Author Archives: Brian

Spammers Begone

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We recently enabled a small security enhancement to the Spiffy Stores software to prevent a security attack called Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF).

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.

Make yourself Popular with Free Shipping

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Everyone loves a bargin or free stuff!

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.


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Making your Orders just a bit more Secure

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Here’s a quick update on a small security update that was added to Spiffy Stores this morning.

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....

Click on the line and it will take you to the payments detail page. On the Message line you will now see something like
Received payment from gateway - Payer Status verified

If you receive a payment from an unverified account, you may wish to exercise a little more caution in processing the order.

New Theme Customization Options

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We’re pleased to announce that we have a new feature for our theme templates… Theme Settings.

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.

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Give us some feedback!

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It’s now been just over a month since we launched Spiffy Stores to the general public.  In our first month, we’ve had an overwhelming response in the number of new signups (a fantastic start!), but haven’t heard much from anyone!  Our goal is to make Spiffy Stores really easy to use, and even faster to set up.  To do this, we need some feedback from everyone that has signed up.

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

Antiqua theme released

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We know we’ve been teasing you a little too much with the delayed launch of this theme… well the Antiqua theme is now available to all stores in your theme gallery.  Check out the theme preview site at http://antiqua.spiffystores.com

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.

minimal theme now available

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The minimal theme is a modern, clean theme that features a customisable slide show on the home page to showcase your products, and also includes a stylesheet for the checkout pages so that they match the store.

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.

New plans & more tomorrow

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We’ve got a brand new web site coming tomorrow, which heralds the commercial release of our software!

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.

Structuring Information for Search Engine Snippets

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Here’s a quick update.

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

[ruby]
{{ header.author }}
{{ header.copyright }}
{{ header.description }}
{{ header.keywords }}
[/ruby]

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