Category Archives: Announcements

Sneak peek: New toolbox changes

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Just thought we should let you know that we’re making a few changes to your Toolbox tomorrow afternoon, and over the coming weeks.

The first thing you’ll notice is that we have a new, fresher colour scheme.  We’re streamlining the design to make things a lot clearer and easier to find.

The second thing you may notice is that we’ve added a new “Getting started” section to the dashboard to make it easier for new store owners to get their store up and running.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be adding in new enhancements to help make managing your store a lot easier, so stay tuned!

Migrating to the new Australia Post shipping carrier

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One of the major changes in our recent software upgrade has been in the way we deal with the Australia Post shipping rate calculator.  This article outlines the changes that you should make to your online store to take advantage of the new features.

In our old system, each of the rates was added individually as a separate shipping rate.  The store owner chose which Australia Post rates were to be added to the shipping rates for each country. So, for domestic shipping, you could add “Regular Parcel Post” or “Express Parcel Post”.

Similarly for international shipping, you had a range of options from “Air Mail”, “Sea Mail” and some courier options.

With our new improved “Shipping carriers” model, the new Australia Post shipping carrier can now be activated globally, and you can specify which rates you wish to support in your ecommerce store.

Continue reading →

International shipping with FedEx now available

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We’re pleased to announce that Spiffy Stores now includes FedEx shipping calculations in your store checkout, in addition to the current support for Australia Post.

To accommodate this, we’ve created a new section in your Store Toolbox (in the Shipping & handling section of your preferences) for “Shipping agents”.

To enable international shipping by FedEx, you just need to go to the “Shipping and handling” section in your Store Toolbox, and click on the “Add shipping agent” button.  You’ll need to have an account with FedEx to take advantage of this.

When you’ve got that sorted, customers visiting your online store from overseas will be able to select FedEx as a shipping method in the checkout, and view real-time shipping prices.

We’ve also changed the way the Australia Post shipping is handled.  We’ve now updated your current Australia Post shipping methods to use the new Australia Post carrier.  Please go to your Store Toolbox and review your shipping rates and ensure that they’re set up correctly.

New functionality you say?  It includes adding extra handling days, extra handling costs, and default fall-back pricing just in case the FedEx or AusPost sites fail…. but you’ll have to come back tomorrow to find out more, or login to your Store Toolbox to have a look.

Special deal from Camtech Payment Gateway

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Camtech recently contacted us with a great deal that is exclusive to Spiffy Stores owners.

They are offering a low annual fee, and a 40¢ transaction fee.  Comparable services have a higher annual fee and/or transaction fee.

The Camtech Payment Gateway provides an easy and cost-effective way to accept real-time online payments.  Camtech integrates with Australia’s major banks, and is now fully integrated with Spiffy Stores, allowing merchants to process real-time transactions in their checkout.

Camtech have a simple signup process, and can even help with your application for a merchant facility at the bank.  They are undoubtedly the best value payment gateway in Australia, and if you find a better advertised rate they will beat it by 10%.

For more information about Camtech, and to take advantage of the exclusive deal for Spiffy Stores owners, visit the Camtech site at http://www.camtech.com.au

To receive this special pricing offer, make sure you select the ‘Custom Pricing Plan’ option when signing up with them.

The minimal theme just got spiffier!

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New Spiffier minimal theme for Spiffy StoresWe’ve just updated the minimal theme so that now it can be re-coloured in your theme editor.  You can now easily add your logo, add images to your slideshow, change your store background colour, the colour of your navigation, your links, as well as your text, footer background, and footer text.

The best thing of all is that all of your colour changes are also reflected in your checkout, which also exactly matches the colour scheme you’ve created.

It comes with a few different colour schemes built-in as well, which you can see by clicking on the image to the right.

Email Marketing Made Easy

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Email marketing in your e-commerce storeWe’ve just released a bunch of new features, and this is the first of a series of blog entries to let you know about the changes.

As you’re probably aware, email marketing is an important part of  running an ecommerce site. At Spiffy Stores we’re always on the lookout to find new and better ways to help you run and promote your online store.

The first of these changes is a feature to help you create an email marketing mailing list. To recognize the importance of Email marketing, we’ve added a whole new section under “Marketing” in your store toolbox for the subject.

Continue reading →

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.


Continue reading →

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.