Shopping Around

Windows Automation with Watir and Ruby 1.9.1

We love automation at Spiffy Stores, so with this in mind, I thought I’d alert anyone who uses Ruby under Windows using the Ruby Installer that there are some small bugs that you should be aware of when using Watir.

First off, if you want to interact with dialog boxes, then you will run into problems using Ruby 1.8.7. There is a bug in DL under the mingw32 code that is used to build this version of ruby and this is what Watir uses. It causes a segmentation fault.

So, finding no solution to this problem, I tried to run Watir under ruby 1.9.1, and this is where the fun starts.

If you try to run a Watir script you may get a popup saying that ‘msvcrt-ruby18.dll’ can’t be found. Strange, I thought we were running 1.9.1.

It turns out the the default gem installation of win32-api comes preconfigured for Ruby 1.8, hence the popup.

The way around this problem is to install the gem manually and specify the platform as ruby and force the gem to be rebuilt when it’s installed. You’ll need the Ruby Installer DevKit installed to do this.

gem install win32-api –platform ruby

Just one of those little quirks that keep us scratching our heads.

Spiffy Stores helps with shipping – Product Export and Import

Spiffy Stores has recently added some new features to help online shop owners improve the way they calculate shipping rates during checkout.

As part of this process, we added seven new attributes to the Product Variations so this has meant that we needed to update the product export and import CSV files.

The seven new attributes are

Variant Free Shipping
Variant Tax Free
Variant No Shipping Required
Variant Ship Separately
Variant Length
Variant Width
Varriant Height

These attributes are now part of the CSV file when you export your products.

If you are currently using an import file, it’s not essential that you update it to add these new attributes if you’re not using them. Our product import code has been written to recognize even old versions of product CSV files, so you can keep using old versions until you’re ready to update them to use the new features.

You can read more about the Product Export/Import process in the Spiffy Stores Knowledge Base.

Spiffy Stores has moved!

As part of our preparations to open up Spiffy Stores to the world, we’ve changed our default web site from http://www.spiffystores.com.au/ to http://www.spiffystores.com/

Of course, all the old links still work, but now you’ll be redirected to our new home, and hopefully we’ll soon be inviting the rest of the world to try out a new spiffy ecommerce store.

How to create featured products with Spiffy Stores

I’ve added some documentation to our Knowledge Base on how to use the ‘Featured Product’ setting to highlight a product in your Spiffy Store ecommerce site.

I think it’s a great way to showcase your products using the ‘Featured’ setting and our Super Collections to build custom collections of your most important products.

You can find more information at

http://www.spiffystores.com/kb/Featured_Products

Theme Settings in Spiffy Stores Templates

After a huge development effort, I’m pleased to announce that Spiffy Stores have now announced a new feature for their theme templates…Theme Settings.

Although the Spiffy Stores Themes have always been highly configurable, this configuration necessarily required some knowledge of HTML and CSS.

Not any more.

The new Theme Settings ability means that theme designers can now create a custom settings form that allows the end-user to simply choose from basic theme configuration options such as colour scheme, custom logo configuration and design layout.

The settings are created using a simple settings configuration file which includes some industry-unique and innovative features such as colour filters which give designers the ability to create varied colour schemes from a single base colour.

More information is available in our Theme Settings Knowledge Base article.

Edit: Updated URL address

Is anybody there?

I’m so used to the Spiffy Stores features, that I kind of take some of them as granted, and forget that some of our competitors seem to ignore basic customer needs.

Take for example, the Contact Us form. Practically every ecommerce site needs one. Customers aren’t going to be very impressed if there’s no way to contact the store owners.

So with this in mind, Spiffy Stores includes a Contact Us form automatically. All you need to do is create two pages called “Contact Us” and “Contact Us Thanks”, and add the Contact Us page to a menu, and you’re done. You can add some customization and additional text and rename the pages, if you like (keeping the page handles the same).

In fact, your Spiffy Stores site is setup with this all done for you.

I can’t believe that other hosted shopping cart vendors make you sign up for an external form service just to add this simple form. I’m kind of glad that they do.

Creating multi-level menus can be such a drag

One of the neat features that we have in our hosted shopping cart, Spiffy Stores,  is the ability to create multi-level drop down menus by simply dragging and dropping menu items into the right position in a tree-structured list. There’s a simple liquid tag in the theme template which then renders the whole menu for you automatically creating a drop down menu with multiple levels and fly-out menu items.

I haven’t seen any other shopping cart or ecommerce product that comes close to this.

Read the rest of this entry »

Spiffy Stores is Live

Well, after so much time, Spiffy Stores is now live.

Check out the brand new web site at

http://www.spiffystores.com

We’re also getting a few mentions around the net. For example,

http://www.feedmyapp.com/p/a/spiffy-stores-the-easiest-way-to-create-an-online-store/16092

I’m going to start posting some blogs about all the features that make Spiffy Stores truely unique. It’s getting hard to stand out from the crowd in the ecommerce shopping cart market, but I believe that we have a bunch of features that I’ve not seen in any other shopping cart.

One of the first items on the list is that you can create multi-level drop down menus with a simple drag and drop interface without any coding.

I’ll be posting a short tutorial video illustrating this in the next day or so. Stay tuned.

Edit: Updated URL address

Is Australia Post run by Amateurs?

Ok, this is getting silly.

Australia Post provides a copy of their Postcode database, which we use to validate shipping addresses in our software.

This database is automatically refreshed on a weekly basis from the data that Australia Post provide on their web site. A couple of weeks ago, this data got corrupted as someone had inserted random blank lines into the CSV file. Not a good look. Of course the database load failed and the postcodes table was wiped out.

Fortunately, we have checks planted into the system, so we picked up the problem pretty quickly and restored a copy of the database from a backup. No big problem.

Today, we received a complaint that customers in the Northern Territory were having problems entering thier postcodes, which all start with zero.

It didn’t take long to discover that the brains trust at Australia Post central have decided to encode the normal 4 digit postcodes beginning with a zero as 3 digit entries. Thus, the postcode ’0810′ is now stored in the database as ’810′.

Now this strikes me as being a bit like amateur hour. Do these people know nothing about quality control or testing? We’re not talking about a small corner-shop operation here, but a large government organization responsible for providing a national service. Other people’s businesses actually depend upon this stuff.

So I thought, maybe I should see if there’s anywhere that I can complain about this latest problem. So off the the Australia Post web site I go and guess what????

“Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete.”

The web site is down. On a Friday evening. Just when everyone has gone home. I wonder if it will be back by Monday?

Mmmmm…..

I rest my case.

First-class morons.

Update:

Optimistically, I sent in a report on the bug using their contact form. Needless to say, I have yet to receive any communication from them. I guess their response is “in the mail”.

Further Update (29th April, 2010):

How good is this? What a class operation. Over a month now, and no sign of a reply. And of course the database is still broken.

Trying out some Social Media

Well, the new Google Buzz is out, so I decided to give it a whirl.

http://www.google.com/profiles/eastsydneyboy

I might try to use it to keep everyone up to date with what’s happening in the Spiffy Stores world.

We hit a bit of a milestone yesterday as I finally finished the last of the pages in the new interface. So now it’s just a matter of tidying up some minor bits and pieces and then we can launch the new version in a couple of weeks.