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.

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.

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Spiffy Stores is Live

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

Check out the brand new web site at

http://spiffystores.com.au

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.