Last night (Oct 6th, 2011) we released an update to our system. Printing was not tested before the release. This resulted in customers not being able to print receipts from late on the 6th until 7:40am PST the next morning.

Note: If you are having printer problems now it is not due to the update. Update problems have been fully resolved as of 7:40am PST Oct. 7th, 2011.

Secondly our virtual phone account was reset a few days earlier. We hadn’t fully re-setup our account. This caused urgent voicemails left by customers to be missed. Usually multiple people within the company get a txt message if a customer leaves an urgent. This wasn’t happening.

We take full responsibility for both of these problems. I’m really sorry to anyone who was affected. We take these issues very seriously. Here is what we are going to do to prevent this from happening again:

Testing Before Releases

We have a pretty good run-through of the system that we do before each release. But obviously it was not thorough enough. We are going to create a more explicit pre-release testing checklist.

Phone System Checklist

We will create a checklist for our phone system functionality. That way if our phone system has problems or is being re-setup we have something to run through to make sure all the vital parts are working properly.

Growing = The Winning Team

MerchantOS is growing rapidly, which is awesome. This gives us more resources for development, support, and communication. It means our company is healthy and you as a customer are with a winning team. You get ever improving technology and solid support. If we aren’t moving forward, we are left behind, especially when it comes to technology.

Growing = More Complexity

The downside to growth is that it brings more complexity. Tasks that use to be small and simple have expanded and become complex. We understand and are grappling with the fact that things we use to ‘wing it’ on need to start having a system and safeguards. It’s a balancing act because you don’t want burden yourself with too many slow procedures. We’re working hard at this stuff.

 Comments and Questions

Feel free to leave your thoughts and questions below. Or as always you can email or phone us.

From this point forward, our response to these situations is, “It’s our fault” – and now that we own the problem, we will help you solve it.

Being Let Down By Other Companies

For the most part businesses we work with are awesome. Every now and then, though, they miss the mark. There can be many reasons for this, such as being too large and unable to manage employees, employees not being empowered to go the extra mile, and not getting your employees invested in your offerings. Whatever reasons they have for failing to meet a customer’s needs, it happens. Worse than that, their response can be seriously lacking.

Before I go on, I do want to say that MerchantOS has certainly failed in the past, and we will probably fail again in the future. We’re not perfect – but we’re aware of it, and working on it!

How We Will Handle the Failures of Partner Companies

Often when a complementary service to MerchantOS fails, it can make MerchantOS look just as bad as the actual service that is failing. That is why it is imperative for us to do our best to correct the situation even if it appears to be out of our control. Here are a few things our support staff will do from now on to help our customers.

• Call the company on your behalf - Often the hardest part of a problem is figuring out what actually went wrong. We will call up anyone we think can help you with your situation. This does a couple of things. First, our customer won’t become the relay of information between us and another company, thus eliminating the risk of confusion over technical details. This will also allow us to gather vital information that we need to resolve the situation. Most importantly, it takes the burden off of you, and you can rest assured that we’re working hard to get you back up and running.
• Not jump to conclusions - In the past, we might have assumed your situation was caused by one problem when in fact it was something completely different. Sometimes multiple customers need to call in to report the same thing before we realize the problem is larger scale than we think. Our support is encouraged to take a step back, be inquisitive, and most importantly, if they are unsure, get help from their team.
• Understand the Customer’s Perspective - Our support is encouraged to be invested in your situation. Our success is dependent upon your success. Support staff sometimes come to me angry about the situation a customer is in, and I strongly believe this is a great characteristic in any employee we have. I want them to feel upset that you are not getting what you need and I want them to do something about it.

The Outcome

The main objective is to get our customers what they need so they can operate their business. Though there are some selfish side benefits for us as well.

• Improved morale at MerchantOS that comes from helping someone, and doing a good job.
• Stronger customer loyalty to MerchantOS
• Customers that will tell other businesses about MerchantOS
• Making other companies we work with look good (or at least not look bad), which hopefully encourages them to do the same for us.

Calling Us Out

Finally, it is critically important that you (our customers) let us know where we have failed. The only way we can improve a situation is by knowing that there is a problem. We do this with the companies we work with, and typically they respond well. Don’t forget that we are far from perfect and that we don’t always know what’s going on, but we do know that together we can ensure that we all succeed!

Have you ever had situations in your business that could have been handled better? Share your stories below.

Immediately half the staff left the room claiming that they had been chopping onions earlier – and we’ve started paying more attention to the manual’s needs. All it wants to do is help our customers. We agreed to help in exchange for it to not write us any more letters that inspire “allergy attacks”.

Here is how you can help too:

For our new users

Watch the video lessons. Just to be clear, I’m going repeat every word in that last sentence. Watch. The. Video. Lessons. Scott, Ivan, and Justin made these videos short, informative, and some are even mildly entertaining.

You want to learn about how to set up a product Matrix? There’s a video for that.

No idea how to void a sale? There’s a video for that.

Want to learn a neat technique for label printing? We have a video for that too.

We’re like the iTunes store when it comes to practical videos except we don’t charge you, we put you in charge of what you want to learn.

For our advanced users

We’d like your feedback on what it is you feel is missing. We want to know what you want to know.

One of our newest additions to the manual is a link to the MerchantOS API documentation. Anyone with a programming background will really want to take advantage this.

Our manual should be more than just a resource for you to get your latest receipt and label printer drivers and installation instructions from.

We’d like to see it as more than a pit stop for you to pick up instructions on how to setup one of the new integrations.

You may have more questions than just what kind of barcoding requirements there are for custom gift cards.

So let us have it – tell us what you need!

Auslogics Disk Defrag – every hard drive on a PC needs a good defragging and usually a cigarette after it’s finished due to the way some of you treat your machines. It’s a good idea to do this once a month. Once a week would be overkill. I like Auslogics because it solves my complaints with Microsofts Disk Defragmenter (such as a working progress bar) and it works faster than Piriform’s Defraggler.

If you’re a fan of Auslogics you may want to check out BoostSpeed. It offers a lot of utilities to fine tune and cleanup your machine. If you download their trial you’ll see it’s fairly limited and they pressure you into buying the full version at $49.95. You can actually pick it up for $24.97 if you uninstall the trial. You should see this screen pop-up in your browser.

CCleaner – the magnum opus of Piriform. It’s a system cleaner that really takes care of those files slowing down your computer and compromising your security. It eats up cookies faster than a googly-eyed blue muppet. Okay, that joke was just stupid, but Bryn made me write something about Cookie Monster. I hate losing bets.

Here are some other pretty cool tools we use around the office:

Dropbox – a simple cloud-based file sharing system. Works on PC, Mac, Linux, iPhone, and Android devices. It is a really swank way of sharing a complimentary 2GB of storage.

SpiderOak – props to Syntress for pointing out that Dropbox will hand over your files to the Federal Government, if asked. “SpiderOak never stores or knows a user’s password or the plaintext encryption keys which means not even SpiderOak employees can access the data.”

I’m feeling like the Mac users could use a little more love in this article so I asked around the office. Ivan has got nothing but dreads for me. Bryn is off doing a victory dance on the Cookie Monster thing. Fortunately I found Bento and got this seal of approval from Chris: “Know what I hate? Spreadsheets. They’re good at what they do — keeping a ton of information structured, organized, and clean. But they just don’t look good doing it! That’s why, for all my databases I prefer using a program called Bento. Bento makes data management of any kind super easy and sleek looking. You can create databases for nearly anything — they have pre-built templates for typical ones: Customers, Inventory, Pictures, Contacts, and more. Or you can start from scratch and add only the pieces you need. And after everything is entered you can always export to your typical, widely used spreadsheet file. There’s even mobile apps available so you have your information anywhere you are. I dare say I was LOOKING for things to organize after finding this program.”

I enjoy a fancy wallpaper now and then, but more so I appreciate variety, and it becomes a chore finding good wallpapers. This site provides a good combination of clean design and smart colors.

Had your eye on some software, but not attracted to its price tag? Check out – http://alternativeto.net/.

OK, this last one is just weird/awesome. You’ll just have to see/hear it for yourself.

Luckily, with Firefox 4.o and MerchantOS you’ve got nothing to worry about. The next time Firefox asks if you’d like to update to the newest version, click confidently knowing everything will still be there when you’re done. So, in short, YES, MerchantOS will work on Firefox 4.0. I’ll show you how it’s done:

On a PC:

In Firefox, go to Tools>Options

And then to the Advanced Tab>Update. Make sure your settings look like this:

This way, Firefox will automatically search for updates.If it doesn’t right away, don’t worry, it will soon.

NOTE: If you have Automatic Printing enabled through the JS Print add-on (PC only), you’ll have to update that too. That can be found HERE. Make sure you’ve restarted Firefox completely after this is installed.

And on a Mac:

Go to Firefox>Preferences…

And then the Advanced tab>Update. Make it look like this:

This way, Firefox will automatically check for updates in the future. If it doesn’t right away, don’t worry, it will soon.

If after you update, your labels are printing funny, check out our manual page HERE to find out how your Firefox print settings should look like.

Later on just past 5pm this issue popped back up and led to the complete inability to access our facility in San Jose and we had to redirect all customers to our backup data center in Seattle. Our San Jose facility continues to remain offline as of this writing.

This issue is purely a networking problem at our San Jose data center. Our servers and owned networking equipment are all unaffected. Your data is safe and you can continue using MerchantOS on our backup facility.

Our redirection process updates the location you access our servers using DNS and some of you may have needed to restart your browser or modem for the change to take effect more quickly.

We are currently inquiring with our San Jose facility to find out what went wrong and what actions they will be taking to prevent this from happening again. We always keep a fully functioning backup data center for these exact situations and you can count on us to maintain that level of redundancy for you.

I would like to apologize to all those affected.

How Catalogs Can Help You

• Quickly search from items from your vendors.
• Find items by scanning UPC/EANs without having to type anything.
• Import items – fills in the description, UPC, EAN, vendor SKU, MSRP, Cost, and more without you having to fill all that information in.
• Create purchase orders quickly and accurately.

Result do vary depending on the item and what information is in the catalogs. Sometimes catalog items don’t contain UPCs or any pricing information. The more information the vendor provides us the less manual entry you’ll have to do.

How To Search The Catalogs

See our manual page here.

Can’t Find A Catalog Or Product?

If we don’t have a catalog in our system or if a catalog isn’t complete, you can request a catalog (Excel format) from your vendor and we can add it to the system for you. There is no cost to import catalogs!. Click here to read our specification for sending catalogs.

Live catalogs

MerchantOS is integrated with a few vendors which allows us to update catalogs nightly so they’re up to date automatically. These vendors include: Quality Bicycle Products (QBP), Hawley, and Specialized. MerchantOS is always looking to integrate with more vendors so let them all know, “it would be great if you could integrate with MerchantOS”.

QBP and Hawley have an extra layer of integration (see “Call For Vendors To Integrate“).

Items Are Not Showing When I Search?

When you created your account with MerchantOS, you should have specified an industry for your store. The industry that you chose will unlock the catalogs specific to that industry. If you’re not sure if the correct industries are enabled for your account give us a call: 866-554-2453 x0.

Don’t Send Order Forms For Import

All too often we’ll get catalogs that are Excel order forms. We will not convert order forms into catalog import files. It takes too much time to edit order forms so that they can be imported. You can request, from your vendor, a file that contains all their current or newest season items and be sure to specify that each item needs to be on it’s own line. A lot of order forms will have a description that contains all the colors and sizes available on a single row. To be importable, every item combination needs to be on it’s own line.

To see a more complete guide on importing, check out the import guide in the MerchantOS online manual.

Every once in a while we’ll see .PDF files sent in to be imported. We cannot import these files either because there is loss of data and format when converting them to Excel.

Outside of the initial setup, there are few things you should know about the Shopify integration. I’ll also be giving you some tips from other MerchantOS customers on what you can do to prepare your inventory.

What gets exported from MerchantOS and put into Shopify

This is important for those of you with strange naming conventions in MerchantOS. What you name the item in MerchantOS will be its Title in Shopify. Make it clear what the item is.

How to setup variants

If you plan on selling items that come in different colors or sizes, you’ll want to plan ahead and put these items into a Matrix. That is the only way to get an item appear online with a drop down to select the variant(s). If you haven’t set up a Matrix before here is a quick video that explains this feature.

What comes back into MerchantOS

All paid orders come into MerchantOS under Customers > Invoices. It’s a good idea to check those from time to time and make sure your shipping charges are correct.

Be patient with the integration. Some requests take only seconds to respond, others can take up to an hour based on the volume of requests.

With New Years coming up it seemed like a good time to remind you that MerchantOS offers support 8am – 5pm PST, not including Holidays. While some get to kick back and enjoy the weekend’s frigid cold weather with a night of fireworks and cheaply-made carbonated wine out of a heavy green bottle, there is still emergency support available to those of you keeping up shop. At any point outside our normal support hours you can reach our on-call support staff by dialing 866-554-2453 and following the instructions to leave an emergency message.

We’ve been coming in on Mondays to listen to issues from our customers that should have been brought to our attention sooner. On the flip side, we have been getting a few urgent requests for issues that can easily be resolved at a later time.

When you should leave an Urgent voicemail.

• Can’t process credit cards. Be sure to write down the error message and be prepared to call Element or Merchant Warehouse.
• Can’t connect to shop.merchantos.com. Before you call up, always try rebooting your modem first. This resolves the majority of calls we get and will save you the time of waiting for a callback.

When you shouldn’t leave an Urgent voicemail.

You can always email us or leave a voicemail on the support line.

• Receipt printer is printing long receipts. Make sure to check your Page Setup in Firefox. 90% of the time that is the problem.
• QuickBooks related issues. MerchantOS will help you get your data into QuickBooks. But under almost any circumstances this can wait until Monday.
• Time Clock issues. Those can be corrected at any time, pun intended.

Thank you to all of our customers who have already worked with us to switch away from Authorize.net. The new gateways and accompanying encrypting card readers you are now using ensure your customers cardholder data is 100% protected while passing through our systems. Security of that same cardholder data within your shop is also greatly improved.

For those of you still using Authorize.net in conjunction with MerchantOS, we plan to shutdown all Authorize.net traffic on Wednesday November 3, 2010. Call our support line at 866-554-2453 ext. 0 to get this switch started. It takes 3 to 4 business days to get your account setup with Element or Merchant Warehouse and only 10 minutes on the phone with our support staff to setup the integration.

Why The Switch?

PCI Compliance The new gateways we are working with make MerchantOS compliant with PCI regulations. The security in the new gateways is so strong, a compromise of cardholder data from MerchantOS systems is next to impossible. The new gateways also improve security on your computers within your shop.

Encrypting card readers are the secret sauce behind these gateways. The data is encrypted before leaving the reader and entering your computer. We at MerchantOS posses no way to possibly decrypt the data. Instead the data is decrypted and processed by the gateway provider. Manual entry of card data will still be possible as well.

Not only is PCI becoming more heavily enforced by the payments industry, some states are drafting legislation to make it law that those handling cardholder data are compliant.

Additional details can be found in our first July announcement about this switch.