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.
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
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.
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.
A comment was made to a previous blog entry yesterday that it would be nice to be able to search for an SKU.
I’m pleased to announce that this is now possible, both from the Store and the Toolbox. We hope this is a big help to those customers who have large inventories.
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!