SolidShops Hosted Ecommerce Platform - Blog

Deployment Day: Version 1.4.4 is now live

Joris — Sun, 20 May 2012 18:14:08 +0000

SolidShops v1.4.4 improves the way you can handle taxes on your orders and enables linking multiple domain names to your store. Read on for a number of practical use cases.

Taxes: private individuals vs. companies

We’ve received feedback from a number of store owners that wanted a way to charge different taxes depending on wether a customer is a private individual versus a company. Here’s how you can accomplish just that.

When you navigate to your “settings : taxes” page you will see that there are now two separate columns where you can enter different tax percentages for either private individuals and companies.

We will differentiate between those two customer types by checking if a customer has entered a company/VAT ID on the checkout page or not.

Simply put: if a customer enters a VAT/Company ID on the checkout page, we will charge the tax percentage in the column that says “Taxes Companies”. If a customer leaves the VAT/Company ID field empty, we will charge the tax percentage from the column that says “Taxes Individuals”.

Linking multiple domain names to your store

When you link a custom domain name to your SolidShops store, you need to set the CNAME’s of your DNS records. That’s easy enough to do, but some DNS registrars don’t allow you to redirect e.g. www.yourstore.com to http://yourstore.com and the other way around.

To solve this problem for a number of customers, we’ve added the ability to link up multiple domain names to your store. This way you can set both the CNAME “yourstore.com” and “www.yourstore.com” to point to your SolidShops account. Just set those two domains in your settings and we’ll do the rest.

Another use case is moving from one domain to another. Add your new and primary domain name as the first domain and then add your old domain name as your secondary domain. That way, visits to both domain names will continue to work, but we’ll permanently redirect all requests from your old domain name to the new one. Search engines will pick up that redirect and will update your domain name in the search results.

That’s it for this release folks. Let us know what you need in order to build better stores for your clients and we’ll make sure to update SolidShops accordingly. Thanks again for all the feedback, it’s making SolidShops better, one release at a time.

Use custom fields for better SEO control

Joris — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 14:49:42 +0000

By using custom fields, there’s nothing you can’t do with your products in SolidShops. In the short tutorial I’ll walk you through how you can add in your own fields to be used for SEO purposes.

SolidShops does a great job for SEO out of the box by e.g. reading in your product description automatically, but if you want greater control over this process, you can do so easily by adding some custom fields to your products.

Let’s get started by creating a new field group called “SEO”. You can pick any name, just don’t use spaces in the group name.

Click the “Add a field group” button to create your first field group and give it the name “SEO Fields”.

Once we have this group, we can start adding fields, by clicking on the “Add/Edit fields” link next to the field group you just created.

To keep things simple, we will add one field that we can use to enter a specific product description to be used in our SEO meta tags. Name the field “seo_description” and give it the label “SEO Description”.

The “Field Name” is a unique technical name or ID if you will that we will use later in our templates to read out the value a user has typed into this field. The “Field Label” is what a user will see when editing product information.

Make sure to set the Field Type to “Text Area”. We want to be able to enter multiple lines of text for our product description meta tag.

We’re done configuring our custom fields. Now let’s add or edit a product. When you do, you will notice we now have the option to select a Custom Fields group.

Pick the group named “SEO Fields” you created earlier and you will see that the custom fields associated with that field group get loaded up in your products screen.

Now just add in the SEO Description you want and save your product like you would normally.

Now open your template named “product” and we’ll add in this data in the section of your document. We want to use the custom SEO Description field you just added.

What the code sample below does, is check if there are any custom fields linked to this product. If there are, we will loop over all of them, printing our the seo_description field when we see it.

{% if product.custom_fields.SEO|length > 0 %}
{% for field_group,arr_field_group in product.custom_fields %}
    {% for field_name, arr_field in arr_field_group %}
        {% if field_name == "seo_description" %}
        
        {% endif %}
    {% endfor %}
{% endfor %}
{% endif %}

In your store, this will now generate the following meta tag, completely under your own control:

If you prefer to just quickly load one of your custom fields, you can do so as well:

{{product.custom_fields.SEO.seo_description.value }}

This example focuses on creating extra fields for SEO purposes, but of course, any other scenario is possible. Use custom fields to allow your clients to enter any type of data for the products they are creating.

Let us know in the comments what you are using custom fields for, we’d love to know!

Deployment Day: Version 1.4.3 Is Now Live

Joris — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 14:49:18 +0000

SolidShops keeps improving, thanks to the feedback of our committed users. Thanks you for that!

We’ve incorporated the most requested new feature in this version: custom product fields. With custom product fields, the possibilities of managing products in your store have practically become limitless.

Here are some real life use cases for custom fields, that our users have submitted to us:

Example 1: Adding a marketing quote and Author field to books

One of our users is using custom fields to add fields to the books he’s selling. He wanted the possibility to add author to the book.

On top of that, he wanted the possibility to add a marketing quote to each book, to promote its sales.

Here is our documentation on how to implement custom fields.

Example: Adding extra fields for more SEO control

The SolidShops application is doing a great job for optimizing your stores for optimal rankings in search engines, out of the box. But if you want more control to e.g. enter your own product description to be used for SEO, you can.

We’ve written a short tutorial here on how to implement custom fields for extra SEO control.

Other fixes and improvements

added discount coupon information to order confirmation emails
added discount coupon information to default invoice template
added discount coupon information to mobile order view
support for Norwegian and other non-standard character sets in email templates
support for Norwegian and other non-standard character sets in PDF invoice templates
we now load less orders by default in the mobile app for better performance
added feedback when removing a payment method from your settings
added documentation for in-store pickups or “pay on delivery”
added support for Norwegian Krone (NOK) currency
added the ability to send invoice PDF links to your clients
clicking on a product image now open the edit mode for that product
fixed a bug where coupon dates would not be set to the right day
new template filter: explode
new template filter: trim

We hope you like this update. Especially the possibility to hook in your own custom fields into products has been requested a lot over the past few months.

We’re now focusing on the next release, which will include a fix for setting VAT/Sales tax based on whether a client is a company or an individual. Stay tuned for more information and thanks for your ongoing support!

Support special characters in your PDF invoices with UTF-8

Joris — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 10:06:26 +0000

When you are using the SolidShops PDF invoices feature to automate the generation of your invoices in any style you want, you can run into a problem when your clients have non standard characters in their names.

Using characters such as æ ø å og Æ Ø Å can generate some weird looking stuff in your final invoices. Luckily, there is an easy way to solve this. Open up your PDF invoice template and make sure you add the following meta tag in the head of your template.

When generating the final invoice, we will detect the meta tag and use UTF-8 encoding in your invoice. This is tech-speak for “we will make sure that any non default characters get shown properly in your invoices”.

Thanks to our user Jon to make us aware of this problem.

What’s the best ecommerce solution for small businesses? Open source software or a hosted solution?

Joris — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 11:48:24 +0000

Finding the best ecommerce solution for building an online store isn’t always easy. You can choose between going the open source route or you can go for a fully hosted SaaS application. Both approaches have their advantages and disadvantages. In this post I’ll try to clarify the differences between both to help you decide which approach is best for your business.

Before you continue reading, you should know that we ourselves are a commercial and hosted solution. In this article I’m simply trying to demonstrate and clarify what the difference is between open source software and commercial hosted ecommerce solutions.

There is no clear winner here, it all depends on what you exact needs are. Let’s get started, shall we?

An open source solution isn’t free

Let’s get a misconception out of the way first. A big advantage is that you can download and implement open source ecommerce solutions free of charge. That means you don’t have to pay a license to download or use the software.

What that also means is that you are responsible for installing, maintaining, securing and configuring the software on your own servers. Unless you are a technical person yourself with lots of free time, setting up an open source solution will take up time.

For most people, time is a valuable thing and you will need to charge your client for the time you spend setting up an open source solution. That cost adds up.

If you are not a technical person yourself, you will need to hire a web designer or developer that can take care of this process for you. By the time you’ve got a working setup, open source isn’t as free anymore as you might thought is was.

Illustration by: http://www.flickr.com/photos/hikingartist

But how can a hosted solution be more cost effective than free?

As you know by now, open source isn’t free unless you’re doing all the work of setting up an open source solution yourself and your time isn’t worth a penny. Even then, you still have to pay for hosting, SSL security and again spend time on maintaining the software whenever an upgrade comes out.

A simple comparison

Let’s take a look at the basic tasks that one has to tackle when using an open source solution.

installing and setting up the open source solution: 1-2 hours
buying and installing an SSL certificate for one year: 1 hour (costs between 30$ and 150$ yearly)
hosting your ecommerce store: 150$ yearly (cheap estimate)
renewing the SSL certificate every year (1 hour)
updating/patching the open source software every few months (4 hours)

Of course, rates depend on where you are but it’s fair for a web developer to charge you 50$ an hour over here.

8 * 50$ + 150$ + 30$ for the SSL equals 580$ upfront costs just to get your open source solution up and running.

This is just the cost for going the open source route and I’m not exactly exaggerating prices here. Of course, this is just an estimate to show you that there are costs associated with open source solutions, unlike what many clients tend to think.

For that same money you can have a store running on SolidShops for nearly two years, without going through the hassle of managing it all yourself. Here is what using a hosted and commercial package like SolidShops would cost you:

creating your store: 5 minutes, pricing starts at 29$ a month per store
installing SSL on your checkout page: not necessary, it’s already included
hosting your ecommerce store: included in all pricing plans
renewing the SSL certificate every year: we’ll take care of that as well
updating/patching the software when a bug arises: we’ll do that for you

Sometimes, open source is better

Open source is definitely a better choice for you if you want to be able to develop your own code on top of the open source solution you are using. For example, if you are unhappy with the way your checkout process is working, it will be a lot easier to change an open source solution if you are willing to put in the hours and money to do so.

When using a hosted solution, you cannot just change the software for the simple reason that you can’t change the source code of the hosted software. That’s what the team behind the hosted solution is doing. On the other hand, that means you don’t have to worry about bugs or improvements to the software. They will be made available by the hosted solution provider.

Is a hosted solution flexible enough for me?

Again, this depends. What I can say is that SolidShops focuses on making it really easy for a web designer to build out unique themes for a store. Building themes and layouts with SolidShops is a walk in the park compared to the complex systems many open source solution offer.

Many open source solutions tend to be too big and too complex for many small to medium sized businesses. On the other hand, if your business requires that complexity, going the open source route might be a good choice for you.

Anything that can be customized in a store-front can be customized with SolidShops, from the look and feel to the PDF invoices and order emails your clients receive so we’ve got your covered there.

Conclusion: the best ecommerce solution is…

I’m afraid there isn’t one simple answer here. The best thing you can do to pick the best ecommerce solution for your business is getting honest information. If you are in doubt, I’d love to give my own honest take on what solution might be best for your specific situation.

At SolidShops, we try to inform everybody that gets in touch with us about the pros and cons of picking a certain solution. In the end, the only one that can tell you what’s best for you is you. This article hopefully gets some misconceptions out of the way.

Before you go shopping, inform your self about the pros and cons and you’ll make the right choice without a doubt.

Illustration by http://www.flickr.com/photos/hikingartist

Shoot an email if you have any questions or post your comments below, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Sweet! We’re in Web Designer Magazine #44

Joris — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 18:05:47 +0000

It’s great to see that web designers are getting more and more into the e-commerce space. Facebook stores are gaining momentum now that it’s more important than ever to conduct cross channel marketing for your online business.

The Dutch edition of Web Designer Magazine decided to publish an article about building Facebook stores in their latest release. I’ve had the honor and the pleasure of writing a SolidShops tutorial for them to help web designers get a Facebook store up and running in no time.

If you haven’t done so already (and if you can read Dutch of course), head over to their website and buy the latest edition of Web Designer now!

Sharing what we’ve learned from building a web app in our Fronteers talk at Microsoft

Joris — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 17:22:45 +0000

Our friends over at Fronteers asked us to give a talk about the lessons we’ve learned in the progress of building SolidShops.com. I was more than happy to share my personal experiences with fellow web developers and designers and headed over to the Belgian Microsoft headquarters for an evening of learning, presenting and socializing afterwards.

In case you weren’t there, here’s a chance to grab the slides I used to give my talk. I sure had a blast being there and hope to meet you on one of the following web designer meetups or conferences.

Facebook Timeline changes for business pages and Facebook stores. Are you ready?

Joris — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 13:31:37 +0000

Facebook is rolling out their timeline view for all business pages on March 30th, 2012, for better or for worse. Here are the most important changes for people that are running a Facebook store or custom app on their business pages.

Upload a custom tab icon for your store

When installing the SolidShops app to run your Facebook store on your business page, you will see our default logo show up in your tab icons. Of course, you’ll want to add your own icon to your tabs.

To do so, hover over the tab icon you want to change and click on “edit settings”. That will bring up a settings screen where you can change the name of the tab and upload a custom icon. The recommended size for this icon is 111x74px.

The good news here is that you can create an icon that stands out and drives more users towards your Facebook store.

Changing the default landing page tab

Once you start using the Facebook timeline layout (and you will be forced to do so on March 30 if you haven’t already) Facebook will not allow you to change the default landing page to any of your app tabs anymore. That is of course a clear disadvantage of the new timeline layout.

Not all hope is lost however, as you can still “pin” a post on your Page’s wall. That way, you could actively promote a discount coupon and drive people towards your Facebook store.

To pin a post, simply click on the pencil icon next to any of your posts and select “Pin to Top”.

Your available canvas width is now 780 pixels

We got used to building a Facebook store theme that would fit nicely inside the 520 pixels width of a Facebook wall. We now have more space available to build out pages inside of Facebook.

Your applications can now be up to 780 pixels wide, but we recommend using a responsive approach to designing your pages as you never know what Facebook will come up with next. If they one day decide to change the width to e.g. 1024 pixels, you’ll be safe if you design with responsive web design principles in mind.

Add a nice cover photo, but don’t use it to advertise promotions

With timeline you can now add a nice 851 x 315 pixel cover photo to your pages. That’s great, but Facebook doesn’t allow you to actively promote deals with this cover photo, so watch out how you you them.

Is timeline all that bad?

There’s been a lot of commotion about the decision Facebook made to migrate all business pages to the new Timeline layout. Facebook has the power to do whatever they please and that’s a shame but I guess we’ll have to live with that if we want to do business on their platform.

On the other hand, the changes listed above do have some advantages. I believe that you can get really creative with the new large cover photo, combined with smart icons for your custom tabs/apps. That, combined with a larger canvas will definitely create opportunities for those looking to sell their products on Facebook.

We have already migrated our “Social theme” to support the Facebook timeline layout. Actually, we made it responsive so that it will work on any width. Install the new social theme from your store admin panel by going to “Design” and “Theme store”. It’s totally free to use and built upon so go nuts and show us what you made with it!

All pictures used in the example store above are made by Dharion

For even more tips and tricks to optimize the new Facebook timeline for your business, check out this comprehensive guide.

Support customizable products like text engravings, personalized messages and more

Joris — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 11:12:12 +0000

Clients love the ability to customize products and make them more personal. An example of a very successful business in this space is of course Nike, with their customizable NIKEiD program, which lets you build your own Nikes.

Not only can you choose the colors and materials used to fabric your personal pair of Nikes, you can also enter a custom text to personalize your pair of shoes to the max, which is awesome.

Now you can also use SolidShops to support customizable products in your store. Let’s take the example of Nike’s shoes above, to ask our clients for a custom text to stitch on to their shoes.

Of course you can use the same techniques mentioned in this article for a lot of other use cases, like asking what the preferred delivery time is for a specific order.

Asking users to customize a product

To start with, we need to edit our product template. Go to the design section of your store and selected the “product” template.

The tags used below can be added to any product template to ask a user for extra information. Whatever a user prefers to enter in those fields will be added to the order data in your store backend. You could also add this data automatically to your PDF invoice templates.

Let’s dive in:

We’ll ask a user to enter his or her custom text to be stitched on the shoes they’re buying, just like Nike is doing. To do so, add the following tags to your product template inside the form that will add the product to the shopping cart. This form should have your “Add to cart” button inside of it as well.

What text should we put on your shoes?

The important attribute here is name=”item_attributes[custom_text]“. You can use any other term instead of “custom_text” if you wish. The term you use to describe this extra information will be visible on the order details.

That’s it, the information entered in these text fields will now be automatically submitted to your shopping cart and to your order info if the order gets placed. When you view your order details in the backend of your store, you will see the text the user has requested to embroid on his or her shoes.

Asking to customize an order

Notice that we’ve customized a single product in the example above. This will allow you to let a user customize multiple products and add them to your shopping cart. For example, a user could buy three pairs of shoes and customize them all with a different text.

What we’re going to do now is a little different. We’ll ask a user for extra information about the complete order, not just about one single product. A good example here is asking what time a user wants us to drop of the order or to ask if we should gift wrap the order as a present or not.

To do so, edit your “cart” template and add the following field within the form tag of your shopping cart.

What's the best time to deliver this order?

Presto! You are now able to grab extra information for an order.

Conclusion

You can add up to five custom attributes for products, as well as for your complete order. The names of the attributes you are using can be anything, but keep it simple for your own sake.

I’m curious what you’ll do with these additional product and order attributes, so don’t hesitate to post some creative solutions in the comments below! We really hope that this will help you build better stores for your clients. Good luck!

Deployment Day: Version 1.4.2 is now live

Dries — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 16:12:48 +0000

With this update, we have added a feature that has been one of the most requested things so far: the ability to let your clients pass in extra data when placing an order.

This means that you can now ask your clients to enter additional data when placing an order in your shopping cart. For example, you can ask your customers to enter a text that they’d like to use for product engravings. Other examples include asking for an optimal delivery time, custom notes to add to the order, gift wrap choice or anything else you think of.

You can use up to five additional data attributes when building your shopping cart, which should be enough for most use cases.

More information on how to implement this functionality can be found in our documentation.

The following items have also been fixed and implemented:

drag and drop images in product screen did not work properly in chrome
a new filter string_replace has been implemented