Category Archives: Announcements

Stripe payment gateway now available

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We’re really pleased to announce that Spiffy Stores now supports the Stripe payment gateway for accepting credit card payments in your online store.

Stripe is super easy to set up, and has some of the lowest fees, bringing the whole process of automating credit card payments within reach of small businesses… without the giant setup fees imposed by many banks.  Their fees are just 2.9% of the transaction plus a 30¢ transaction fee.

Stripe has no setup fees, no monthly fees, no minimum charges, no validation fees, and no card storage fees. There’s also no charge for failed payments.

What’s the catch you ask?  None except that it’s only currently available to ecommerce businesses based in the US.  We’re eagerly awaiting the release of their worldwide service though, and will let you know as soon as it’s available.

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Worldpay payment gateway now available

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We’re happy to announce that Spiffy Stores now supports the Worldpay Direct XML payment gateway, allowing store owners to seamlessly accept credit and debit card payments in their online store.

Worldpay’s Business Gateway Plus is an all in one payment gateway and Internet Merchant Account that includes advanced fraud screening and online management, giving you everything you need to start collecting payments online. With everything under one roof, it really is good value and easy to manage.

Existing store owners who have signed up with Worldpay can enable the Worldpay gateway in the “Preferences -> Checkout & payment” section of their store toolbox.  More information about payment gateways compatible with Spiffy Stores can be found in our knowledge base.

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Adding URL Redirects makes migrating your online store even easier

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A URL redirect can help your customers find your products on your new Spiffy Store site when you migrate from another software platform and your old links are still cached by the search engines. This makes the whole migration process easy and painless as you don’t run the risk of losing sales because your customers can’t find the right products.

In simple terms, a URL redirect lets you map from one web page address to another, and this is the kind of feature that you’ll find supported by most modern ecommerce and online shop builder software.

However, here at Spiffy Stores we like to provide our store owners with the best possible tools for running their online stores, so we decided to go just that little bit further to help you solve your problems without actually creating more work for you.

If you look at the URL Redirection solutions offered by other hosted e-commerce providers, you’ll quickly see that in most cases they don’t offer any form of pattern matching or wildcard support for the redirections. This means that for a large store, you may be forced to enter many thousands of redirection mappings to support the full range of possibilities. Even worse, some don’t even offer a bulk import/export feature, so you have to type in all your redirects by hand.
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New payment gateway: Quickbooks Merchant Services

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Happy Friday everyone! This is just a quick post to let you know that Spiffy Stores now supports Intuit’s Quickbooks Merchant Services payment gateway to accept credit card payments in your online store.

You can select this gateway in the “Checkout & Payment” section of your store’s preferences, where you’ll also find some handy setup instructions to get you up and running.

Westpac PayWay payment gateway now available

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Spiffy Stores is proud to announce that we now support the Westpac PayWay API service. If you already have a PayWay account or are planning on getting one, you can now use the PayWay payment gateway to seamlessly accept payments in your online store.

PayWay is a fully integrated merchant solution and payment gateway from Westpac, which means you only have to pay one organisation for both your merchant solution and your gateway solution to accept credit cards in your ecommerce website.

Existing Spiffy Stores store owners can set up the PayWay gateway in the “Checkout & payment” section of their store preferences. Unlike some other providers, we don’t charge a fee for an “add-on” to enable you to use PayWay…  it’s available for use with no additional charges from us!

For more information about the Payway gateway, please visit https://www.payway.com.au/core/AboutView

As with all payment gateway options, we recommend you shop around to get the best deal for your business. A full list of all of the payment gateways that can be used with Spiffy Stores is available in our knowledge base.

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International shipping with NZ Post now available

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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.

Syntax highlighting – now in our Liquid template editor

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Until now the Theme Editor has displayed your theme’s Liquid template files in a very boring, black text field.

We think this makes it harder to edit and change your theme files than it needs to be, so we’ve added a bit of colour to the whole process.

Now, when you go to edit a theme’s Liquid file, you’ll see the text highlighted and colour-coded according to the syntax of the language. You’ll see HTML, CSS and Javascript as well as all the Liquid tags highlighted using different colours so that it makes it a lot easier to navigate your way around the file. In addition, strings, numbers and various other bits of punctuation are highlighted as well.

To round off this update, we’ve added line numbers on the left to make it easier to locate and refer to the code.

In technical terms, this is known as a syntax-directed editor, but we just call it easy to use.

NZ Post shipping calculator now available

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New Zealand Post Shipping Calculator now available with Spiffy StoresWe’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.

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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