Blog

New Feature: Fulfillment Methods Added July 06, 2009

We've added new fulfillment methods to make Vae's eCommerce even better. Our Australian customers will be happy to know that they can now utilize Australia Post eParcel. For those of us in the states, you can now use USPS fulfillment with Endicia; this means you can print up postage right from your office!

To start using these new fulfillment methods, clicking on the 'Settings' subtab of your 'Store' tab:

Click on any of the Fulfillment Methods to add them:

(Australia eParcel)


(USPS w/ Endicia)

Use the Right Editor June 22, 2009

It can be a headache to edit, save, and upload the files via FTP onto your Vae site. That's why we recommend using an editor with integrated FTP. With one of these editors, you can type in your ftp information once, bookmark it, and then edit files directly in your web space. Every time you hit save, the editor uploads your changes to the file. Here's a few recommendations for possible editors:

Mac OS X

  • Coda has a great interface. We use it here at Vae, and so do many of our designers. Besides integrated FTP, Coda has many other advanced features that can make your coding process more efficient.
  • BBEdit is also a fine editor. We think it's impressive that BBEdit integrates with VMWare Fusion, giving you the ability to preview your work in Internet Explorer - on a Mac!
  • Smultron is free and easy to use. A good editor for basic text editing.

Windows

  • Coffee Cup will help our Windows-using friends edit code just as well as us Mac-nerds do.

If you have a favorite editor that we're not mentioning here, please let us know. We're always looking for new ways to make our designers' lives easier.

We <3 Feedback June 18, 2009

If you're reading our blog, hopefully you're aware by now that we're a different breed of CMS. To add to the list of reasons why is this: we listen to our designers. Vae is an exceptional platform, but we aggressively seek new ways we can make it better, faster, and easier to work with. We've already added several features in response to the needs of our designers (see also: Blog Post Scheduling).

So today, we're reaching out and asking you to tell us what you think about Vae. Is something slowing you down? Is there a problem you're trying to solve and you don't know how? In return, you can expect we'll work with you to find a solution if one exists already (more often than not this is the case), or we'll log it as a feature request and let you know how long you can expect to wait before it's available.

So send us an email, or contact your account manager. We look forward to hearing from you!

Video Tuesday: The AJAX Attribute June 16, 2009

Get the Flash Player so you can see an awesome video about Vae.

Vae's AJAX attribute can save you time and make your code more readable. As always, checkout our Documentation and Integration Center for more videos and tutorials.

3 Newsletter Targeting Tips May 27, 2009

Sending effective newsletters is a tricky business. Not only is the content of your newsletters important, but so is the destination. To make sure your clients are reading what you send them, make sure you're not sending them too many emails, or emails that are irrelevant. To help with the latter challenge, Vae provides ways for you to send your newsletters to specific groups. Here's three ideas.

Target By Location
Is your band touring through England? Alert the masses by shooting out an email to all your English customers. Under Vae’s Newsletter tab, create a new campaign and select the country or state you’d like to target:

Target By Order History
Another effective marketing strategy is to zero-in on a certain demographic of customer based on their order history. For example, if your online store were debuting a pricey new gadget, you might not want to bother your customers who haven’t spent much money in the past. Instead, you could tell Vae to email customers who have spent a certain about in a specified span of time:

Target By Hand-Picking
Vae allows you to make lists of customers in any manor you see fit. Maybe you have a list of VIP customers who you’d like to email a sneak peak of an upcoming product release. Just create a list under Vae’s Newsletter tab, then choose that list when creating a new campaign.

Retain customers on your store with Amazon Universal Wishlist March 12, 2009

If you're selling products online (through Vae Store or otherwise), you should consider implementing wishlist functionality. It brings back customers that want something but aren't buying it now. If you don't want to implement this yourself, Amazon has launched a service called Universal Wishlist that gives you this functionality by just inserting a script into your page.

To learn more, go here: http://www.amazon.com/wishlist/vendor-button/

Add a search box to your site -- cool! February 26, 2009

Take a look at Sikbox. You can use it to instantly add a searchbox to your site. Really cool.