New in ExpressRex: Bundles, Vertical Layouts and Query String Fiddling

Hi folks --

We hit a critical mass of new goodies since our last newsletter, so we thought we'd let you guys know about some of the new stuff we've added to ExpressRex in the last couple months:

Bundles:

So, this is the biggest new thing. You know like on Amazon where it has those, "Buy these together..." bundles? Now you can have those automatically generated for you with ExpressRex and shown on your product pages too! Here's a screenshot from one of our beta testers:

To get them up and going all you have to do is replace the snippet of Javascript that you've been using thus far with an updated one that will also show bundles. You'll find the new snippet on our instructions page in step #3:

http://shopify.directededge.com/

The Shopify API doesn't at present support creating discounts on the fly, so for now these are just full-price bundles, but maybe at a later date it'll be possible to support bundles in full-discounted-glory.

Vertical layouts:

A few of you asked about being able to display recommendations vertically rather than horizontally. There's now a brand-new option in our settings panel that lets you do just that. You just set the orientation to vertical and pick how many items should be show.

You can get to the settings for that here, under "look and feel":

http://shopify.directededge.com/panel/settings

Overriding options with the ExpressRex query string:

For those of you that are a bit more adventurous, you can now override most of the settings from the settings panel in the ExpressRex query string. To run with the example above, if you, for instance, wanted to have vertical recommendations only on your product page, you can do so by adding "orientation=vertical" to your query string, like this:

Here's the full list of things you can override in the query string:

orientation
image_size
border_width
border_color
border_style
background_color
minimum_width
minimum_height
show_price

If this query string business makes zero sense to you, but you'd still like to customize one of those fields, get in touch with us at support and we'll help you get it going.

Well, that's it for this edition -- happy Shopifyering!

-Scott and the Directed Edge team