Posted by Joris on February 21, 2012 at 8:43 am No Comments
Did you ever think about picking the right colors for your store? If you did, you might know that the colors red/orange, black and royal blue (Burger King anyone) attract impulse shoppers and tend to show up a lot at outlet malls.
Warm exciting colors like red make you feel hungry and energetic. Lighter blue on the other hand makes you feel secure and trustworthy about a brand or store. That’s why so many banks have – you guessed it – blue logo’s and branding. Not that our banks can be trusted as much as they could be in the older days, but then again, a red logo wouldn’t help much.
Our friends at KISSmetrics have made an interesting infographic about how colors can affect purchases.
Not only do colors affect what kind of customers you’ll be attracting. The use of power words can also evoke certain emotions. For example: the infographic mentions that 52% of consumers are more likely to enter a store if there is a sale sign in the window. Definitely worth giving a shot in your online store as well.
Posted by Joris on February 12, 2012 at 11:31 am No Comments
Hey there friends. In our interview series we’d like to showcase interesting stores and store owners on the SolidShops platform, as well as share e-commerce tips from people who are in the online store business every day.
This week, we’ve had the chance to talk to Jill, who runs Lady Rose, an online store selling hand made jewelry with a straight-up ’50s feel to it. Read on to see what Jill’s tips are for running a successful online store.
Hi Jill, can you tell our readers who you are and how your started your online store?
Sure! I’m Jill and I’m a teacher. I teach Dutch to my students in school and I love my job, but I was looking for a way to be creative outside of school and do my own thing during my evenings and weekends. That’s how I got the idea of opening my own little jewelry business for people that are looking for creative but really affordable jewels and accessories.
How did you come up with the name Lady Rose for your business?
In my collection I use a lot of roses. Together with a friend who coined the term “Lady Rose”, I got excited about using that name for my business. There’s a funny side-story to it though. “Lady Rose” appears to be a music band in Asia, which has led a lot of fans to my Facebook page commenting on my jewels.
Of course, that was not really helping my business so here’s a little tip for people in the same situation as me: you can limit your Facebook page visibility to people from certain countries. It’s not that I didn’t like the high number of fans on my Facebook page, it’s just that they weren’t exactly looking for jewels 
.
Your store is pretty successful to say the least. Do you mind sharing your secret with our readers?
I think it’s important to renew your collection on a regular basis. That’s definitely one of the things that make people get excited about visiting the shop regularly. Almost every day there’s something new to discover. That combined with prices that are affordable to anyone makes that people shop on a regular basis with us.
Besides that, I combine an online store and Facebook store with offline activities like home shopping nights. I think that’s another way to be there for your clients. Don’t just start an online store, but make sure you connect with them on a personal offline level. I certainly enjoy being amongst my clients. You guys would probably call that online/offline combination cross channeling.
One of the dreams I have is opening up my own little boutique store in my own house where people could come and pickup their orders, as well as browse through my collections.
Oh and of course, don’t skimp on hiring a good web designer for creating a design that’s truly custom made. Pascalculator designed my store and I’m absolutely happy with the result so I’d definitely recommend him.
What do you like most about SolidShops?
For me that’s definitely the ease of use of the SolidShops application. I’m not exactly a computer expert and I like how easy it is to manage my store with SolidShops. That and your amazing support make it a winner for me.
Great! Now tell us what’s the one thing you want us to improve?
Well, now that you’re asking. I’d love to have an automated way to inform my clients that their orders have been shipped. That’s something I’m still doing manually right now.
I’ll make sure to pass it on. Thanks for the tip and good luck with your business!
Posted by Joris on February 7, 2012 at 11:33 am No Comments
It’s great to see that small businesses are moving faster than ever before. A lot of large companies are having trouble keeping up with the boutique online stores and small businesses that are communicating with their fans through Facebook and Twitter in an authentic way.
Lady Rose, a Belgian jewelry store launched on SolidShops recently, understands what it takes to build an online presence. Not only did they optimize their store for any screen resolution by adopting a responsive web design approach, they also launched a Facebook store on our platform to reach out to the 2000 fans on their Facebook page.
That way, their Facebook fans don’t have to leave their natural cosy Facebook habitat to browse and buy new products.
Keep your eyes open for more responsive stores and Facebook commerce. We think a lot of businesses will catch up soon with this trend.
Posted by Joris on January 31, 2012 at 1:26 pm No Comments
Coffee Or has been a SolidShops client for some time now. Earlier this month they opened up a new espresso bar in Brussels and now they’ve just updated their online store. Check it out and if you’re in Brussels or Ghent one day, make sure to visit their cosy esspresso bar which is packed almost every day.
Website: http://orcoffee.be/
Posted by Joris on January 29, 2012 at 8:28 pm No Comments
Sometimes it can be nice to show related products on a product page, so that your visitors can more easily browse your store. To do so, we’ll be using product tags to match products to each other. To start, add a couple of products to your store and don’t forget to fill in the “tags” field with tags that match the products, like “coolstuff”. I’m just making up a tag here, use anything that’s logical for your own store and products.
In your “product” template, load up the current product as follows:
{% set current_product = product.get() %}
{{ current_product.name }}
Next, we will get a list of products, but only those that match the tags that have been entered in our currently loaded product. Here’s the snippet you can use to do just that:
{% set related_products = product.getList({"tag":current_product.tags}) %}
{% for p in related_products %}
{{ p.name }}
{% endfor %}
There you have it. Related products in just a few lines of template code.
If you’d like to see more of these little code snippets, let us now in the comments below. Enjoy!
Posted by Joris on January 29, 2012 at 6:32 pm No Comments
In this first update of 2012, we have made a couple of improvements for you. First of all, our template language is now more consistent by following a specific coding convention. This will make it easier for all of you who are using the language to build flexible designs for your clients by providing a consistent way to code up themes.
We’ve decided to make small adjustments to the syntax of some of the variables and methods used in the template language. These changes will apply to our API later down the road as well, so that you will always have one clear way of coding things on SolidShops.
The following is a list of changes that have been made. Of course we’ve also updated our documentation, as well as all store templates, email templates and invoice templates where necessary.
Changes to the template language
- old: stripwhitespace / new: strip_whitespace
- old: striptags / new: strip_tags
- old: charlimit / new: char_limit
- old: random / new: random_number
- old: orderby / new: order
- old: shopname / new: shop_name
- old: shopurl / new: shop_url
- old: assetsurl / new: assets_url
- old: productscount / new: products_count
- old: firsturl / new: first_url
- old: previousurl / new: previous_url
- old: lasturl / new: last_url
- old: currenturl / new: current_url
- old: nexturl / new: next_url
- old: taxpercentage / new: tax_percentage
- old: taxsetting / new: tax_setting
- old: trackstock / new: track_stock
- old: alwaysavailable / new: always_available
- old: parentid / new: parent_id
- old: paymenttext / new: payment_text
- old: productid / new: product_id
- old: taxpercentage / new: tax_percentage
- old: firstname / new: first_name
- old: lastname / new: last_name
- old: postalcode / new: postal_code
- old: countrycode / new: country_code
- old: datemodified / new: date_modified
- old: trackstock / new: track_stock
- old: thumb / new: thumbnail
In short, the most important change here is that we are consistently using underscores in our variables and filters whenever a new word starts.
Additional image formats
When you upload a product image, we now generate three different versions of that image:
- .thumbnail (this is the cropped thumbnail with a height of 200 pixels and a width of 200 pixels
- .full (the original image, compressed and optimized for faster loading, recommended in most cases)
- .original (the original image, uncompressed in full quality)
Other updates and improvements
The following improvements have also been made to the SolidShops application.
- CSV export of orders now includes all details like name, address (thanks David)
- linking Facebook stores can now be done without navigating away from your store backend
- you can now sort products by stock in your store backend
- theme name is added to the browser tab’s title for easier editing (thanks Pascal)
- new payment method: “pick up in store without charging shipping costs” (thanks Jill)
- you can now show “related products” in your store based on product tags (thanks Peter)
- sometimes, thumbnails would be 199 pixels high instead of 200 pixels. This has been fixed (thanks Samir)
Posted by Joris on December 31, 2011 at 1:30 pm No Comments
We want to wish everyone a happy New Year. Thanks for building stores with SolidShops, thanks for your trust, your feedback and for recommending SolidShops to your friends the past year.
You can expect more great features from us in 2012 so keep your feedback coming! Be safe and we hope to build a lot of great stores with you together in the coming year.
We’re off to see the fireworks right outside of the office. See you all in 2012!
Picture © by Andhi
Posted by Joris on December 30, 2011 at 7:33 pm 1 Comment
Version 1.4 of the SolidShops application brings a number of improvements to your stores. Here’s what’s new.
Managing products with different combinations or options just got easier
Do you have products that come in different styles or variations such as color, size, fabric, … ?
Then you probably want an easy way to keep track of your stock and pricing for those variants.
Let’s say you are selling T-Shirts in different sizes and colors. That new fancy shirt you’ve got in store comes in the following options:
- color green / size XL: 2 in stock, costs $ 11.99
- color red / size XL: 2 in stock, costs $ 11.99
- color green / size small: 2 in stock, costs $ 9.99
- color red / size small : 3 in stock, costs $ 9.99
You can now easily track these stock and pricing combinations as follows (documentation is right here if you need it)
SolidShops JavaScript framework for better product templates
Let’s take the T-shirt example we discussed above. When a product has multiple product options, you’ll probably want to show them in different select boxes to your users. That’s great, but you’ll also want to print out the correct price for your user. The problem is you can only do that once a user has selected the options he or she wants.
That’s where our Javascript library come in. We’ve created a simple Javascript library that you can use to update pricing and stock info live on your product pages, whenever a users selects an option. The advantage of doing this client-side with Javascript, is that there is no need to submit a form or refresh a page in order to update the price and stock info.
You can even hook in your own functions by using a custom callback, in case you want to e.g. use jQuery or another library to throw in some effects when showing price or stock info to your user.
Documentation for the Solid Javascript library can be found right here. New stores are automatically configured with the new Javascript library. Existing templates don’t need to be updated, unless you want to make use of this new functionality. In that case, simple go over the documentation and get in touch if there would be any problems. We’d love to help out wherever necessary.
Oh, before I forget: your product pages will still work without Javascript as well. If a user blocks or does not have Javascript, he or she will see the following fully working alternative (right side of the screen shot):
Other improvements include:
- google sitemaps are again automatically generated (thanks David)
- you can now use a contact form in any of your theme templates
- we added a json filter so that you can more easily implement AJAX functionality
- the SolidShops application is now responsive and ready for use on tablets or other smaller screens
It’s been an exciting year for us and I’m sure it was equally exciting for many of the web designers and store owners that are relying on SolidShops. I’d like to take this chance to thank every single one of you for your continuous support.
Thanks for making e-commerce better, together with us, one shop at a time. Let’s do even better next year!
Posted by Joris on December 18, 2011 at 4:39 pm No Comments
Saturday morning, 11 a.m; we’ve arranged a little interview with Tim, lead singer of postrock band Musth at Kaffee Ine, a fine espresso bar in the city of Mechelen. Tim is a rocker at night, but a SolidShops store owner by day. Let’s ask him some questions at this early hour, which is without doubt unbearably early for him.
Hi Tim! Would you mind telling us where the name of your band ‘MUSTH’ actually comes from?
Musth is a periodic condition in bull elephants, characterized by highly aggressive behavior, accompanied by a large rise in reproductive hormones – testosterone levels in an elephant in musth can be as much as 60 times greater than in the same elephant at other times. Off course, we’re not elephants nor are we selling them. Musth is the name of our postrock/sludge/metal band. The vibe of the music can be compared to the state of the elephants, being really calm with outbursts of anger and emotion.
How does SolidShops help you to grow Musth?
Well, since we’re a band, we carry merchandise such as t-shirts, cd’s etc. Most of the time you can buy our merch at a show, but since we’re not (yet) playing all over the world, it’s hard for some people to buy our merch. And that’s where SolidShops comes in as an extremely handy tool that is accessible to anyone anywhere in the world.
What do you like most about SolidShops?
I like the fact that everyone can design the shop however they want to. You can give it the layout you always wanted for your shop! Also the facebook app and the iPhone app are amazing!
What would you like us to change or improve?
For now, I can’t think of anything, I remember having a few remarks when we were designing the shop, but you guys are so fast in handling those, that every issue is solved extremely fast!
Your are also running a SolidShops store on Facebook. What made you decide to do that?
Since we have quite some people liking us on facebook, it’s handy to also be able to show them our merchandise through that forum… and it’s extremely easy to add!
Anything else you’d like to add?
I’d love to say that I really enjoy working with you guys, because like I said: whenever there is an issue anywhere, you guys pick it up asap and deal with it asap, which is great! So big up for that! And off course, keep it up and I wish you all the best for the future! Hope to see all of you on a Musth show!
Cool! Thanks a lot for the interview. Let’s have another coffee and we’ll definitely see you again at one of your next shows!
Tim by day
Tim at night
Photography © wannabes.be
Musth Live at AB club Brussels
Posted by Dries on December 10, 2011 at 9:40 am 2 Comments
When doing support for SolidShops, we often receive interesting feedback from our users. Today, I had the chance to have a short conversation via email with the very friendly Jessa B who was looking for a solution to power her fabrics store. When I asked her about what she didn’t like about her current e-commerce solution (we won’t name names), she sent us the following feedback:
It’s such a heavy piece of software that upgrades and simple customizations become big nightmares that have to be outsourced even though I have a pretty good handle on CSS and HTML. It’s also not as speedy and responsive as I’d like it to be — particularly in the backend/admin side. And because I’m on the Community version, some basic functions — like good control on shipping costs, use of gift certificates and a search function that actually works to help customers find products — seem to be lacking without paying for 3rd party extensions that may or may not ‘break’ or be compatible with my already existing site. — Jessa B
The feeling I had after reading that mail was: wow, she really hits the nail on the head. I’ll never claim that SolidShops is the perfect solution for every single business in the world, far from it, but this email exactly describes why we started building SolidShops in the first place. We think that most e-commerce software is too complex and limitative, especially for web designers.
The takeaway point here is to always ask your clients what they don’t like about their current solution. Ask why they prefer your solution instead of going with a much more well-known application. You probably think you know why clients prefer your software – you’ve built it after all – but until a client tells you the exact reason why, you’re just guessing and hoping you’re right.
This time, Jessa hit the nail on the head and confirmed our beliefs but sometimes user feedback will give you insights into the strenghts of your application that you might not even have thought about. Your clients won’t lie, don’t be a fool by not listening to them. If you know what frustrates them, you can focus on creating a real solution for them.
Thanks for sharing your opinion with us, Jessa.
