Google Shopping arrives in Australia!

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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

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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!

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Introducing SASS – Syntactically Awesome Spiffy Stores

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Actually, it’s really “Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets”.

For all the theme designers out there, we’ve just made your life a little bit easier. We all know that sometimes CSS stylesheets can get complicated, so anything that can help you manage that complexity is a welcome bonus.

As you may already know, when you enable the Theme Editor by creating a ‘theme.settings‘ file, you can parse your CSS files by making sure they have a suffix of ‘.css.liquid‘.

Now, as part of the CSS processing that gets initiated to deal with the Liquid tags, we’ve added a pass through the SCSS processor, which is part of the SASS CSS extensions. You can read more about these CSS extensions at http://sass-lang.com

By using the CSS extensions, you can simplify your stylesheets by using variables, conditional logic, mixins and templates, nested attributes and a whole lot more. Even better, at the end of the processing you get a compressed CSS file so you can ensure that your site loads as fast as possible. Even if you don’t use any of the CSS extensions, you still get a compressed stylesheet, so that’s got to be something to smile about!

You can read more about the Spiffy Stores Theme Customizations in our Knowledge Base.

Enhanced product tags

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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

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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

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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.

Extra space for everyone!

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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!

minimal theme – now with social media options

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We’ve just updated the minimal ecommerce  theme in your theme gallery to include some social media options.  Your visitors can now post products in your online store to Twitter, facebook, del.ic.io.us, digg, Technorati, blogger.com, StumbleUpon, and can even click a link to send a quick email to a friend.

That’s not it though…. new options have been added to customise your footer with links to your facebook page, twitter page, your blog’s RSS feed, and a link to your contact form.

To see the changes, head on over to the demo store.  If you want to add these changes to your store you’ll need to first make a backup of your existing theme, apply the new theme, and then update it with whatever customisations you’ve made in the theme editor.  If you want us to do this for you, there will be a one-off fee of $70AUD.

There will also be updates to some of our existing ecommerce themes in the coming months… so if you’re not using the minimal theme in your store, you shouldn’t miss out on the new goodies!