2025 is here and you’re going to see even more ways that Spiffy Stores is delivering real solutions that you need to run a successful ecommerce business.

One of our main focuses this year is Shipping – one of the most difficult things to get right in ecommerce.

To start with, let’s have a look at Local Delivery.

Delivering to your Local Community

You’re a small business, just starting out, and you might want to encourage sales in your local community. What better way to introduce yourself than by offering free or low-cost local delivery? So how is this done?

Using Checkout Rules for Local Delivery

You may not be aware of it, but Spiffy Stores has a very advanced rules-based feature that allows you to control various aspects of the checkout process. This feature is called “Checkout Rules” and is included in our Pro plan, but everyone else can add it to their existing plans for just $5.00 extra per month.

Amongst its features is the ability to control what shipping rates are made available to a customer when they checkout. You have a wide range of options available, such as being able to offer special discount shipping to your VIP customers or, in this case, offer free or low-cost local delivery to anyone who lives within a certain distance of your store location.

Getting the Distance Right

Now local delivery is not really such a unique feature – you’ll find something similar in most ecommerce platforms, but they’re all going to work much the same way by calculating the distance in a straight line.

Where Spiffy Stores stands out is that we now offer a distance calculation that calculates the distance based on the actual route needed to drive between the two points.

Here’s why this is important. If you want to cover a reasonably large area to offer local delivery, then you’re bound to run into situations where the straight-line distance is far less than the actual distance needed to drive to that location. This often happens in the fringe areas of a locality where there may not be a direct route to a particular location.

If you happen to get an order from one of these remote locations, then you’re probably going to make a loss on delivering the item to that location, and that’s something that you need to avoid if possible.

More Possibilities

Once you open up the idea of measuring the actual distance between your store location and the customer’s shipping location, some new possibilties can be considered.

For example, we’re currently looking at the idea of adding distance based shipping rates. This means that you’ll be able to create a shipping rate that is calculated using a fixed rate per kilometer using the actual driving distance between your store location and the customer.

If you think this is something that would be a benefit to your store, please let us know.

Parcel delivery for small business, but better!

Hot on the heels of our integrations with Fastway and Australia Post, we’re delighted to announce our integration with Sendle… who have just recently announced they are now Climate Neutral Certified!

Sendle is the sustainable shipper specifically designed for small business. As the first 100% carbon neutral shipping service in Australia (and now the US and Canada, too), they work hard to reduce shipping’s harm on the planet. Sendle, like us, thinks that everyone, everywhere should have the opportunity and tools to build their dream business.

Each year 1 billion parcels are sent across Australia alone. And, each one of those parcels has an impact on the environment. In addition to a heap of packaging waste, tons of CO₂ are emitted into the atmosphere with every delivery. It’s a huge problem. 

By shipping with Sendle, you’re part of the solution. Every time you send a parcel, Sendle offsets the carbon emissions by investing in environmental projects. So far, they’ve helped preserve pockets of native forests in Tasmania’s Central Highlands, helped protect the Australian Long-nosed Potoroo, and are helping restore wetlands and native forests in Australia.

For us at Spiffy Stores, efficiency is the name of the game when it comes to shipping. Relying on manual processes to fulfil orders can be a recipe for disaster when things get busy.

Using shipping tools, such as our fulfilment integrations enables you to book a courier and print shipping labels automatically as part of a streamlined workflow. By simply doing this, you could get parcels out of the door 200% faster than you could by manually entering information for each parcel.

Like our other integrations, when you ship an order, your customer is automatically notified with the tracking information, you can print out all of your labels in one batch…and you’ll also be able to check on the status of each parcel until it is successfully delivered.

The difference with Sendle though, is that you can get discounted rates with a free upgrade to Sendle Premium, providing great discounted rates… as well as the peace of mind that your deliveries are 100% carbon neutral. You can take advantage of their 250g options for small or light items, Sendle Express is guaranteed cheaper than Express post, and you buy compostable satchels from them that break down in home compost (worms love them!). Plus, they’ve got dedicated customer support available 24-hours a day, 5 days a week if you need a hand.

Learn more about how to enable our Sendle integration here, and how to use it here.

We’ve just integrated with Aramex/Fastway, to help you automate your shipping processes.

Aramex (formerly Fastway) is a popular carrier for many businesses, as they offer an affordable and reliable courier service that operates all over Australia and New Zealand.

Previously with Aramex, you would need to manually book a pickup, and manually add in all of the address details. This manual process can be quite time consuming.

We’re always on the hunt for way to save our merchants time and money, so we’ve now developed a direct integration with the Fastway/Aramex system.

If you already have an account with Fastway/Aramex, you can then easily enable this integration in your store’s admin, you can directly submit your orders to Fastway with the click of a button. Your customer is automatically notified with the tracking information, you can print out all of your labels in one batch… and you’ll also be able to check on the status of each parcel until it is successfully delivered.

Of course, this new integration will save you a lot of time, and we hope that new free time will be spent marketing your store. It’s the difference between a successful store and an er… not so successful one.

We already have merchants using the new integration, and so far the feedback seems very positive. If you’re using it and encounter any problems, just let us know by emailing us at support@spiffystores.com.au or calling us on 1300 727 334 to discuss.

To make this feature accessible to everyone, the Fastway/Aramex integration is available to all stores. It’s included in our Pro plan, and available as an add-on on all other plans in the Accounts -> Add-ons section of your store’s admin. It can be enabled in the Preferences -> Fulfilment Services section of your store’s admin.

Instructions on how to enable our Aramex/Fastway integration, and how to use it can be found in our knowledge base.

eParcel Integration

Hey! Just a quick heads-up for anyone using our Australia Post eParcel integration. They have updated their services, and you may need to update your rates in the Fulfilment Services section of your store’s Preferences.

What we can see is that the Express Post service has been given a new product ID and/or renamed. If you get an error when trying to ship, your best bet is to roll back the shipment, update the settings and try shipping the order again.

Note: This only affects stores using our fulfillment integration with eParcel. If you are just using Australia Post’s CSV file then you shouldn’t be affected.

We all remember the time we received our first order from our new online store and how we eagerly packed the parcel, wrote out a label and proudly took it down to the post office to be sent on its way.

This was the start of a new adventure, and with time and effort, it’s now grown to the point where packing all those parcels and sending them off can consume a significant part of the day. It’s not that we’re complaining about the success, but it would be really nice if it wasn’t such a chore.

This is a common story, that many new store owners experience as their businesses grow. Once the volume of your sales increases, you can start to take advantage of discount shipping rates by signing up with services such as Australia Post’s eParcel.

eParcel is used widely by many businesses, and it allows you to submit your parcel information electronically and to generate pre-printed labels and tracking information automatically.

Although there are many advantages to using eParcel, it can become a bit of a chore without some sort of direct integration between your online store orders and the eParcel system.

This is where the new Spiffy Stores Fulfilment integration shines. Once you have activated your eParcel account within the Spiffy Stores Toolbox, you can directly submit it to Australia Post with the click of a button. Your customer is automatically notified with the tracking information, and you’ll be able to check on the status of each parcel until it is successfully delivered.

Our new Fulfilment integration is going to save you so much time that you’ll have oodles of time left to invest in marketing your store. Our first users are already delighted and excited by the way this improves the way they run their businesses.

As part of a planned outage to upgrade their services, the Australia Post website (auspost.com.au) will be unavailable for approximately 26 hours from 10pm AEDT on Friday 17 October until midnight AEDT on Saturday 18 October 2014.

This outage affects many Australia Post tools including the Australia Post Postage Calculator built into Spiffy Stores.

To minimise disruption, please plan ahead accordingly. Then check the Australia Post website for updates as the timeframe for the outage may change.

Please do not contact the Australia Post help desk during the outage as they’ll restore the service as quickly as possible. Similarly, there is nothing Spiffy Stores Support can do to remedy the situation other than to provide the instructions that we have provided below…

How to plan for this outage

You will need to make sure that you have backup shipping rates during the outage. Australia Post calculations will not be available during the outage, so your customers may not be able to order at all.

1. Firstly, you will need to check whether you are affected. Go to the “Preferences -> Shipping & handling” section of your store’s Toolbox.  If you are using Australia Post, it will display there (see image below).
   
   If you’re not using the Australia Post Shipping Carrier, then you don’t need to worry about the outage.

2. If you are only using the Australia Post Shipping Agent then you will need to make sure you have set a “Default fee” for the shipping rate.  To do this, you click on the shipping rate and edit it.  Under “Default action”, choose “Use the default fee” and enter your default fee.  See example below.
3. Once you have done this, save your changes.  You will also need to make sure that you do this for any other countries that use the Australia Post shipping carrier.

ADDED @ 2:30pm…

We’ve had a few questions about what price you should set for the default fee.  As there’s no substitute for the actual shipping rate, the only think I can suggest is that you have a look at some of your orders and calculate the average shipping cost.

For example;

Average shipping cost = $800.80 ÷ 66
which comes to $12.13

You may think that averaging out your shipping is a bad approach, but if the alternative is that you miss out on some orders during the outage, it seems to be the lesser of two evils. Australia Post calculations will not be available during the outage, so your customers may not be able to order at all.

Related articles

• Minimize Shipping Costs with the Spiffy Stores Advanced Packing Algorithm
• Migrating to the new Australia Post shipping carrier
• New Shipping Rate Options for Australia Post Rate Calculator

We’re happy to announce that we’ve completed testing of the Fastway Couriers shipping module, and it’s now available in all stores based in Australia, New Zealand, Ireland or South Africa.

To activate it, go to the “Preferences -> Shipping and handling” section of your store’s Toolbox, and click on the “Add a shipping agent” button in the top right of the screen.

You’ll need to click the “Activate” button under Fastway, and then choose which services you’d like to offer to your customers. Whether or not you’re entitled to the Frequent User Rate depends on your account standing with Fastway, so you’ll most likely want to contact them to either set up an account or find out if you’re eligible.

After you’ve activated the Fastway shipping agent, you’ll the need to add a weight based shipping rate for Fastway. Further instructions on how to do this are located in our knowledge base.

Related articles

• Minimize Shipping Costs with the Spiffy Stores Advanced Packing Algorithm
• New Shipping Rate Options for Australia Post Rate Calculator
• International shipping with NZ Post now available

“How do I save money by minimizing my shipping costs?”

That’s a question we hear all too often as our store owners stuggle with the problems of shipping their goods to customers.

Setting your shipping costs is one of the most important aspects to running an online ecommerce business. If you charge too little, then you may lose money on each order and if you charge too much, you may lose sales as customers go elsewhere.

Other Shopping Cart Software Fails to Deliver

As incredible as it sounds, the popular ecommerce software packages available today are of little help, with most offering no more than simple flat-rate shipping schemes. If you find a service offering real-time carrier calculated shipping rates, such as from Australia Post or New Zealand Post, then the chances are that if your customers order more than 20kg of items, they’re out of luck as that’s the maximum weight that you can send using these services.

This means that you could lose customers or risk going out of business because you’re not making enough profit. What’s worse is that you may be losing valuable orders where your customer wants to purchase a large number of items and your shopping cart software says: “Sorry! I don’t know how to handle that many items. It’s all too complicated for me. Please take your business elsewhere.”

Large shipping companies pay $100,000s for software to help them optimize their parcel packing because it saves them money. It’s expensive because it’s a very complicated problem and requires a lot of advanced mathematics to solve.

Spiffy Stores Advanced Packing Algorithm Software Solution

At Spiffy Stores, we’ve solved the packing problem and we’ve added our advanced parcel packing algorithm to all stores at no extra cost. Every Spiffy Stores plan includes real-time carrier calculated shipping rates, and all orders are processed by our advanced packing software.  This means that the cost of shipping every package is minimized, and that means you save money!

Our Advanced Packing Algorithm software is unique to Spiffy Stores and you won’t find it anywhere else. Our range of shipping options is unmatched by any other vendor, and every one of our shipping features is freely available to every store on every plan. Other providers charge extra for basic carrier shipping apps, plugins and add-ons that we provide for free!

There’s simply no competition. Have a look at what the others offer and you’ll see the advantage in choosing to build your business with Spiffy Stores.

Related articles

• New Shipping Rate Options for Australia Post Rate Calculator
• International shipping with NZ Post now available
• International shipping with FedEx now available

When we first started Spiffy Stores, one of the first features we added was a shipping rate calculator for Australia Post. Remember, this was back in the day when live shipping rates were a bit of a novelty in ecommerce software.

So it is with great pleasure that we are now able to offer our online store owners an enhanced version of the Australia Post shipping rate calculator which supports the full range of Australia Post’s parcel shipping services.

Included in this release is support for the following new services –

• Parcel Post Satchels
• Express Post Satchels
• Express Post Platinum
• Express Post Platinum Satchel
• Registered Post International
• Pack and Track International

This new support comes from the recently announced Australia Post initiative to boost their support for the rapidly growing online shopping and delivery market. As part of this initiative, a new international tracked parcel product called “Pack and Track International” has been introduced, initially supporting parcels between Australia and the United States.

We’re pleased to be announcing this support as part of our ongoing commitment to support Australian small business and to provide them with the best tools available to help them run their online ecommerce ventures. We’re also proud to be offering this support to our Australian store owners, when other so-called “market leaders” just ignore Australian businesses and concentrate on the North American market.

We’re also introducing some exciting new technology into our Shipping Rate calculators that automatically splits up a customer’s order into multiple parcels. This is a real boon when you’ve got a mixture of heavy and bulky items to ship with your normal standard weight items, and it means you won’t have to worry any more about losing money because of incorrect shipping rate calculations.

This technology is unique to Spiffy Stores and is one of a range of advanced features that are designed to make running an online store as easy as possible.

Existing store owners can activate the new services by going to the “Shipping carriers” section of the Store Toolbox.  More information about the new services can be found in our knowledge base.

Related articles

• International shipping with NZ Post now available
• NZ Post shipping calculator now available

We’re happy to announce that our New Zealand Post shipping calculator can now calculate international shipping rates!  It’s now available to all Spiffy Stores based in New Zealand for calculating postage costs to your customers all over the world.

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 international services that you want to support and you’re done.

Existing store owners already using NZ Post for their domestic shipping should follow much the same process.  If you’re already using the New Zealand Post shipping calculator for domestic shipping, 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, and enable the extra international services.  You’ll also have to add rates for each country as well.

More information about our New Zealand shipping calculator can be found in our knowledge base.

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.

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.

To activate the Australia Post shipping carrier, go to the “Shipping & handling” section of your Store Toolbox, and click the add the “Add a shipping agent” button on the right.  You then click the “Activate” button in the Australia Post section,  choose which services from Australia Post that you want to use, and save your changes.

Then for each country that you want to ship to using Australia Post, you just add a single rate using the Australia Post rate calculator. We’ve added a few extra functions here;

• Handling days: In the checkout, the customer is currently shown an estimated delivery date e.g. “Delivery Estimate: 10th Sep, 2010”.  If you want to give yourself an extra day or two before you ship the item, adjust the handling days.  If you add 2 handling days, the text displayed in the checkout would be adjusted to read “Delivery Estimate: 12th Sep, 2010”.
• Handling fee:  You can adjust all carrier shipping rates by adding a flat rate handling fee.  If you want to charge a customer for packing up the item etc.  you add a handling fee.  This amount is added to the shipping cost in the checkout.
• Adjust your shipping rate by a percentage amount:  If you want to charge a little extra (or a little less) for your shipping to cover costs, you can adjust the calculated shipping fee by a percentage amount.  This also allows you to compensate for any errors in rates that a shipping carrier might return.
• Fall-back options:  If for any reason the shipping carrier fails, you can set a default rate or set it to ignore that carrier.

When you’ve created your Australia Post rate, your customer is then given a selection of  all the available Australia Post rates that are applicable in the checkout.

The same will apply for new shipping rate calculators that we will be adding in the future. For example, as Shawn announced yesterday, FedEx is now available and there are more shipping carriers to come in the near future.

The other important change is that “free shipping” can now be configured on a per country basis. Previously, a product that qualified for free shipping would be shipped free of charge to any of the countries that you had added in the “Regions & taxes” section of your Toolbox.  Now, you can restrict which countries are eligible for free shipping offers, as you may wish to offer this only to domestic destinations.

As a part of the release of these updates, we have enabled the free shipping option for all Australian destinations (where you’re already using free shipping).  This will have no effect in your storefront if you currently do not offer free shipping.   If you wish to enable free shipping for any other country, you should update the settings for that country in the “Shipping & handling” section of your store preferences.

More information is available in our knowledge base.

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.