minimal theme now available

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

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

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

The Exciting World of Inventory Management

Our new software release is now out the door, so it’s time to sit back and take the opportunity to highlight some of the new features.

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.

Product Variation with Inventory Management

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More previews: shopping cart discounts

Shopping cart discountsA shopping cart discount allows you to provide discounted prices for selected items, without your customer needing to put in a coupon code in the checkout.

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.

Major version update

minimal-theme-previewYou may have noticed that things have been a little quiet here lately. That’s because we’ve been busy working on a major update to the software, which is pretty huge!

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.

5 vital SEO tips

So you have your online store but just can’t seem to get good ranking in Google’s search results. Well, if you’re a DIY search engine optimiser then what’s best way to fix this?  To most people, why sites rank well on google is a mystery,  so here are basic some tips on just what it is you need to do….
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Great review…

We had such a nice review the other day, that I thought I would share it…

“The software has a beautiful feel to it and is laid out so well.  I have tried and used quite a few DIY store builders and I must admit you have impressed me!”

Thankyou!