use the coupon code for their first purchase of these items, and get the discount, but on subsequent orders, the discount offer will no longer be available.

Our second update to the Coupon Code Discounts is similar, except that it limits the use of the coupon code discount to only new customers. This is a great way to attract new customers. You’re able to offer them a discount or free shipping on their very first purchase, which introduces them to your store, and hopefully leads to repeat purchases in the future!

These new options are now available on all plans that include the Discounts and Coupon Codes feature, and for other plans, it is included as part of the associated add-on.

For more information and a step-by-step, check out the documentation on setting up Coupon Codes in our knowledge base.

PayPal Checkout is Here!

We’re happy to announce that PayPal’s new payments platform, PayPal Checkout, is now available on all Spiffy Stores.

This new platform brings a raft of improvements, both for you, as a merchant, and for your customers.

Your customers are going to be pleased that the new PayPal Pay in 4 payments option is now available to eligible customers, allowing them to split their payment into 4 separate payments, so that they can spread out the cost of their purchases to suit their budgets. As a merchant, you’ll receive the full payment up front, with PayPal managing the remaining payments.

You’ll be also happy to know that all the confusion between PayPal Express and PayPal Website Payments Standard has gone away. Now there’s just a single payment option that the customer can choose at payment time. What’s better is that the customer doesn’t leave the checkout page to be redirected to the PayPal site for payment. The whole payment process takes place within a pop-up window on the checkout page. This will eliminate a lot of confusion for your customers, and will hopefully improve your sales as a result.

Another terrific improvement for you, as a merchant, is that abandoned orders are a thing of the past. Under the new PayPal Checkout platform, if a customer has a change of mind, and doesn’t proceed with the payment, then an order is not created. This means that you won’t see a lot of unpaid orders popping up as customers get redirected to PayPal, and then confused by the process, and abandon their purchase, leaving you with an unpaid order to deal with. Of course, if a customer does not go through with the purchase, you still have the option of following them up with a reminder email using our Abandoned Checkouts feature.

If there’s a problem with the order, and you need to process a refund, you’ll be happy to know that the refund process is now fully integrated with PayPal. If you process a refund for a PayPal Checkout order through your Spiffy Store admin interface, then that refund will also be passed through to PayPal for processing automatically.

Finally, when you ship an order, if you add a tracking number to the order, this will automatically be added to the PayPal order as well. This will greatly improve your chances of winning any dispute with the customer, as PayPal will have a record of the tracking number and will generally find in your favour as a result.

PayPal Checkout is fairly straightforward to add to your Spiffy Store. If you are currently using the older legacy PayPal integrations, then you will need to disable them first. You can then follow our instructions in our Knowledge Base for adding PayPal Checkout to your store.

https://www.spiffystores.com.au/kb/Enabling_PayPal_Checkout

Get in synch with Square Point of Sale systems

Square is a well-known and trusted solution for many small business owners who need a Point of Sale solution. Their software and hardware options make the management of physical inventory a breeze, which is why they are a popular choice.

If your business starts to grow and you want to branch out and add an ecommerce option for sales, or vice versa, then you need to look at how you’re going to manage inventory and make sure that it all stays in synchronization between what your online store has for sale, versus what you have on the shelves in your physical store.

Here’s where Spiffy Stores can help.

We know that lots of Square POS users love their systems, but it can be difficult to find an ecommerce platform that is going to share the love. That’s why we have integrated the Square Point of Sale within our platform, to make your life as easy as possible.

It’s a simple as connecting your Square POS account to your Spiffy Stores account, selecting which products to synchronize and performing an initial synchronization. Products are then synched across to Square POS with their images and information seamlessly. Everything’s built in. There are no extra 3rd-party apps to buy and install and it’s all done in real time.

Once you’re up and running, every sale from your online store will update available inventory in your in-store POS system so that you can’t ever find yourself out of stock. Similarly, a sale in your physical store updates the inventory in your online store. A product can’t be oversold, so you now have a drama-free experience fulfilling your orders.

With Spiffy Stores and Square POS, you have the best of both worlds.

Don’t forget we’ve already integrated Square payments, so you can also accept credit card payments using your Square account in your online store.

Our Square POS integration is now available to all stores. It’s included in our Pro Plan, and is available as an add-on to all stores on other plans.

Sass support upgraded for Spiffy Stores Themes

This is a quick “heads-up” for all our Spiffy Stores web designers and developers out there who are customizing and building fantastic themes for their customers.

As you already know, Spiffy Stores has always supported the use of Sass (Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets) to ease the development of stylesheets in your themes. It’s a great productivity tool and makes the whole job of building and managing your CSS styles a whole lot easier. In fact, at Spiffy Stores, we’ve been using Sass almost from day one, well over ten years ago.

Since it’s such a great productivity tool, we were a bit concerned to learn that our current implementation was being deprecated in favour of a newly developed version called Dart Sass, and that this version would be the basis of all future development going forward.

We’re happy to announce that we’ve just built a bridge to the new Dart Sass that can be used by all existing themes and any new themes without any change, ensuring our long-term commitment to the Sass language and environment.

We’re aware that another ecommerce platform has decided that supporting Sass is too difficult, and has chosen to withdraw support for Sass from their theme platform, requiring instead that all stylesheets be coded using native CSS. Booooo! As web developers ourselves, we’d be pretty unhappy about something like this, so if you know anyone who has been affected by this change, then please let them know that Spiffy Stores is fully behind Sass and it’s continued importance in the web development stack.

If you have any questions about the use of Sass, or developing themes for Spiffy Stores, please let us know at support@spiffystores.com.au.

Address Autocompletion. Now included at no extra charge.

Success as a merchant means getting a million little details right, and Spiffy Stores is continuously working on improving every single one of them for you… one step at a time.

If you’ve ever tried to ship to an invalid address, you know if you get it wrong, it costs you both the time and money to resend the order to your customer. Getting customers to complete the checkout process… let alone enter their address properly is one of the great challenges for web-based sales.

We think we’ve just made that process a little bit easier for all our Spiffy Stores merchants.

From today, we’ve included at no extra charge, an address autocompletion capability during checkout which offers customers a list of verified address suggestions based on what they’ve already entered for the address.

This feature has two great benefits;

Firstly… it makes it easier for the customer, as they don’t need to enter as much information when completing address details. Less effort for the customer means there’s a better chance that they won’t abandon their order, and go through to complete the payment for the order.

Secondly… it means that the addresses are more likely to be correct, and that means that orders are less likely to go astray and get lost because of incorrect or incomplete addressing.

How many times have you seen a customer just enter Sydney or Melbourne as their location, regardless of which suburb they may actually live in? That must be a nightmare for Australia Post and the courier companies to sort out.

So we know that address completion is a really good idea, but why is this Spiffy Stores feature even better value? Not only do you get an address autocompletion feature at no extra cost, but you get a service that is backed by the ultimate source for Australian location data.

Some competitors offer their own address autocompletion features, but you may not know that these services are generally based upon Google’s own mapping services. The problem with this is that the data provided is not always of the highest quality. For example, we checked out our own office address and to our surprise Google located us in the wrong suburb!

Spiffy Stores has been able to leverage Geoscape G-NAF, which is Australia’s authoritative geocoded address file. It is built and maintained by Geoscape Australia using authoritative government data, such as State and Federal authorities and other semi-government bodies such as Australia Post.

What this means is that you’re getting access to the highest quality data, absolutely free. It’s worth noting that this kind of service is also available from a number of 3rd party providers, but you could end up paying hundreds of dollars a month for exactly what your getting included with your Spiffy Store at no additional cost.

Go and add a product to your cart and “checkout” the newest Spiffy Stores feature!

Credit Card Surcharges can be your Secret Sauce

Getting your business online involves choosing an ecommerce platform like Spiffy Stores, but there are large number of features to consider when trying to make a choice between different platforms.

Credit Card Surcharges can be your Secret Sauce

In fact, for Australian merchants, there’s pretty much only one feature that really makes any difference!

Does your chosen platform fully support surcharges for credit cards and other payment methods?

I’ll explain why this is pretty important. Let’s say you accept payment by credit card or PayPal. For PayPal, you could be looking at having to pay up to 2.6% of the transaction as a merchant fee. Now this means that your net profit on the sale of an item is cut by this amount. If your ecommerce platform doesn’t support surcharges, then you need to increase the advertised price of the item by 2.6% to maintain your profit margin.

Now, considering that credit card surcharges are pretty well accepted as a normal cost for payment processing in Australia, there’s no real disadvantage to adding a surcharge at checkout time. This means that if you’re adding a surcharge, then you can decrease the advertised price of the item without suffering any loss in profits.

This turns out to be a secret advantage that you will have over your competitors. If all your competitors are using Shopify, then they don’t have the option of adding credit card surcharges. Shopify’s platform has been built for and is largely driven by the US market, where surcharges are often illegal. This means your competitors must increase their prices to cover the merchant fees, or suffer a loss in profits.

So for a Spiffy Stores platform merchant, the difference is clear. You can advertise the same item at a lower price than your competitor, without having to sacrifice any profit margin. As we all know, shopping on online has made it very easy to do price comparisons, so for the same item, the store that has the lowest advertised price will most likely pick up the sale.

And that’s it. By choosing Spiffy Stores your online business gets a head start on all your Shopify competitors without any loss of profits.

Spiffy Stores offers the ability to set credit card surcharge rates for individual credit card brands, and also for PayPal payments. It’s fairly likely that at some stage surcharges will be allowed for Buy Now, Pay Later schemes such as Afterpay, and we’ll be able to implement support for that almost immediately.

Spiffy Stores is an Australian-built and owned ecommerce platform that aims to fully support Australian merchants in a way that is lacking in most of the major global platforms. We’ll be adding new articles on a host of other features that can help you, as an Australian merchant, improve your sales and cut down the time and effort required to keep your store up and running. If you have any questions on how we support credit card surcharges, please contact us at support@spiffystores.com.au

Adding jQuery to Webpacker 6 under Rails 6

From time to time we post some notes about technical issues that we’ve encountered during our development work on Spiffy Stores. There are a lot of moving parts to manage, and sometimes we come across some tips or techniques that can help others to build their projects.

In this case, we’ve been looking at how to configure Webpacker 6 (currently Beta 7) under Rails 6.1, which acts as a wrapper to the latest version of Webpack 5. Now, as anyone who’s used Webpack since it was introduced as an option in Rails 5 will attest to, it’s not an easy package to get working properly.

The new versions of Webpacker and Webpack bring around some changes to the way things are configured, and unfortunately, some of the documentation is lacking, or indeed, wrong.

For our environment, we need jQuery as a starter. The trick with Webpack is to get the code loaded and assigned to the global variables, $ and jQuery. The trick with jQuery is to realize that the node modules version provides both a distributed module and also the source code which can be used to build the module with Webpack. If you just

require("jquery")

then you’ll get the pre-built module. It turns out that it’s better to build it from source instead.

If you’ve followed the migration documentation, you should have a custom.js under your webpack directory.

module.exports = {
   resolve: {
     alias: {
       jquery: 'jquery/src/jquery'
     }
   }
 }

Requiring jquery now, pulls in the source files instead, and this will build jQuery with the appropriate global references.

Another important “gotcha” with Webpacker 6 is that when you include the javascript_pack_tag in your layout, you MUST include it only once.

<%= javascript_pack_tag('application', 'common', 'customer', data: { turbolinks_track: :reload }) %>

Webpack builds a number of different file chunks for each entry point, and this means that the javascript_pack_tag will generate a number of <script> tags, one for each chunk. If you have multiple entry point files, then you must include them all on a single javascript_pack_tag and not create a separate tag for each entry point.

Unfortunately, coming from a Sprockets background, most Rails programmers will be used to creating multiple javascript_include_tags, but this is not the case for Webpacker.

If you happen to use multiple javascript_pack_tags, you’ll likely find that scripts may be loaded multiple times. In many cases, this may not be obvious, but if you see errors from @rails/ujs, then this is probably because it is being loaded multiple times by Webpack.

Expanded Payment Surcharge Options Now Available for Australian Merchants

Surcharges for payments by credit card are now fairly common in the Australian market place, and came about from an RBA review into the payments system, which recommended greater transparency for consumers.

These sort of regulations, however, do not exist overseas… especially in the US. This means that support for adding surcharge payments to orders is basically non-existent, and is not really likely to be added in the near future by US-dominated ecommerce platforms.

In case you hadn’t realised, Spiffy Stores is 100% Australia owned, so of course we’re more concerned with meeting the needs of our Australia based merchants. Today’s announcement demonstrates this point.

So we’re happy to announce that our payment surcharge options now include the ability to add a percentage surcharge to all PayPal transactions, in addition to our existing credit card based surcharge options, which allow differing surcharges based on the credit card brand.

Perhaps one of the important lessons we’ve learnt from the global pandemic is that maybe there are some things we don’t really want to get from overseas! It’s been a reminder that there are benefits in looking at local solutions for many of our needs.

Shouldn’t this also be true when you are considering what platform you choose as the basis for your own business?

I guess the bottom line is that with Spiffy Stores, you’re going to get a platform for your online business that is aligned with your needs as a business owner. The same can probably not be said for the US-based platforms that you may be considering.

Love a Bargain? Customers Love Product Bundles.

We love adding new features to Spiffy Stores, especially when they add heaps of value for our customers. Our newest addition to the family is the Product Bundle.

You might already be familiar with the concept of selling products in convenient bundles or related products. It’s great way to encourage your customers to buy a few extra items by offering them a bargain when they purchase a product bundle. Studies have shown that customers are drawn to product bundles if they see them as providing good value. Why buy the items separately when you can save money by buying them together in a bundle?

Product Bundles are such a great idea that we’re kicking ourselves for taking so long to add them to our set of core features. The Spiffy Stores core features are all included as part of our base software, and there’s no need to mess around with 3rd-party apps to get access to something that’s essential to running your business.

Product Bundles are also such a great addition to your Spiffy Store that we include them free of charge in all of our plans except for the entry-level Startup plan, where they are also available as an Add-On.

Product Bundles also have other uses. They are great for managing your inventory when you want to sell build-to-order products such as Gift Hampers. A Gift Hamper is going to be made up of lots of different products, which you may or may not sell individually. The Gift Hampers are likely to contain some products in common, but it would be crazy (and bad business) to build your hampers ahead of time, as you really don’t know how many of each type are going to be sold.

Building your Gift Hamper products using Product Bundles allows you to track the inventory levels of all of the individual products, so no matter what hamper sells the most, you’ll always know that you’re not overselling your products and ending up with disappointed customers.

Finally, Product Bundles are an easy way to offer bulk-purchase discounts for a single product. Just create a Product Bundle for the product, and then add additional variations to the bundle for the multiple quantities that you want to sell, such as a “Pack of 5” or a “Pack of 10”. Adjust the bundle quantities and prices of the packs and you’re done. Bulk-Purchase discounts done in a few simple steps.

If you’re not using Product Bundles now, then maybe it’s time to start adding them to your product line-up. If you’re not using Spiffy Stores as your ecommerce provider, then maybe it’s time to make the switch to save money, support an Australian business and get access to all our great features.

More info about Product Bundles can be found in the Product Bundles Tutorial in our Knowledge Base.

Is your Online Store Tax Compliant?

Is your ecommerce store tax compliant?

It’s the start of a new tax year, so it’s seems appropriate to revisit one of the topics that we get heaps of questions about. How do I make sure my new Spiffy Store is correctly configured for GST?

Not many people realize that overseas-based ecommerce services, like Shopify, don’t support GST and other Australian tax regulations properly. Happily, Spiffy Stores has been developed in Australia, and that means you don’t have to worry about your store being fully tax compliant.

The first set is to go to your “Preferences -> Regions & taxes” page, and for Australia, make sure the country tax rate is set to 10%. If you’re not registered for GST, then set this value to 0%.

Underneath the shipping countries on this page, you’ll see a “Taxation Rate Policies” section. For Australia, just make sure you check the boxes to include taxes in your product prices, and to charge taxes on domestic shipping rates.

Finally, on the “Preferences -> General Settings” page, go to the “Business Number” section and enter your ABN. This will ensure that your ABN appears on all orders, and ensures that you comply with the taxation legislation. Your order templates will also include the “Tax Invoice” label as required by law.

Your products will all display with the GST included price, except for any products that you have marked as Tax Free.

When an order is placed, the customer receives an order confirmation which shows the amount of GST included in the order. In addition, for orders placed from overseas, the amount of GST included in the order is automatically deducted.

And that’s it. As they say, easy peasy.