STHLM STARTUPS

Back in October last year, we had an amazing party to promote Stockholm as the great startup city it is. It was a great night and the next event is already creeping up (15th May) with talks from Sergej Kotliar (Banterfly) and Caroline Walerud (Volumental) as well as our own CEO Carl Waldekranz!

Read more about the #sthlmstartups event 15th May on the Startup Space Blog. Hope you can join us!

Billing for Apps - the Practical Stuff

Curious about what you need to do in order to use our apps? It’s simple! Just click on “Apps” in dashboard, and click the “Add credit card” button at the top of the page, and a little window as shown above in the picture will appear.

This is where you fill in your billing information in order to be able to subscribe to our apps. When you’re done, don’t forget to hit the green “Add credit card” button :-) We accept Visa, Mastercard and soon American Express (sorry, we don’t take PayPal at the mo!).

Subscription to Tictail apps will take place on a monthly basis, however, it’s possible that we’ll be launching more billing options for apps (such as annual subscriptions) a little further down the line!

If you have any questions regarding billing of apps, head over to our help site where we have a section about billing and a section about our apps.

All my best,

Livia

Community Manager

Say Hello to Tictail Apps!

In December of last year, we launched Apps, a new item in the Dashboard and the very birth of Tictail’s App Store. Since then, all our apps (such as Custom Domain and Discount Codes) have been free of charge but, just as we communicated back in chilly December, starting May 1st we’ll start charging for our apps. 

But there’s no need to worry - the basic Tictail service (including full PayPal integration, unlimited product upload etc.) will still be free, just like it’s always been. Since all our apps are completely optional you can still continue to use Tictail at no cost!

I hope that you’re just as excited as we are at this chance to start adding new features to your store! The great thing is that there’ll be more new apps coming soon so do keep yer eyes peeled!

If you’re dying to try them out straight away, just head over to “Apps” in the Dashboard and subscribe to the ones you fancy. You can unsubscribe to them any time you like and if you unsubscribe before 1st May (still 2 days left!!), we won’t charge you a single penny.

All the best,

Livia

Community Manager

London Store Hangout

Tictail’s coming to London next week! Curious about Tictail and wanna learn more or already have an online store and would like to meet other Tictailers? Come join us at our second store hangout in London at The Book Club in Shoreditch.

Drinks are on us! :)

Tictail Store Hangout
Thursday 11th April
6 - 8pm
The Book Club
100-106 Leonard Street
London, EC2A 4RH

We’d love to meet you and hope you can make it!

Love,

Tictail xx

Psst! Here’s what we were up to last time we were in London… 

The Tictail Easter Hunt!

We’ve picked 10 of our favourite Tictail stores as Golden Easter Eggs. Guess one of the right ones and you’ll win a beautiful product from this store! 

Enter the hunt by posting the link to the store in a comment on this Facebook post or Tweet it with #tictailstore.

We’ll be picking 10 winners on Thursday, 28th March. Good luck!!

Psst! We’ll be sharing clues on how to find stores throughout the week, so keep an eye out.

Backend Developer of the Future of Ecommerce

I’m Siavash and I’m one of the co-founders and the CTO of Tictail. Have you heard the story of how I ended up here? From tech lead at Blocket (Sweden’s most visited site) to joining not a company but a vision in three months. 

In short, I followed a tweet and landed on the beta sign up page of Tictail. It was a beautiful page, simple but with a powerful message; “retail re-born, easy, pretty & social” and a video collage of sleepless hacks. I ran over to my friend William (who later became the first employee of Tictail!) and said “this will be big!”. 

A few days later I needed a beautiful font for a hack I was working on and found reason to return. I checked the markup in hopes of finding @font-family but found this hidden message instead:

I met up with Kaj, Carl and Birk, the guys behind Tictail, the next day to find out more of what they were cooking. Keep in mind, these were three guys I had never even heard of before.

Three months later I left my job and gave up everything for a vision and a team I truly believed in. It’s now 10 months since we launched, we’re just about to become 10 people and break 10 000 online stores - we’re seeing some incredible traction!

But what makes me even more proud is the engineering culture and team we have here. We’re six people on the tech side and I must say that these are the smartest people I’ve ever had the privilege to work with. And guess what, we’re looking for one more person to join this pack of heroes!

At Tictail we believe our product should be just as beautiful on the inside as it is on the outside. An important part of this inner beauty comes from our core team that is responsible for building the infrastructure of the platform and API.

The platform is primarily built on Python, and we enjoy the occasional buzzwords you might find on HN. Our current web/API platform is built on top of Tornado, but we really like Flask *wink*.

Besides building a scalable ecommerce platform on state of the art technology while making the technology invisible for the end user we also spend time analyzing the data generated by over 10,000 stores and their end consumers. This data is automatically translated into specific tasks that compound the Tictail to-do feed, a feed that tells the store owners what they need to do and when they need to do it in order to improve their store and sales.

Responsibilities

As part of the core team you will be …

• building the backend infrastructure of the platform and API
• ensuring the scalability and security of a fast-growing platform
• enjoying the freedom and responsibility of working in a small talented team
• working with everything from load balancers to API design

You:

• find writing web applications in Python more fun than job applications
• enjoy collaborating with other talented people
• think RFCs, man pages are more fun to read than gossip pages
• have friends who think you talk too much about scaling
• have friends who suspect you wear a tin-foil hat when they’re not around
• think ‘curl’ is a tool and not a workout form

Superwoman/Superman Skills

You:

• have startup experience and enjoy the freedom and responsibility that it allows
• are great if you have worked with scalable systems in the past
• are totally amazing if you enjoying occasionally taking a stroll in front-end land
• are Superwoman and Batman combined if you pop up Photoshop to express the designer in you

To join Tictail at this early stage is a fantastic opportunity to get the freedom to shape a platform of high scale, to create fantastic user experiences and to be challenged to push your solutions further by colleagues who are just as passionate as you are about product development. 

Last but not least, there’s no decision that I’m more proud of than pursuing this vision, and there hasn’t yet been a day where I haven’t been reminded of this by my amazing colleagues and now friends. Feel free to ping me @siavashg or s@tictail.com and I’ll gladly tell you more about a day at Tictail.

All the best,

Siavash

CTO & Co-founder

The New Theme Editor

Ta-da! We’re happy to present the new theme editor with lots of improvements - both from a design and functionality perspective!

Why did we feel it was time for a fresher up? Ah, we just wanted to give a little love to all you out there busy coding away in our theme editor :)

Let us take you through the updates:

Design Improvements 

• Previously the theme editor would minimize itself automatically when not in use. Now, in default mode, the theme editor is expanded. However, it’s still possible to choose the previous mode where it minimizes when you’re not mousing over it.  
• We’ve also made it easier to reset a theme to which changes have been made - instead of first having to choose another theme before going back to the desired theme without the changes.
• It used to be rather difficult to see whether any changes had been made to the theme without digging deeper into the code - now you can tell straight from the image stating “Custom Theme”.
• It’s also easier to preview your theme and observe the changes you make. Before, your store would be centred in your browser’s window, now it’s situated on the left-hand side so you can follow all the changes live!
• Animations in the transitions between the different views, change code, choose theme etc. 
• New icons for each of the different themes (as soon as you mouse over them a preview pops up). 
• A whole bunch of spanking new icons and crispy design updates in general!

Functionality Improvements

• A direct link to the documentation appears the minute you start editing your theme - instead of you having to go to tictail.com to find it.
• You don’t have to word wrap long lines of code, which makes life a little easier by giving you a better overview.
• You’re now able open the code editor in a separate window so as to have the preview in one and the code in another.
• You can minimize/expand blocks of code to hide the blocks of code you’re done with = more space!
• Loads of neat improvements with the editor through the Ace upgrade of the JavaScript editor from which our theme editor is built. 

A little teaser…
You, our stores, are super important to us and we want to create the most amazing Tictail experience for you. This is why we’ve reached out to some of the best designers in the industry. And guess what? They’ll be designing a set of themes for Tictail! We can’t wait to show them to you.

We want you to feel that your store is as beautiful as it is easy and fun to use, and would love to hear your ideas on how you’d like your Tictail store to look! Got a favourite designer? Found a really cool online store that you wish was yours? Send your suggestions to hello@tictail.com and we’ll do our best incorporate your dreams into our themes!

Design the Future of Ecommerce

As Tictail’s second designer, you will be given an immense opportunity to influence our service, company and community and be a part of shaping the future of one of Europe’s fastest growing startups as it goes global.

Dubbed the Tumblr of ecommerce by Wired Magazine and named Digital Entrepreneurs of the Year by Swedish Internet World, Tictail is expanding. Although it hasn’t been a year since launch, we just broke 10,000 stores online. Our ambition is simple, Tictail is to become the world’s most used and loved ecommerce service.

Tictail is much more than just a web app. It’s at the core of our stores’ businesses and a service appreciated as much by small entrepreneurs making a living from their dreams as by members of the developer and designer community who finally can create a beautiful online store without the constraints of badly performing code and inflexible frameworks.

From a product point of view, it’s more exciting than ever to work at Tictail. We’ve spent sleepless weeks refining the foundation of our ecommerce platform, but things are just about to get really interesting. This year, we will create our first (but not last) iOS app, a new mobile experience, a better way to discover and share Tictail stores, an app marketplace and loads more!

The kind of person we’re looking for:

• You’re passionate and innovative (means more to us than safe bets and immaculate CVs)
• Your English, both spoken and written, is flawless
• (If you speak a second language this is a huge plus)
• You thrive on creating a well-designed product and understand how code and design interact
• You’re eager not just to implement design, but also to work tightly with the company co-founders and help form the long-term product strategy 
• You enjoy taking part in discussions surrounding user experience and product development

Your role at Tictail will be critical and I sincerely believe that if you think you’re the person we’re searching for, joining the Tictail team is an amazing opportunity. Each and every member of our team has been carefully selected and our devoted, go-getter attitude is at the centre of the Tictail culture. I would love to see you become part of it.

Best,

Kaj Drobin
Designer & Co-Founder

Email your application to jobs@tictail.com.

Are You Tictail’s First Evangelist?

Founded by two engineers and two designers, Tictail - a smart and intuitive solution for e-commerce that’s fun to use - sprung out of a mix between technology and design. This mix is, and will always be, at the heart of our organisation. 

Tictail is growing. We started off with eight founding stores and we’re soon about to break 10,000 stores online. Dubbed the Tumblr of e-commerce by Wired and named Digital Entrepreneurs of the Year by Swedish Internetworld, 2013 will be the year we go global. 

As the very first Tictail Evangelist, you will spearhead Tictail’s communication from a technical and design point of view. You will rally the most talented designers and engineers and bring them together within our community forum, our blog, for meetups, hackathons, beer rallies, the first annual Tictail Hack Conference and whatever is needed to create a community that we’re proud to be part of. 

You will be part of the marketing and community team, but will be given the opportunity to work within and develop several different fields. We are still a small team at Tictail and encourage initiatives across areas; we believe that marketing and product development go hand-in-hand. The Evangelist role will involve a lot of travelling and the chance to meet some of the most influential people in tech today. You will also be responsible for running our (yet to be launched) ‘Behind the Scenes’ product blog (think Signal vs Noise), as well as handle technical support and community efforts in our forums. 

The kind of person we’re looking for:

• You’re highly social and a brilliant storyteller
• You’re ambitious and creative (means more to us than safe bets and immaculate CVs)
• Your English, both spoken and written, is flawless 
• (If you speak a second language this is a huge plus)
• You appreciate a well designed product as much as well-written code and like to be apart of discussions surrounding user experience and product development
• You have an understanding of working on a big scale and highly distributed system
• You’re analytical, an eager adopter of technology, and someone who is able to see the value of data-driven solutions. 

You will play an extremely important role for Tictail this year and I truthfully believe that if the above seems like a fit for you, then joining Tictail is a fantastic opportunity. In building the Tictail team, each and every member has been carefully selected and together we have created an enthusiastic go-getter attitude that’s at the centre of the Tictail culture. I would love to see you become part of it.

All the best,

Carl Waldekranz
CEO & Co-Founder

Email your application to jobs@tictail.com.

Export Your Orders

As a follow-up to our little Valentine’s gift last week, we have now made it possible to export orders to Excel and CSV!

Search for a customer’s name and export all their orders

In the left-hand box you can select

• Inbox - for new orders
• Archive - for completed orders
• All - for lifetime orders

… and hit the export button to the right!

Of course, it’s also possible to use our new order search feature to export anything you like - by typing a customer’s name for instance you can export all orders from this one customer.

We hope the new export feature will make your life a little easier.

// The Tictail Team