The last few weeks have been busy ones for us. Upgrades were carried out to allow you as a seller to manage your eBay listings from Tradelr. Using Tradelr, you are now able to

• post products to eBay
• automatically download new and recent orders from eBay
• revise listings to adjust quantity
• choose to automatically relist an in stock item when the current listing ends
• mark an order as shipped
• end active listings if you are out of stock

The above are only the initial capabilites that we have implemented and we are looking forward to implement more. Suggestions are always welcomed. 

For more details, you can browse our eBay integration help section.

Supported eBay Sites

Currently, the following eBay sites are supported

• eBay Australia
• eBay Canada
• eBay Malaysia
• eBay US
• eBay UK
• eBay Singapore

Subscription Discount

Until the end of February 2012, we are offering 50% off all plans to any business planning to use Tradelr to manage their eBay listings. If you plan to do so, contact us after you sign up.

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Here you go, more Shopify liquid themes that we have converted to Tradelr for your pleasure.

Moving to Tradelr from Shopify and wanting to use your existing Shopify theme? Contact us and we will convert your theme for you for free!

Liquid Templating

Our themes are based on the open sourced liquid templating engine. For those more technically inclined, this engine will allow you to easily create beautiful themes quickly. You can either use your own editor to design your theme or use our built-in online editor.

For those less technically inclined, we have made it easy to create your own unique look via the customisation of selected fields like colour, logo, background-image etc. without needing to know how to code.

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As an independent producer, artist or writer, selling your digital products online can be a daunting process.

There are a number of things to consider when selling digital products online. For instance, you will need to

• be able to secure your download links to prevent the buyer from sharing the download link with everyone else on the internet
• provide a secure and quick checkout process where payment can be quickly verified
• be able to embed buy links on your other sites, eg. blogs, forums, social networks to help advertise or market your goods.

There are a number of services that will allow you to sell your digital products. However, these tend to just cater for either digital or physical products.

With tradelr, we provide a facility for you to sell both physical and digital products all from one location while addressing all the above concerns.

And the great thing about tradelr is that we do not charge any commission for each sale.

What can you sell?

With tradelr, you can sell digital goods such as videos, video games, ebooks, software, art, music, fonts and other downloadable products as long as you have the rights to do so.

How to start selling digital goods with tradelr?

Selling digital products on tradelr is not that much different from selling physical products. For digital products, you will need to do the following

1. When adding a new product, click on the digital products tab
2. Select and upload your digital file that you're selling
3. Once your file has been uploaded successfully, you will be presented with the following optional fields that can be edited anytime

Also, on this same tab you will be presented with 3 links which can be embeded externally into your other sites.

What happens when a buyer checksout?

Compared to physical products, when a digital product is purchased, a shipping address will not be required. 

However, a shipping address will still be requested if the buyer's shopping cart contains both physical and digital products.

If the buyer's shopping cart contains digital products, the download links will only be emailed to the buyer once payment has been confirmed.

This is automatically done if the buyer has purchased using paypal. If the buyer had paid using a custom payment method, then you will need to review and accept their payment once you received a notification that a buyer has entered a payment.

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Yes, we have outdone ourselves again. It looks like we were still able to squeeze in one last feature before 2012.

You are now able to use our Facebook app to allow customers to directly purchase goods without leaving Facebook.

To help promote your page, add a discount coupon which will be revealed to users who like your page.

Get Started Now!

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Due to recent changes to how Google Base works, you may have noticed that you are now unable to post products to Google Base.

Google Base is now known as Google Merchant Center. With this change, they have also been stricter on who is allowed to post products using their new Google Merchant Center.

You will now need to get Google's permission to post products using their Google Merchant Center. To do this, go to

http://support.google.com/merchants/bin/request.py?hl=en&contact_type=item_noshow

Please select 'Scheduling' as "Submission method" and 'Other' as "Issue you are experiencing". "Additional information" will be: "Please enable use of  Content API for Shopping for my account.".

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Looks like we were able to squeeze in some more updates before 2011 ends.

We have added the ability to register your own domain name directly from your dashboard. To get your own domain, just follow the following simple steps

1. Check the availability of your domain name
2. Determine how long you want to own the domain for. This can be renewed.
3. Complete your payment

And you will be redirected to your new domain name within minutes. 

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SSL Encryption

Great news! Your dashboard is now encrypted via SSL to prevent eavesdropping.

This means you are save to log into your account from public places. Just make sure you don't tick "Remember me on this computer".

Product Price History

We have added the ability to retrieve a record of all prices that a product has ever been bought or sold. 

To do this, you can either click on the inventory total in your inventory listing or view a contact's profile directly.

We have replaced the store wide on/off inventory tracking feature with per product inventory tracking.

Once inventory tracking is enabled for a product, its inventory movement is tracked via 4 counters.

Transactions

Transactions have been simplified further. Interdomain transactions has been removed. Basically, there are 2 types of transactions; purchase orders and invoices.

Invoices are sent to other people to record a sales transaction, ie. products sold to a customer or services rendered. For example, everytime someone buys something from your online shop, an invoice will be created.

Purchase orders are used to record purchases from suppliers. You create a purchase order to increase the number of available stock in hand.

Themes Update

There have been some updates to existing themes. You can update to the latest version by selecting a theme from the theme gallery. 

Unfortunately, this will also overwrite any changes you have made to your current theme. Therefore, backup your current theme if necessary.

And we have added 2 more themes.

And Merry Christmas to everyone!

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If you haven't done so, you will need to sign up for a service that will allow you to manage your email subscribers. We recommend MailChimp or you could just use your own personal favourite service.  

Some of the features that we love about MailChimp are the ability to 

• find out the number of subscribers who actually opened your newsletter 
• find out who actually clicked on links in your newsletter
• find out where your subscribers are from
• style your emails while maintaining your branding

And its FREE. In this example, we will show you how to add a newsletter signup form using MailChimp.

MailChimp

1. Once you have signed up and logged in, click on Lists to create a new list. This list will hold the contact information of your subscribers.
    
   
2. Once you have created your list, click on Forms. 
   
   
   And then click on For Your Website > Signup Form Embed Code.
   
    
3. Go to the "copy/paste into your site" section, select and copy the code. This is the code that will be displaying our signup form.
4. Now, go to your Theme Editor page in your Tradelr dashboard and you can either
   1. paste the code into any existing liquid template page that you want the signup form to appear in; or
   2. Create a new snippet called newsletter
      
      
      And then insert the following liquid code into any location where you want the signup form to appear.

      {% include 'newsletter' %} 

In some themes, the ability to add newsletters is built into its settings. For example, for the Solo theme there is section for configuring your newsletter subscription.

Basically, you just need to copy and paste from MailChimp the action value of the form HTML tag.

For a limited time, sign up to MailChimp for FREE and get $30 free monkeyrewards credited into your account. Signup for your FREE MailChimp account here.

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With increasing number of shoppers using mobile devices to shop online, it is only natural that every online store owner should be able to properly facilitate these transactions.

We are therefore excited to announce support for mobile themes for tradelr. You can now customize a separate theme to be displayed on iPhone and Android devices.

The customer checkout process has also been updated appropriately.

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Tradelr uses the open-sourced liquid templating engine originally created by Shopify.

Tradelr themes are very similar to Shopify themes. However, Shopify themes will not work on tradelr without some changes.

A couple of things which are different in Tradelr includes

• we do not support vendor types
• we do not support product types
• we do not support customer templates
• our product variants are structured differently from Shopify
• we do not support compare at prices
• we support discount coupons

Theme Changes

To modify Shopify themes so that there will work correctly on Tradelr, you will need to carry out the following changes

• rename shopify_asset_url to tradelr_asset_url
• remove link_to_type
• remove product.type
• remove link_to_vendor
• remove product.vendor
• product.compare_at_price_min and product.compare_at_price_max
• rename product.compare_at_price to product.price
• rename product.featured_image to product.default_image
• remove shop.money_format and shop.money_with_currency_format. Tradelr uses currency variable for formatting money values
• rename variant.weight to product.weight
• in your contact and comment forms remove input name brackets from form tag input fields 
• remove customer templates
• add {{ login_for_store }} just before <body> to add links for customers to login

Cart Changes

The following are changes specifically for the cart.liquid template file

• add discount input field if you want to support discount codes. 
• add cart.subtotal_price (before discount), cart.discount_amount, and update usage of change cart.total_price which is not the price after discount.
• rename item.line_price to item.total_price
• remove input name brackets from cart.liquid
• rename item.variant.id to item.id

Product Collections

When determining the current product url, you no longer need to check if a collection exist to create a product within a collection url. The proper url with be automatically determined. For example,

With Shopify, you would have needed to specify

{% if collection %}/collections/{{ collection.handle }}{% endif %}/products/{{ product.handle }}

With Tradelr, all you need to specify is

{{ product.url }}

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We are excited to announce some major changes to the tradelr dashboard and online ecommerce platform.

Store Themes and Liquid Templates

All storefronts are now 100% fully customizable via the liquid templating language. With the new system, you can now create custom pages, blogs, navigation structures and customize the look and feel of your online store as much as you want.  A few themes have been included with this latest update and more will be forthcoming.

Member-only stores

With the new platform you are now able to create exclusive member-only stores for selected contacts.

Group Pricing

Are you a supplier or wholesaler? Use our group pricing feature to create different pricing for different groups of customers.

For example, visitors to your shop will see retail prices. Customers and contacts with accounts can view their respective special prices once they sign into their accounts.

This gives a simple way to track what prices have been agreed upon to different customers.

Coming Soon

Some of the major features we plan to have are allowing customers to shop without leaving Facebook and to allow customers to shop directly from their mobile devices.

Create your shop on tradelr today.

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Here we are again. Yes, we are very much alive and kicking. Just a little busy with other things at the moment. Life seems to always present new opportunities and sometimes we are just forced to reprioritize things. The bad news is that theming of the store front using liquid templates is going to be delayed again.

We did however managed to do the following

Group Pricing

We have now made the private store feature only viewable to users with existing login and passwords. Also, you can now create contact groups and allow contacts in these group to view products are different pricing from other contacts.

This feature should be useful to resellers or suppliers who wish to differentiate their pricing for different customers.

Product Autoposting

We have added two more blogs you can autopost your products to: tumblr and wordpress.

Importing Products

You can now import your existing products from ebay, etsy and facebook.You aren't able to post to ebay or etsy yet but we hope to change this in the future.

Facebook? Well yes, if you're selling on facebook and using photo albums to promote your products, tradelr will allow you to import these albums and photos as products on tradelr. Our algorithm doesn't guarantee that you will be able to import your products accurately but we're continuously improving the algorithm. If you're having problems, let us know and we'll try to make it work as painlessly as possible for you.

Other Languages

We are trying to figure out the fastest and most cost effective way of doing this at the moment. Spanish and mandarin is what we plan to offer.

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First, most importantly, a number of software issues has been resolved. Tradelr should be running more smoothly now. However, if you're using Internet Explorer, you may not like what you see.

Coupons
To help market your products, you can now create discount coupons. Discount coupons are a great marketing tool and can help draw buyers to your online store.

Once you've created your coupons, you can submit your coupons to a number of coupon sites worldwide. The following are the 5 best coupon sites you could submit your coupons to.

• www.coupons.com
• www.couponcabin.com
• www.couponmom.com
• www.retailmenot.com
• www.smartsource.com

You can also share your coupons on forums, blog or review sites that are relevant to the products you are selling.

Facebook Coupon
You can also specify a coupon to be revealed on Facebook when a user likes your page. This will help in promoting your facebook page and draw more traffic to your online store.

Store Customisations
We have improved store customisation a little by offering over 2 million colour palettes and patterns to choose from via colourlovers.com

Store Analytics
We have made it easier for you to track the performance of your online store by automatically integrating web analytics. You are now able to get a quick up to date summary of your sales and invoices as well as view stats on visitor traffic to your store.

Product Listings
To help organise your product listings, we have added product collections, featured products and product tags.

Shipping Rules
We have introduced flat rate shipping to simplify the current method of specifying shipping costs. As of this moment, shipping costs can be specified either using flat rate calculations, automated calculations via shipping rules and automated shipwire calculations.

There are few more tweaks here and there to improve your usage experience. The checkout process has also been simplified. Look for more updates from us in the coming weeks.

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New Updates and Improvements
First of all, we would like to say thank you to those who have been giving us feedbacks and suggestions. As early adopters, you are helping to shape tradelr as we continue to improve the platform. Since the last newsletter, we've changed a few things and added some new features.

Also, some of you may not be getting our emails so please check the help section in tradelr on how to fix this. As a new site, some of emails will inadvertently end up being marked as spam.

Simplified Checkout Process
One of the first thing that we did was to simplify and shorten the store checkout process. The buyer is now just presented with a sales invoice after placing an order. Purchase orders are now used only when placing orders from other linked Tradelr networks.

Shipping Cost Rules
There is now a feature for online store owners to specify shipping costs. These rules can be weight-based or price-based. You can set different costs by country or state or simply a catch all rule for international destinations. You can read more about this feature from this blog entry.

Shipwire Integration
To simplify and shorten the checkout process further we have integrated our system with Shipwire. Basically, Shipwire provides dropshipping, i.e. you send your stuff to be stored in their massive warehouses in Canada, U.S. or Europe and they handle everything else for you. With our integration, buyers can now be quoted shipping costs for their orders automatically and they will be able to automatically obtain tracking information for their orders without you having to do anything. You can read more about our integration here.

Google Product Search
You can now use your own Google Base account to auto post products under your name. Currently supported target countries for Google Product Search are the U.S., U.K. and Germany. You will need to ensure that you can ship your products to the selected country. We will convert your local currency to the appropriate currency of the selected country for you automatically. Unfortunately, try as we may, we can't translate your listings to German if you're posting to the German market.

Product Variants
Tradelr now supports product variants. Group your products by size or color. And you should check out how we handle variants with multiple inventory locations. It's really information at a glance.

Taxes & Discounts
We've also allowed you to specify sale / offer prices for products as well as Tax, GST or VAT that you would like to include in your prices.

Coming soon
We're currently looking into ways on improving storefront customisations and theming so expect further improvements in the coming month. In the meantime, keep those feedbacks and suggestions coming!

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We are excited to announce that we have successfully integrated Tradelr with Shipwire as a fulfillment service. Shipwire is a service that allows you to store your products in their massive warehouses in the U.S., Canada and Europe and handles all your shipping jobs.

By linking your Tradelr account with Shipwire, Tradelr will act as your storefront and accepts orders from buyers. Using Shipwire, you will be able to automatically obtain shipping costs to provide to buyers during the checkout process. Thus simplifying and shortening the checkout process for everyone.
 
Once you are ready to ship to the customer, the order is submitted to Shipwire for processing. Once Shipwire has shipped your order, Tradelr will automatically obtain the tracking number for the order being shipped.
 
Initial Setup
The following describes the necessary steps to complete the integration between Shipwire and Tradelr
1.       Link your Tradelr and Shipwire accounts from the “Account / Networks” menu option.
2.       Next, you will need to ensure that products you are selling on Tradelr are also listed on Shipwire. You can either export your products from Tradelr to Shipwire using the ‘Inventory / Export’ button or manually list products already on Shipwire on Tradelr. The product SKUs on Tradelr and Shipwire must match for the integration to work properly.
 
Shipping Costs
Customers to your online store are automatically presented with different shipping options and costs. Shipping costs are calculated automatically from product information provided to Shipwire and require no extra work on your part.
 
Submitting Orders
The “Ship Order” button when viewing the invoice or purchase order will enable you to submit your order to Shipwire for processing and shipping.
 
Tracking Information Updates
Once an order has been submitted to Shipwire for processing, Tradelr will automatically obtain any order tracking numbers from the selected shipping services and update the purchase order/invoice with the tracking number. Your customer will be informed when this happens.
 
Inventory Level Updates
Once you’ve linked your Tradelr account with Shipwire, inventory levels between Tradelr and Shipwire will be automatically synchronised. The various Shipwire warehouses with your products will be created on Tradelr. Any new products (identified via SKU values) from each of these locations will be automatically be updated on Tradelr. If the SKU already exists on Tradelr, inventory levels on Tradelr will be updated to reflect the current levels on Shipwire.
 
Inventory levels are pulled from Shipwire. We are not able to update inventory levels on Shipwire from Tradelr. Changes are automatically obtained from Shipwire every couple of minutes.

If you do not already have a Shipwire account, get started now and create one.

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Tradelr now allows online sellers to specify shipping costs to various destinations. This enables buyers to obtain shipping cost quotes based on the total weight or price value of their order.

How Shipping Cost Rules Work

For each country or state, you will have a list of rules with different effective values and shipping costs. You can specify ‘Others’ for the country or state, so that you do not need to have a list of rules for each location.

You can specify a few of these rules with different names to give buyers a list of shipping services they can choose from.
 
Example

Let us imagine that I have an online shop on Tradelr selling Manuka honey in Auckland. Using weight-based rules, I will structure my shipping costs as follows:

• Cost will be based on the total weight of the order.
• Free shipping in Auckland.
• Everywhere else in New Zealand will cost $10 for 0 to 5 kg and $20 for 5kg or more.
• Charge a flat rate of $100 for the rest of the world

The following table shows the rules that I would need to create for the shipping costs defined above.

Important Things To Remember

If you are going to use weight-based rules to provide shipping cost estimates, please remember to specify the weight of the products you are selling.

Need a better way?

If you are currently a Shipwire user, you will soon be able to provide automatic quotes for your customers and submit orders to Shipwire directly from tradelr. Shipwire is a company that helps you handle your product storage and shipping.

Let us know what you think.

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We're excited to announce that tradelr has moved from preview to beta phase. Some major improvements has been made to the software and we will be reviewing these changes over the next few weeks.

New Pricing Plans

We have decided to provide and keep a free plan for the time being. For existing members, there will be no change to what you're currently paying (or not paying). Over the next few weeks, we will continue to update our plans and pricing to provide the best fit for your needs.

User Permissions

We also added the ability for you to fine tune what your staff members can access on your network. This feature will be reviewed over the next few weeks.

Our Facebook app has been updated. Your organisation logo will now show up in your Facebook store. We've also added a comment box and made it easier for people to share your products and store when your profile or fan page is viewed by others.

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The last couple of weeks saw us starting our long journey at implementing offline access for tradelr. This would enable account holders to use tradelr without an internet connection. Inventory information, invoices, purchase order and contact information will be avalable even if your internet connection is unavailable. This means that you get virtually no delays when using tradelr and you get to bring tradelr anywhere with you on your device.

As busy as we were, we still managed to get in some features that our users have been waiting for.

Exporting Products

Purchase Order Generation

If your account is linked with another tradelr account holder, you can now directly select supplier products and generate a purchase order with the click of a button.

Once again, let us know what you want and we will get it done for you.

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tradelr gives you the option to use it as a private inventory manager or a public online ecommerce store.

By default, tradelr acts as a private inventory manager. What this means is that all your products are private only to you and users that you have added to your network.

To make your products public, after signing in, go to Account and check the "Enable online store" box. Unticking this box will hide your online store and make your products private to only you and your network.

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Account holders now have the ability to use their own registered domain name instead of the default xxx.tradelr.com.

What you need to do

1. To use your own domain name, you will need an existing domain name. Otherwise, you will need to register one with a third party domain registrar like GoDaddy. You can check if the domain you want to register is available by using instantdomainsearch.com.
2. You then need to create an A record for the domain name that you have registered, pointing it to 98.126.29.28. You may need help from your domain registrar to do this.
3. Verify that your domain name is pointing to tradelr by typing your domain name into your browser. You should be redirected to www.tradelr.com
4. Finally, go to Account and click on "Custom Domain Name" located on the right side panel. Enter your domain name.
5. And that's it!

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