The Arlington Milne store is based on the Minimal theme from Spiffy Stores, and features photography by Jedd Cooney.
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NZ Post shipping calculator now available
We’re very pleased to announce that we’ve incorporated New Zealand Post’s domestic shipping calculator into the Spiffy Stores ecommerce software. It’s currently available to all NZ-based Spiffy Stores for calculating postage costs to your customers within New Zealand.
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.
Another New Zealand payment gateway available
With the recent expansion of Spiffy Stores into New Zealand, we’re actively looking out for new ways to add support for our New Zealand store owners… so we’re pleased to announce the addition of a new payment gateway from Flo2Cash today.
We’re obviously used to writing code to interact with a wide variety of credit card payment gateways around the world, but we have to admit that adding the support for the Flo2Cash Web2Pay web service had to be one of the fastest turnaround times that we’ve ever experienced. The whole process from start to end took just over 24 hours, and included some very helpful support from the Flo2Cash people!
In coming weeks, we’re expecting to be adding some other features specfically for New Zealand, so watch out.
Of course, this new gateway is in addition to our NZ support for PayPal Website Payments Standard, PayPal Express, and the ability to accept credit card payments manually using your own credit card processing facilities.
If any of our New Zealand customers have any feature requests that are specific to New Zealand e-commerce stores, please let us know!
Google Shopping arrives in Australia!
Google have just announced that they are launching both the Google Merchant Center and Google Shopping in Australia!
If you’d like to use Google Shopping to reach more customers, just log in to your Spiffy Store Toolbox and head over to the “Marketing >> Product data feeds” section. You can then set up a new feed for the Google Merchant Centre by following the instructions in that section.
When you’ve done that, the next step is to log in to the Google Merchant Centre, create a new feed , and choose Australia from the drop-down menu. If you’re new to the Google Merchant Centre, we recommend reading the “Getting Started” articles in the Google Merchant Help Center.
Store owners that choose to advertise their product catalogue can also do so using AdWords’ product extensions as well. Product extensions use the product information submitted by the retailer and automatically display the extra information within ads, where relevant. To learn more about product extensions, visit the AdWords Help Center.
Happy shopping!
Easy image editing with the Feather Editor from Aviary.com
Spiffy Stores has just joined the flock!
We’re pleased to announce the addition of a new, easy to use image editor to your store toolbox. The Feather editor from Aviary.com loads into your browser and allows you to perform a wide range of editing tasks, all without leaving your Spiffy Stores Toolbox.
It couldn’t be simpler. Just click on the edit link that you’ll now see on your uploaded product images. If you want to edit an image file that has been uploaded into the uploaded files section, or an image that is part of a theme, then click on the file icon for the image, and then click on the new edit link that appears above the image preview.
Once you’ve invoked the editor, it will start to load into your browser. After a few seconds you’ll see your image in the Feather toolbox. From there you can perform actions such as image resizing, cropping, colouring an other effects. You can annotate your image with text or additional graphics. In short, you can really make your product images look extra spiffy!
Enhanced product tags
Here’s a small but useful enhancement that has just been released for your Spiffy Store.
We all know how important it is to add tags to your product, as they help your customers find the right product and add extra information about your product that search engines can use to help you get a better ranking for your online store.
Well, we’ve just made it easier to add more descriptive tags to your products. From today, you can create multi-word tags which means that your tags can more accurately reflect the terms that your customers will be searching for.
When you create or edit your tags, they will now be separated by commas, which means that you can include multiple words in a single tag.
Now you can create a tag for ‘spiffy stores online store software’, rather than being restricted to the single words, ‘spiffy’, ‘stores’, ‘online’, ‘store’ and ‘software’.
Don’t forget that product tags are also used in the keyword meta tags for your site, and whilst these are going out of style, they are still very important to use.
New Australian payment gateways available
We’re pleased to announce that we’ve added payment gateways from Suncorp Bank and Bendigo Bank to our supported Australian payment gateways.
This means that you now have even more options for accepting credit card payments directly in your online store.
Our current direct payment gateways available to stores in Australia are:
- Advam
- ANZ eGate
- Bendigo Bank
- Camtech
- Commonwealth Bank CommWeb
- eWay
- NAB Transact
- NetRegistry
- PaySecure
- PaymentExpress
- SecurePay
- Suncorp Bank
These are in addition to our support for PayPal Website Payments Standard, PayPal Express, and the ability to accept credit card payments manually using your own credit card processing facilities.
Covetish.com added to your store data feeds
With an emphasis on local fashion, Covetish.com enables their members to seek what they covet like never before, searching across hundreds of fashion retail sites in a single click.
Developed for an Australian audience seeking all their favourite brands in one place and an international audience hungry for Australian fashion, content is sourced from designers, high street brands, boutique retailers and established online stores.
With over 1,000 brands to covet, members edit their style from a comprehensive catalogue of what’s available online.
For more information about the Covetish.com Merchant Program, visit the Covetish.com site.
To add a covetish.com data feed to your store, you first need to sign up for the covetish.com Merchant Program, and then create a feed in the Marketing section of your Spiffy Store.
Store of the moment: Surf Prints
The Surf Prints store was designed and built by Hive on the Gold Coast, and is a great example of the flexibility that the Spiffy Stores theme system provides. They currently have a deal running where you can get 10% off your purchase until the 1st of May. To receive this discount, just enter the coupon code SPIFFY001 in the checkout.
Extra space for everyone!
We’ve just updated our plans with a bit more space for free! Every existing store has been updated with the new limits;
- The Basic plan has changed from 100MB to 250MB
- The Business plan has changed from 500MB to 1GB
- The Enterprise plan has changed from 2GB to 5GB
Now everyone has some extra space to add some extra gorgeous images of their products to their online store… there’s no excuse for just having 1 measly little photo!