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09
May |
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James |
There’s a new tool at your disposal for rewarding your Shopify store’s valued customers: price-based shipping rates! These rates only become available for orders with a subtotal over a certain specified amount, so you can create all kinds of promotional incentives for the people who buy your products. You could start offering free shipping for any order over $39.99, or maybe advertise a special June-only $5 shipping offer for people spending $9 or more. You’ll find new links located on your shipping preferences screen to create price-based shipping rates for any countries you want. Enjoy! |
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25
Apr |
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Tobi |
We just enabled our new content delivery network for all Basic, Professional and Enterprise Shopify accounts. What is a CDN? A content delivery network (CDN) is a collection of web servers distributed across multiple locations around the Planet to deliver content more efficiently to users. The server selected for delivering content to a specific user is based on proximity. For example, the server with the fewest network hops or the server with the quickest response time is chosen and will service the users requests. This means that Shopify stores should come up almost instantaneously all around the globe. Quick response times have shown to increase the conversion rates in e-commerce and we are bringing this feature to all our subscribers at no additional cost. Shopify is the only e-commerce system which offers this feature. Take a peek at the ping times from different places. Wikipedia on CDN. |
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08
Apr |
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Shannon |
Good news: Shopify has a new PixelPlex! Today seems very far from the days when the Shopify team used the local Bridgehead coffee shop as their virtual office. After several months of bribing the baristas to look the other way as they took up tables for hours on end, Scott, Tobi and Daniel moved into a charming office space in late 2005. The office was conveniently located on Elgin street in Ottawa, the right price, and perfect for three people – you can see the original “moving in” pictures here. And when jaded Pixel grew, the space was even perfect for four. Then five. But when we hit nine, well, things got a little tight: A day wasn’t complete without blowing a fuse from using too much power, without pushing your chair back and knocking the person behind you over, or without having to make your phone calls in the hallway (much to our neighbours’ dismay!) We were bursting at the seams and definitely ready for a change. We’ve been searching for new office space for several months now and finally, as of yesterday, we’ve moved in! Our new digs are at 185 Rideau Street in Ottawa – right in the heart of the ByWard Market. Our new space is about four times the size of the old one, with lovely exposed stone walls, shiny polished concrete floors and best of all, plenty of room for everyone without having to trip over each other. We’re still putting on the finishing touches – such as installing cool, funky Starwalls to create a boardroom and meeting room, finishing the light fixtures, getting some new furniture in and getting everyone settled into their new roomy spots. We’ll be uploading more photos to the Flickr stream as work progresses, so keep checking. Once we’re finished, we’ll definitely be celebrating and inviting everyone – so stay tuned for the details! |
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07
Apr |
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Tobi |
Pixallent released their latest Shopify addon Synctobase. We’ve built is a little, hosted Ruby on Rails app which uses the Shopify API to sync your products with Google Base. All you need to do is signup for a basesync account and the rest is automated. We check for any changes to your Shopify inventory (add, edit or delete) on a daily basis, then inject them to Google Base. The best part is that it’s completely FREE! For those of you who haven’t seen it yet, they also built Fetch to allow Shopify users to sell digital goods and have them automatically delivered. Pixallent sure does put their early access to the Shopify API to good use :-) |
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19
Mar |
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Shannon |
Today we announced that Shopify has achieved a huge milestone: Our clients have surpassed $10M in total sales from all of our Shopify stores. This is a massive achievement, not just for the team at Jaded Pixel but also for our customers: we wouldn’t have a market if you didn’t have products to sell. And selling you are: From t-shirts to beauty products, from shoes to organizers, from funky art to vile masks, Shopify stores are selling almost anything a purchaser could ever want to buy. You’re in dozens of countries around the world, using currencies from Dollars to Pounds to ¥en, and breaking new ground in e-commerce every single day. Congratulations to everyone, and onwards and upwards to the next $10M! In honour of this achievement, I sat down with Tobias Lütke, co-founder of Jaded Pixel along with Scott Lake, to take us back over the origins of Shopify as well as some of the challenges and surprises that Shopify has come up with over its brief but brilliant history. Q: Tell me about the origins of Shopify and how it got from an idea to $10 Million. A: We didn’t set out with Shopify as you see it today in mind. We were originally building Snowdevil. We were a couple of guys who wanted to sell cool designer snowboards, not create an e-commerce application for thousands of customers. We had looked at lots of e-commerce packages, but nothing was good enough for what we wanted to do. I was kind of off programming at the time and wasn’t crazy about the idea of building something from scratch, but we had requirements that just weren’t there in existing programs. We wanted it to look cool. We wanted it to be easy to use. And if the idea took off we wanted to be able to change the store with the seasons, and we didn’t want to be tied to a product that couldn’t handle it. So I jumped back in to programming and started to build something we could use to jumpstart that business. And we ended up with something completely unexpected. We sold snowboards all that winter, but when spring came and business slowed down we realized that the shop, not the snowboards, was the real opportunity. Only when we built Snowdevil did we realize it was the basis of something good enough to allow thousands of people to run their own shops. Q: What about it made you realize you had something really good on your hands?
Q: How long did the product take to build? A: It took about 2 or 3 months to write Snowdevil, but it took about a year and a half to take Snowdevil and turn it in to Shopify. Originally I was coding in coffee shops, then after about a year we got office space which we’ve now outgrown. Q: Why did you decide to build Shopify in Ruby on Rails? A: On the day Rails was released a friend of mine linked to it, so I checked it out. I had started to build Snowdevil in PHP, but as soon as I found rails I knew it was the technology to bet the company on. It’s not something that techies usually decide in a day, but we did. At that time, Rails was as close to the proverbial silver bullet as anything else in technology I’ve ever seen. Q: What’s been the biggest surprise that’s come out of working on Shopify? A: The thing that surprises me the most is how crafty and technical our customers are, especially those on the forums. I am used to out-geeking everyone around me, and I’m constantly surprised by what people can do with Shopify. When you program a lot, you end up with x-ray vision for code – you see something and know how it was done. Once in a while, though, you can’t tell, and you look at the code and find some new innovative way to do something, and every time that happens it’s a great surprise. From a less geeky perspective, I’m also always pleasantly surprised by the quality of the Shopify stores out there. One of my favourite surprises is to find a cool store highlighted on Digg or somewhere and not realize it is a Shopify store until I actually look it up. - Tobi Lütke, interviewed by Shannon McKarney |
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21
Feb |
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Tobi |
Shopify’s latest feature allows you, in addition to receiving email notifications for new orders, also receive WebHooks. WebHooks are a way to tell Shopify to call a script on one of your own web servers and react to the event in any way you want.
Once you register a webhook url with Shopify we will issue a HTTP Post to the url specified and pass on the Order as an XML document. Don’t worry, if your server is down we will simply try again until your server confirms to us that it has successfully received the notification. To learn more about Web hooks please visit the WebHook wiki page |
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19
Feb |
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Cody |
Shopify now has support for the Australian payment gateweway SecurePay. SecurePay supports processing all the major credit card types including Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Diners Club, and JCB. SecurePay also supports merchant accounts with most Australian banks including Advance Bank, ANZ Bank, Bank of Melbourne, Bank of SA, Bank West, Commonwealth Bank, Challenge Bank, National Australia Bank, St George Bank, and Westpac Bank. Some more information from the SecurePay website:
We’re happy to add support for another payment gateway to our Australian customers. |
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05
Feb |
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Shannon |
The Shopify team is bursting with excitement. Shopify’s latest addition is finally ready for the world. We know you work hard for your clients and we’re very grateful that you consider Shopify as their e-commerce solution. Now we’d like to say “thanks” to you for bringing clients to us. (Not to mention the fact that you’ve been banging down the door looking for this for months!) So, without further ado…. The Shopify Affiliate Program is now open for business! The Shopify Affiliate System is a revenue share between you, the affiliate, and Jaded Pixel. The system allows you refer clients to Shopify and share 20% of Shopify’s revenue for as long as the store is in operation. Not bad, hey? There’s an overview of the system right here – take a look. Got questions? We’ve tried to think of everything you could possibly want to ask and have compiled an FAQ to try and answer them. If you still have questions, you can email Shannon – your friendly neighbourhood affiliate chick – at affiliates [at] jadedpixel [dot] com. We’re very excited and we want to hear from you. Let us know what you think or, if you’re ready to sign up, just head on over. See you on the flip side! Shannon and the Shopify Team |
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22
Jan |
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Cody |
We’ve managed to kick off the first 2 weeks of 2008 with some great enhancements to the Order screen in Shopify. Localized Address Display
The first enhancement to the orders screen we added is the localized display of addresses. This means that no matter where your customer lives you’ll see the address in the correct format for that country. Tracking NumbersThe second new feature is the ability to add tracking numbers to orders. The tracking number can be added while you’re marking your items as shipped. If you don’t know the tracking numbers at the time of shipment you can always add the tracking number later. The tracking number will also automatically link to the carrier’s tracking website so you can quickly look up the tracking history of a shipment.
Risk Assessment
The biggest new feature added is the addition of a risk assessment summary. Credit card providers use several mechanisms for reducing credit card fraud. The first is called the Address Verification System (AVS). AVS compares the numeric portion of the customer’s billing address and zip code to the information on file with the credit card issuer. This helps reduce a significant amount of fraud because thieves are required to also obtain the billing address information for the credit card they’ve stolen. Visa also provides some compelling information in the Merchant Guide to the Visa Address Verification Service. The second method to reduce credit card fraud is the validation of the credit card’s Card Verification Value (CVV). The CVV is 3 or 4 digit number on the back of the customer’s credit card and helps to ensure that the buyer has the card physically in their possession. The credit card companies also forbid the storage of the CVV code, so credit cards stolen online wouldn’t be useable. Shopify has been submitting the buyer’s billing address for address verification and has been requiring the CVV code during checkout for a long time now. What was lacking was the presentation of the information. The gathered data is now presented in an easy to view table that either displays a green check for success or detailed information about the failure. The last piece of the risk assessment is the IP Address check. The IP address check compares the country of the buyer’s billing address to the country the buyer placed the order from. If there is a mismatch then Shopify will issue the warning so that you can investigate the order with the buyer. The screenshot above shows a very risky order where the CVV code matched the credit card, but the AVS checks and IP address checks failed. The new Risk Assessment features are designed to help provide the Shopify store owner with all of the information required to quickly and accurately assess the validity of the orders they receive. |
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03
Dec |
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Cody |
Shopify now has support for the SkipJack payment gateway . SkipJack supports both US, and Canadian based merchants, connects to almost all banks in the US, and supports the processing of all major credit cards including VISA, MasterCard, American Express, JCB, Discover and Diner’s Club. Some more information about “SkipJack” from their homepage:
Special thanks to Bill Bereza of Atomic Object who contributed the code to to ActiveMerchant. |
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01
Nov |
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Cody |
With our recent push to expand our support for fulfillment services we’ve added support for Fulfillment by Amazon to Shopify. 
Amazon says it best with the following from the Fulfillment by Amazon homepage:
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30
Oct |
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Daniel |
Did you ever want to insert an Image on one of your blog posts or add a PDF with a feature overview to a product but you just could not figure out where to upload such files? This week we introduce some improvements to Shopify’s asset management:
New is the “Insert an image” link which you can find underneath every text area in Shopify. Clicking it opens a new dialog:
The files you upload here are independent of your theme and will stay with you even if you decide to apply a completely new theme to your store. You can get an overview of all your uploaded files under the new Assets tab.
The new Assets tab unifies the Uploaded files, the newly redesigned Theme Editor and the Theme Gallery. |
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24
Oct |
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Tobi |
Fetch is an application developed by Pixellent for bringing digital goods delivery to Shopify.
from the product page :
Once setup, fetch will automatically contact your customers with the download instructions for your digital goods. Digital items are hosted on their secure servers and are only made available for actual customers. Its fantastic to see the Shopify eco-system growing just prior to the launch of our Open API thanks to our wonderful customer base and passionate store owners. We hope that this is the first of many businesses build around Shopify, best of luck to Pixellent. |
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23
Oct |
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Cody |
Shopify now has support for the New Zealand based payment gateway SecurePayTech, thanks to a member of the Shopify community. Jasper Bryant-Greene had originally requested the gateway in the Shopify forums, but he decided to take matters into his own hands and write the code for the gateway himself. He then contributed the code to ActiveMerchant. More information about contributing payment gateways to ActiveMerchant can be found in the ActiveMerchant Guide to Contributing. Some more information about SecurePayTech from their homepage:
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19
Oct |
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Cody |
We’re very excited to expand our support for fulfillment services with our new support for Webgistix, a global leader in fulfillment solutions. From the Webgistix homepage:
Fulfillment services are excellent because they allow you focus on your core business instead of worrying about warehousing, packaging, and shipping, as we have previously mentioned. |
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A: We realized we’d already done a lot of the hard work. In going through the process of building an online store, there were so many pieces of the process that were cumbersome and seemed unnecessary. For example, Snowdevil needed some basic 
