Like many, I’m a bargain hunter. The first thing I do when shopping – online or in a retail store – is check out the sales section. Having a Sale section on your website is a great way to catch customer’s attention and get them to make an impulse buy.

Although DecoNetwork does not automatically have a Sale page set up, we can take a couple of simple steps to make our own.

Note: This tutorial is for blank products only. If there is interest, I will follow-up with a tutorial for pre-decorated products later on.

1. Create a “Sale” category.Login to your Manage Fulfillment Center and navigate to “Products”. On the left side, you’ll see the “Categories” menu. Click “add” and name your new category “Sale”. Make sure it is a top-level category, and not a sub-category. (You can always drag and drop to move the category placement around).
2. Add products to your new “Sale” category.Click “configure” above the product that you want to appear on the Sale page. Now, click on “Categories” from the left-menu. Check the “Sale”
   category. (Your products can belong to multiple categories, so that’s all you have to do!) Repeat this step for all products that you want to appear on the “Sale” page.
3. Create Your Sale Page. Navigate to Websites > Manage > Website Pages. From the left menu, click “Add Page”. Name your page “Sale”.
   Under Body Settings for this new page, click “configure” next to “Blank Products”. Name the Panel Title “Sale Items”. Under the “category” dropdown menu, select the “Sale” category which we just created. Now, all of the products in the sale category will display on this page. Click save.

Awesome! Now we have a page that is displaying any of the products that belong to the “Sale” category. Yours should look something like this (except probably with more products!)

The only problem? There is no indicator of the original price! As a customer, I’m not convinced that an item is on sale until I see some red numbers! We can take things one step further by tricking the system into adding some extra “sale” content to your product.

1. Go back to your product configuration (MFC > Products > Configure). On the product name field, paste this code:

   <span class="sale">Sale! Originally $5.50</span>

   (Feel free to change “Sale! Originally $5.50” to anything you’d like. Just make sure that there is a space before the first word!)
   While you’re here, feel free to add some additional text in the “Description” field about the product being on sale. Click save when you are done. Repeat this for the other Sale products.

2. Paste this CSS into your Custom CSS Template (Websites > Manage > Appearance >Customize Template CSS > Create Custom CSS). Feel free to change the code if you’d like.

   .sale {
     color: red;
     font-weight: bold;
   }

Awesome! Now our Sales page should look something like this:

Congrats! Now go take advantage of your new Sale page and market it to the world! Share on your social media accounts, and send out an e-mail blast!

Thanks, and until week, Happy Deco-ing!

Thanks to everyone who joined our “CorelDRAW template made easy” hosted by TJ Stepper of Ryonet and myself. We had fun presenting it as I hope you did attending it.

if you missed it or want to review the webinar again here is a record for you to enjoy.

See you at the next webinar!

To change the background image in your store you need to override the default CSS code which controls that background. In this tutorial I will show you how this can be done for the default “Hub” template.

1. Go to Manage Fulfillment > Websites > Manage (if you are an affiliate store go to Settings) and click Appearance

2. Click Customize Template CSS

3. Go to Create Custom CSS > Select File/Image  This will let you to upload your own background image.

4. This will generate relative path to your file in DecoNetwork which needs to be included in Custom CSS code. In this case the relative path is: /uploads/11042477/File/hero-products.jpg

Here is the code which you will need to add:

#container { 
background: url("/uploads/11042477/File/hero-products.jpg") no-repeat scroll 0 0 / cover #fff; 
}

Also please make sure to replace /uploads/11042477/File/hero-products.jpg with your own path and save the changes.

In my last post, I showed you how to create a Sale page for blank products. I’ve been asked how to do the same for pre-decorated products. The system handles pre-decorated products a little bit differently, and although our options are a bit more limited, we can certainly accomplish this!

1. Navigate to Website > Manage Decorated Products. Create a new category called “Sale”.

2. Configure all Sale products:
   a. I recommend adding some text to the title of each sale product, such as “Originally $19.99”.
   b. Assign the product to the sales category
   c. Update the product description with more info on the Sale
   d. Don’t forget to edit the actual price of the product, too!

3. Awesome! Now our Sale category is being prominently displayed under the “Shop Page”, and our individual sale products will even show up when customers select “view all”

4. Let’s take this one step further and create a “sale” page on the top navigation. Navigate to “website pages” and select “Add Page” from the left menu. Name your page “Sale”.

5. Click “Configure” next to the Decorated Products widget. Make sure you set “active” to “yes”. Under the “Category” field, select “Sale” from the dropdown menu. Feel free to configure the other settings in this widget as you see fit.

Awesome! We now have pre-decorated Sale products prominently displayed on our website! Congrats, and until next week, happy deco-ing!

It’s fairly common with group orders that orders stagger in one by one and in the end you batch together the production and print or embroider them all at once.

In DecoNetwork we have a store-level feature called Batch Production that helps you manage this process.

With Batch Production enabled on a store, you can allow customers to purchase freely on that store and the jobs will not appear in the mix of your main ‘ready to go’ production. They will be queued until you are ready to consciously access the orders for that store.

As Batch Product is enabled on a store level, its ideal to create an affiliate store for a sports team and send their sports member to store to make their purchase. Orders for that store will be grouped for batch production.

To enable batch production on a store level:

1. Log into your DecoNetwork website
2. Browse to Manage Fulfilment Center > Websites
3. Select Manage for the website you want to enable batch production for
4. Select Admin Settings from the Store Configuration column
5. Select Options from the left menu and then check “This site does batch production” under Production Options
6. Click Save to save your changes

Accessing batch production orders

With Batch Production enabled on any site, you will notice a new column appearing on your Production scree called “Batch Site“:

This column contains three main options:

• Unbatched Sites: which shows standard orders from sites that are not being batched.
• All: which shows orders for all sites including standard orders and batched orders.
• Selected batch production sites: Following the above two options are listed each site that has batch production enabled.

To access the orders for a batch production site select the site from the Batch site list and click Search.

Orders for this batch production site will now appear.

Deep in the core of the secret DecoNetwork server bunker our team have been busy preparing and rolling out a new major upgrade to our server infrastructure that will deliver some significant speed and performance improvements.

We managed to scrape some valuable time from Mark Pentland,  Development Manager & Systems Architect  here at DecoNetwork to share a little on what the improvements are and how they will make your experience with DecoNetwork even more enjoyable.

“The focus of the upgrade is to improve stability, speed and response times during peak load periods.”

“The primary database servers are now 12 core machines with 32GB of memory, backed by a 400GB solid state drive (SSD). The previous arrangement was handling the load fine but now that the drive is SSD peak load periods and large database queries will not have an impact any more. This would be noticeable when loading data-rich areas of the application such as the Newsfeed in Business Hub, as well as longer order lists.”

“The Load balancer has been changed to better manage queuing of requests and also has a 400GB SSD to cache static content (product images, etc.), giving better throughput. This upgrade will stop the ‘random slow page’ problem sometimes experienced in peak periods.”

“The application nodes now use a SSD as their primary disk which makes updating them under load much easier. The clustered file system now stops using file servers under loading or performance issues much earlier, reducing slowdowns on application nodes.”

“In additional to these and other hardware upgrades, we’ve enhanced our internal administration tools by completely replacing our monitoring and alerting system, greatly improving our team’s response rates.”

“The cluster management system that routes around hardware failures has been upgraded. This includes both the software used, and the configuration, to make it more resilient.”

“Overall the management of the cluster has been improved, making it easier to upgrade in future as load increases. The improved monitoring will also identify help what components need upgrading over time.”

Many thanks to Mark and his team for the hard work on this major upgrade putting DecoNetwork on a solid platform to continue our rapid growth.

We recently rolled out v6.01 which was a minor update that included some version 6 fixes and improvements, plus some goodies like a new production worksheet.

This new worksheet is a slim-line version of the worksheet crafted from your input and suggestions.

The new worksheet is available in conjunction with the previous worksheet and you can select and use either worksheet from the Email and Order Templates section of DecoNetwork.

1. Log into your DecoNetwork website
2. Browse to Manage Fulfilment > Settings > and select Email and Order Templates from the Customer Settings column
3. Select Order templates on the left menu then Configure next to Worksheet
4. Select Default Template from the left menu and select:
   • Production Worksheet 001 for the new version
   • Production Worksheet 002 for the previous version

You can download an example here: http://www.deconetwork.com/files/worksheet-example.pdf

Enjoy!

Hello, DecoNetwork friends. Today, I’d like to teach you how to upload images and files to your DecoNetwork site. This is a necessary step to learn in order to customize your website.

Option One – Adding Images Directly to a website page

If you want to place an image on one of your website pages, then this is the most simple way of doing it:

1. Navigate to the “website pages” area of your website’s back-end
2. Select the page that you’d like to edit from the menu on the right.
3. Click “configure” next to the “body content” option
4. Click on the portrait image icon in this editor.
   
5. A popup window will appear. Click on the “Browse Server” button
   
6. Another pop up will appear. This is where you can upload your images and see them in a list. Click the “choose file” button and select the image you’d like to upload from your local computer.
7. Now, click the “Upload” button
8. Once the image has been uploaded, it will appear in the list. Click on its name from the list.
   
9. Now, your image will appear in the “image properties” window. If you’d like, you can make it a link by selecting the “link” tab. Click “ok” when you’re done.
   
10. Now your image has been added to this page! Just click “Save” at the bottom of the page, and you’re good to go!

Option Two – Uploading Images and Files to the Server and Viewing their URL path

You can also upload any image or file to the server and view its URL path (so that you can then reference it in your HTML code).

1. Navigate to the “Appearance” area of your website’s back-end
2. Select Customize Template CSS > Create Custom CSS
3. Click on the “Select File/Image” button
   
4. A pop-up window will appear. Select the type of file you’re uploading from the dropdown menu on the left. For this example, we’ll upload an image.
5. Click the “choose file” button and select the file you’d like to upload from your local computer.
6. Now, click the “Upload” button
7. Once the image has been uploaded, it will appear in the list. Click on its name from the list.
   
8. The file URL path will now appear in the field. You can copy this and paste it in your source code.
   

DecoNetwork is a powerful tool and it is easy sometimes to miss an option which can be very helpful for you. Below you may find a list of 6 options which you may have missed so far but they can be very useful in setting up your store.

1. In Business Hub you can control what columns are being displayed on the Quotes, Orders, and Production page.

Being on the production page look for the icon right above the “search” option and click on it. This will let you to select what columns are displayed on that page.

2. You can copy your products.

This is done in Manage Fulfillment > Products > click on “Listing tab” and then click on “Copy” option

3. You can change the order in which information is being displayed on your site.

Have you ever wondered how to display blank products above page image or any other element on your site? You can do it just by dragging widgets in the order you want in Manage Fulfillment > Website > Website Pages

4. You can limit your product availability to selected stores only.

This is done in Manage Fulfillment > Products > Configure > Availability where you can “deny” this particular item to all stores except the one selected from the list as “allow”

5. You can change/update your DecoNetwork domain after the store is created.

This is done per store in Manage Fulfillment > Website > Domain Settings >Edit Default Domain Name

On the next page you can change the prefix and/or subdomain and click “update”

To see how you can redirect your own domain to DecoNetwork please see this article: http://www.deconetwork.com/support/article/7-adding-a-domain-name

6. You can protect your site with the password.

This can be done in Manage Fulfillment > Website > Admin Settings > Options > and then select “Customers must be logged in to view the website” along with “Customers can login using a generic password”

We have a pretty nice version 6.03 teaser for you which is a brand new affiliate store directory.

This feature will allow you to have a new page on your main site called “Store Directory” that will list all of your affiliate stores that opt in to have their store listed.

Your affiliate store can simply upload a store banner logo at 175px x 175px and this will automatically create a tile listing on your store directory.

When selected the website visitor will jump to your affiliate store’s site.

Pretty sweet huh!

Version 6.03 will be released towards the end of October.

Keep an eye out for more version 6.03 teasers through the week

The following topic walks you through the process of creating discount tables and assigning them to product types, and individual products.

To create discount table:

1. Go to Manage Fulfillment > Settings > Configure Discounts

2. Click Add Discount
3. On the next page you can:

• Define discount name
• Add discount level
• Define discount percentage for each breakdown quantity

4. Save the changes

You can create multiple discount tables and use them with different product types and products.

To select default discount for product type:

1. Go to Manage Fulfillment > Settings > Product Types
2. Click Configure Defaults next to the selected product type

3. Select Default Discount Configuration

Note: You can apply discount to the base price only (by default discount will apply to the total retail price of the product)

4. Save the changes

The default product type discount can be changed for individual items.

To change the default discount per product:

1. Go to Manage Fulfillment > Products > click Configure for the selected item

2. Click Minimum Quantity where you can change the default discount table to another just for one product

3. Save the changes

Each affiliate store can decide whether the discount will apply to the final retail price including markup or just to the wholesale price of each garment.

To include/exclude discount from the markup:

1. Go to Manage Fulfillment > Websites > Manage (next to the store you want to modify)
2. Click Price Settings
3. Under Volume discounts select/deselect Apply discounts to markup

4. Save the changes

DecoNetwork version 6.03 is released and all V6.02 websites have been updated.

For release notes visit http://www.deconetwork.com/releasenotes/v603.

DecoNetwork version 6.04 is released and all V6.03 websites have been updated.

For release notes visit http://www.deconetwork.com/releasenotes/v604.

Check out this short video highlighting some of the new improvements in DecoNetwork version 6.04.

It’s an ongoing challenge for us here at DecoNetwork to get good, product views for our product catalogs. Most of the time suppliers themselves don’t have product views and this can lead to some products only have good photos for the front, and missing back, sleeves and other areas.

To resolve this problem our team have made a series of photo and vector views for catalog products that are missing views. You will see them being added to our product catalogs over time with a goal that as many of the 9,000+ products we have will have usable back, front and sleeve views.

Of course there are some products which are so unique templates just are not suited. We’ll also be working on some neat improvements to handle those as well.

So keep an eye out for this new templates as they start rolling out!

DecoNetwork version 6.05 is released and all V6.04 websites have been updated.

For release notes visit http://www.deconetwork.com/releasenotes/v605.

Here is a quick video highlighting 5 of the top new improvements in DecoNetwork version 6.05.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFt9emwOx2A

For full release notes head to http://www.deconetwork.com/releasenotes/v605

Would you like to get early access to DecoNetwork features as they are rolled out as part of our on-going beta testing process? Well we’ve made it ever simpler in version 6.05.

You can now opt in and out of beta any time you want by logging into your DecoNetwork website with the owner account, and browsing to Manage Fulfilment > Account > Beta program.

From here you can upgrade to beta or downgrade to public release at any time!

In addition to joining our beta program, you can also join our beta discussions in our forum at deconetwork.com/forums/beta.

Enjoy!

Did you miss our webinar “Getting the most from Facebook for your business”? Don’t worry! This awesome webinar hosted by Natchi Lazarus, Digital Marketing Manager at DecoNetwork, explains how to get the most from Facebook for your business and is now available to view online.

There is an easy way to update all of your base prices in batch in DecoNetwork.

To do it:

1. Go to Manage Fulfillment > Products > change view to the listing view, and select multiple products
>
Note: Tick very first check-box to select all of the products from one page at once.

2. Scroll down to the bottom of the page where you can select, from the drop-down menu, an option Modify Base Prices and click Apply Action
Note: This option is visible only when 2 or more products are selected.

3. On the next page you can modify base prices in batch either by percentage or fixed value. You can also reduce the prices by adding minus sign in front of the value.

4. Save the changes.