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.
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.
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
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.
A 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.
We now have a date for release! On Thursday the 25th of February, we will be updating the software to the new version. We’re very excited about this release, as it incorporates much new functionality that will save everyone time, and will make managing your store even easier!
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….
Continue reading
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!
Spiffy Stores now accept payments through the Payment Express payment gateway!
Payment Express is a Visa and MasterCard certified solution, developed by DPS, which facilitates electronic payments seamlessly from multiple access points i.e. Web, EFTPOS, Billing, IVR (Interactive Voice Response), CRM, Vending, MOTO (Mail Order / Telephone Order) and Wireless.
DPS are certified with banks in Australia, New Zealand, Pacific Islands, Singapore, South Africa, USA and United Kingdom.
Of course Payment Express does require a merchant account, but they have developed a relationship with their banking parters to streamline the application process for you. They are currently offering free setup, with a low $20 a month fee and a 40 cents per transaction charge, making them one of the most affordable payment gateways in Australia.
It’s easy to accept payments through Payment Express in your Spiffy Store. After you’ve signed up with Payment Express, you just go to the “Checkout & Payment” section of your preferences, select “Payment Express” as your payment gateway, and then enter your Payment Express login and password, and it’s all set up for you instantly!
If you haven’t noticed that the “show all” link on the Orders page is broken, you’re in the minority.
We’ve received tons of emails letting us know about it. Rest assured that we know it’s broken and it will be fixed very soon.
This little glitch is because of some new features that we’re working on bringing to this screen that should make it a lot clearer when there’s an order that needs your attention.
We’ve focused on whether action needs to be taken on an order, so rather than highlighting the fact that an order, has been paid for, we’re highlighting things like orders that are paid for and not shipped, and new orders that require a payment to be processed.
This, along with some other tweaks should resolve a few issues we’ve seen where orders are left open, items aren’t marked as shipped, and payments not marked as processed. Hopefully it will really help people that have stores with a lot of small orders and small shipments keep on top of their workflow.
Update: 24th May, 2009
This bug has now been fixed!