As an independent producer, artist or writer, selling your digital products online can be a daunting process.

There are a number of things to consider when selling digital products online. For instance, you will need to

• be able to secure your download links to prevent the buyer from sharing the download link with everyone else on the internet
• provide a secure and quick checkout process where payment can be quickly verified
• be able to embed buy links on your other sites, eg. blogs, forums, social networks to help advertise or market your goods.

There are a number of services that will allow you to sell your digital products. However, these tend to just cater for either digital or physical products.

With tradelr, we provide a facility for you to sell both physical and digital products all from one location while addressing all the above concerns.

And the great thing about tradelr is that we do not charge any commission for each sale.

What can you sell?

With tradelr, you can sell digital goods such as videos, video games, ebooks, software, art, music, fonts and other downloadable products as long as you have the rights to do so.

How to start selling digital goods with tradelr?

Selling digital products on tradelr is not that much different from selling physical products. For digital products, you will need to do the following

1. When adding a new product, click on the digital products tab
2. Select and upload your digital file that you're selling
3. Once your file has been uploaded successfully, you will be presented with the following optional fields that can be edited anytime

Also, on this same tab you will be presented with 3 links which can be embeded externally into your other sites.

What happens when a buyer checksout?

Compared to physical products, when a digital product is purchased, a shipping address will not be required. 

However, a shipping address will still be requested if the buyer's shopping cart contains both physical and digital products.

If the buyer's shopping cart contains digital products, the download links will only be emailed to the buyer once payment has been confirmed.

This is automatically done if the buyer has purchased using paypal. If the buyer had paid using a custom payment method, then you will need to review and accept their payment once you received a notification that a buyer has entered a payment.

Yes, we have outdone ourselves again. It looks like we were still able to squeeze in one last feature before 2012.

You are now able to use our Facebook app to allow customers to directly purchase goods without leaving Facebook.

To help promote your page, add a discount coupon which will be revealed to users who like your page.

Get Started Now!

Due to recent changes to how Google Base works, you may have noticed that you are now unable to post products to Google Base.

Google Base is now known as Google Merchant Center. With this change, they have also been stricter on who is allowed to post products using their new Google Merchant Center.

You will now need to get Google's permission to post products using their Google Merchant Center. To do this, go to

http://support.google.com/merchants/bin/request.py?hl=en&contact_type=item_noshow

Please select 'Scheduling' as "Submission method" and 'Other' as "Issue you are experiencing". "Additional information" will be: "Please enable use of  Content API for Shopping for my account.".

Looks like we were able to squeeze in some more updates before 2011 ends.

We have added the ability to register your own domain name directly from your dashboard. To get your own domain, just follow the following simple steps

1. Check the availability of your domain name
2. Determine how long you want to own the domain for. This can be renewed.
3. Complete your payment

And you will be redirected to your new domain name within minutes. 

SSL Encryption

Great news! Your dashboard is now encrypted via SSL to prevent eavesdropping.

This means you are save to log into your account from public places. Just make sure you don't tick "Remember me on this computer".

Product Price History

We have added the ability to retrieve a record of all prices that a product has ever been bought or sold. 

To do this, you can either click on the inventory total in your inventory listing or view a contact's profile directly.

We have replaced the store wide on/off inventory tracking feature with per product inventory tracking.

Once inventory tracking is enabled for a product, its inventory movement is tracked via 4 counters.

Transactions

Transactions have been simplified further. Interdomain transactions has been removed. Basically, there are 2 types of transactions; purchase orders and invoices.

Invoices are sent to other people to record a sales transaction, ie. products sold to a customer or services rendered. For example, everytime someone buys something from your online shop, an invoice will be created.

Purchase orders are used to record purchases from suppliers. You create a purchase order to increase the number of available stock in hand.

Themes Update

There have been some updates to existing themes. You can update to the latest version by selecting a theme from the theme gallery. 

Unfortunately, this will also overwrite any changes you have made to your current theme. Therefore, backup your current theme if necessary.

And we have added 2 more themes.

And Merry Christmas to everyone!

If you haven't done so, you will need to sign up for a service that will allow you to manage your email subscribers. We recommend MailChimp or you could just use your own personal favourite service.  

Some of the features that we love about MailChimp are the ability to 

• find out the number of subscribers who actually opened your newsletter 
• find out who actually clicked on links in your newsletter
• find out where your subscribers are from
• style your emails while maintaining your branding

And its FREE. In this example, we will show you how to add a newsletter signup form using MailChimp.

MailChimp

1. Once you have signed up and logged in, click on Lists to create a new list. This list will hold the contact information of your subscribers.
    
   
2. Once you have created your list, click on Forms. 
   
   
   And then click on For Your Website > Signup Form Embed Code.
   
    
3. Go to the "copy/paste into your site" section, select and copy the code. This is the code that will be displaying our signup form.
4. Now, go to your Theme Editor page in your Tradelr dashboard and you can either
   1. paste the code into any existing liquid template page that you want the signup form to appear in; or
   2. Create a new snippet called newsletter
      
      
      And then insert the following liquid code into any location where you want the signup form to appear.

      {% include 'newsletter' %} 

In some themes, the ability to add newsletters is built into its settings. For example, for the Solo theme there is section for configuring your newsletter subscription.

Basically, you just need to copy and paste from MailChimp the action value of the form HTML tag.

For a limited time, sign up to MailChimp for FREE and get $30 free monkeyrewards credited into your account. Signup for your FREE MailChimp account here.

With increasing number of shoppers using mobile devices to shop online, it is only natural that every online store owner should be able to properly facilitate these transactions.

We are therefore excited to announce support for mobile themes for tradelr. You can now customize a separate theme to be displayed on iPhone and Android devices.

The customer checkout process has also been updated appropriately.

Tradelr uses the open-sourced liquid templating engine originally created by Shopify.

Tradelr themes are very similar to Shopify themes. However, Shopify themes will not work on tradelr without some changes.

A couple of things which are different in Tradelr includes

• we do not support vendor types
• we do not support product types
• we do not support customer templates
• our product variants are structured differently from Shopify
• we do not support compare at prices
• we support discount coupons

Theme Changes

To modify Shopify themes so that there will work correctly on Tradelr, you will need to carry out the following changes

• rename shopify_asset_url to tradelr_asset_url
• remove link_to_type
• remove product.type
• remove link_to_vendor
• remove product.vendor
• product.compare_at_price_min and product.compare_at_price_max
• rename product.compare_at_price to product.price
• rename product.featured_image to product.default_image
• remove shop.money_format and shop.money_with_currency_format. Tradelr uses currency variable for formatting money values
• rename variant.weight to product.weight
• in your contact and comment forms remove input name brackets from form tag input fields 
• remove customer templates
• add {{ login_for_store }} just before <body> to add links for customers to login

Cart Changes

The following are changes specifically for the cart.liquid template file

• add discount input field if you want to support discount codes. 
• add cart.subtotal_price (before discount), cart.discount_amount, and update usage of change cart.total_price which is not the price after discount.
• rename item.line_price to item.total_price
• remove input name brackets from cart.liquid
• rename item.variant.id to item.id

Product Collections

When determining the current product url, you no longer need to check if a collection exist to create a product within a collection url. The proper url with be automatically determined. For example,

With Shopify, you would have needed to specify

{% if collection %}/collections/{{ collection.handle }}{% endif %}/products/{{ product.handle }}

With Tradelr, all you need to specify is

{{ product.url }}

We are excited to announce some major changes to the tradelr dashboard and online ecommerce platform.

Store Themes and Liquid Templates

All storefronts are now 100% fully customizable via the liquid templating language. With the new system, you can now create custom pages, blogs, navigation structures and customize the look and feel of your online store as much as you want.  A few themes have been included with this latest update and more will be forthcoming.

Member-only stores

With the new platform you are now able to create exclusive member-only stores for selected contacts.

Group Pricing

Are you a supplier or wholesaler? Use our group pricing feature to create different pricing for different groups of customers.

For example, visitors to your shop will see retail prices. Customers and contacts with accounts can view their respective special prices once they sign into their accounts.

This gives a simple way to track what prices have been agreed upon to different customers.

Coming Soon

Some of the major features we plan to have are allowing customers to shop without leaving Facebook and to allow customers to shop directly from their mobile devices.

Create your shop on tradelr today.

Here we are again. Yes, we are very much alive and kicking. Just a little busy with other things at the moment. Life seems to always present new opportunities and sometimes we are just forced to reprioritize things. The bad news is that theming of the store front using liquid templates is going to be delayed again.

We did however managed to do the following

Group Pricing

We have now made the private store feature only viewable to users with existing login and passwords. Also, you can now create contact groups and allow contacts in these group to view products are different pricing from other contacts.

This feature should be useful to resellers or suppliers who wish to differentiate their pricing for different customers.

Product Autoposting

We have added two more blogs you can autopost your products to: tumblr and wordpress.

Importing Products

You can now import your existing products from ebay, etsy and facebook.You aren't able to post to ebay or etsy yet but we hope to change this in the future.

Facebook? Well yes, if you're selling on facebook and using photo albums to promote your products, tradelr will allow you to import these albums and photos as products on tradelr. Our algorithm doesn't guarantee that you will be able to import your products accurately but we're continuously improving the algorithm. If you're having problems, let us know and we'll try to make it work as painlessly as possible for you.

Other Languages

We are trying to figure out the fastest and most cost effective way of doing this at the moment. Spanish and mandarin is what we plan to offer.