Real-time stock checking will allow you to see the actual stock availability for the products you are ordering as you are creating your order. This allows you to know if a product would be back ordered or if there are more available for you to purchase for your shop. You can find information about setting up the Giant integration in the MerchantOS Manual.

We are also working on several updates to existing integrations and a few new vendor integrations in several different industries. Check back on our blog for updates as we release them.

We are proud to annouce some changes and improvements to our API that are coming in our next release. Here is a quick overview of what is coming.

API Errors Returned in the Requested Format

Now when the API encounters an error instead of returning an html error page it will return error information in the format that was selected in the request (XML or JSON). This should allow for better error handling by client applications.

Fixes to API Datetimes

There was a bug that was causing some datetimes in the API to be returned incorrectly. Datetimes are now returned as GMT corrected for the timezone set in account.

Add Category and Tags to Receipt Template Items

We had a request to load the Item Category and Tags on the XML returned in the receipt template. This change will give access to those values to people using custom receipt templates.

Load Customer and Employee on Workorders

Another request we had was to load Customer and Employee information on returned Workorder objects. This gives access to the Customer name and address and Employee details for a Workorder without having to make more requests.

Sale Write Access

The biggest change that we have made is open up write access to Sales via the API. This is an important step forward for our API as it exposes more of the functionality of our application via our API. There are some important caveats to the functionality that we have exposed:

• Refunds and Returns are not yet supported
• Sales can be Archived (using the Delete method) or Completed, but they cannot be Unarchived or Uncompleted
• We have made every effort to fully test Sale write access via the API, but proceed with caution. If you find an error or discrepancy please contact us and let us know so we can correct it.

We still have plenty of work to do to improve our API including improving performance and exposing write access to more objects. We’re excited about these changes as they allow us to make big improvements to our product in the future.

If you have an API question, comment, suggestion or issue feel free to contact Nate at nate@merchantos.com.

You may also notice that when you login you are directed to a different URL (address) than before. Something like “east1.merchantos.com” instead of the normal “shop.merchantos.com”. We’re making this change so we can better handle our growing customer base and give you better reliability.

We’ve found that the biggest reliability issue is your internet connection. Sometimes your provider will loose connectivity to a portion of the internet, and sometimes this includes the data center where our system runs. We’ve designed the new login page to help work around these problems. After we phase in the new look/feel of the login page we’ll be turning on this new feature.

Use Your Email Address As A Login

We’re switching to email addresses as the primary way to login in to MerchantOS. For now this is optional and you can keep your normal login name. But we are going to encourage you to go to Admin->Employee Setup and change your employee logins over to their email addresses.

Why? We are adding the ability to reset your password via email. The easiest and most straight forward way to do this is to have your login name be your email address. This is also becoming a fairly standard practice across the internet so this should be comfortable to most users.

We are also implementing a Users email list that you will have the option to subscribe to. We’ll email you about once every 3 months to let you know about changes to the system and other important news. We won’t spam you every day or week with it. Promise! You can unsubscribe at any time.

For The Geeks

The login page uses some clever javascript to detect which of our data centers you have connectivity to. It will then direct you to our preferred datacenter if you can connect, but if you don’t have connectivity there it will use a proxy in our secondary data center to get you there. This means that if you can connect to at least one of our data centers you’ll be good to go.

At first we are just turning on the new look/feel of the login page but keeping it hosted at our primary data center. Meaning this new whiz-bang functionality won’t get you much benefit. But over the course of the next month or so we’ll be moving the login page to a more high availability setup that you should be able to access even if you have limited internet connectivity.

After our software update on 11/28/2011 integrated vendors are no longer exclusive to bike shops. Our newest integrated vendor, Bradley Caldwell, is one of the largest agricultural equipment suppliers in the U.S., and should be no stranger to our shops in the pet industry. We hope to see our list of integrated vendors continue to expand in a way that will help your shop manage purchase orders.

Vendor integrations have three prominent features in MerchantOS, among others. Before any of these will work, you want to take a few minutes to go into Admin > Vendors and click the Pencil next to vendors you want to setup. Make sure all of your account information is entered correctly.

Let’s explore those features

Catalog Sync

This kind of integration allows us to contact the vendor’s servers each night and automatically download the complete catalog to make sure you have the most current catalog updates. You can configure whether or not you update the Price or Cost in Admin > Vendors.

This feature is available for all of our integrated bike vendors BTI, Downeast, Giant, Hans Johnsen, Hawley, J&B, KHS, QBP, Seattle Bike Supply, Specialized as well as our first integration outside of the bicycle industry, Bradley Caldwell.

Purchase Order Upload

This advanced integration allows you to create a Purchase Order within MerchantOS but instead of emailing the order like you can with the non-integrated vendors you have an Online Ordering option within the Purchase Order. This will allow you to instantly relay your order to the selected vendor for fulfillment.

This feature is exclusive to Giant, Hawley, J&B, QBP and Specialized.

Invoice Download

This is another kind of integration found within a Purchase Order in the Online Ordering section. Instead of creating the order within MerchantOS, you would place the order on your vendor’s side and download the Invoice into a Purchase Order. Select your Vendor Invoice number which has the date and the order total ($) next to it. After clicking the Import / Synchronize Invoice button all of your items will populate in the Purchase Order. The only thing left to do on the Purchase Order is Check-In the inventory and mark it as Finished.

At this time, this awesome feature is exclusive to Hawley, QBP, and Specialized.

With our latest release we are now sending product UPCs, EANs, manufacturer product numbers, and custom SKUs to Shopify in what are known as Metafields. Metafields are a special object on Shopify that allow us to store information that otherwise isn’t supported in the Shopify API. Metafields are not visible in the Shopify interface, but they can be accessed using the Liquid templating language.

Metafields have a namespace and are attached to specific resources in Shopify. We are using the “merchantos” namespace to send our Metafield information and are attaching it to variants.

So to display the UPC information for all of a product’s variants in your Liquid template you could use code similar to:

 {% for variant in product.variants %} {{variant.metafields.merchantos.upc}} {% endfor %} 

You must save a product in MerchantOS for the new Metafields data to be exported.

We are always looking for ways to improve our integrations, and appreciate your feedback. We are working on more improvements to our Shopify integration and will be posting more information when it becomes available.

If you have any questions feel free to contact us.

In our latest release we’ve made a few adjustments to how the API works. None of these changes should break compatibility.

Reduced API Rate Limit Penalty

We had a penalty included in our API for when an application went over their call limit. We had found that this penalty was too harsh and we’ve reworked it to allow applications using our API to hit the call limit occasionally without penalizing them.

Return 503 When Over Rate Limit

Previously we had been returning a 500 error when an application went over it’s call limit. We’ve changed that to a 503 Service Unavailable error as that better reflects the error.

JSON input and output

We’ve also been working on adding JSON input and output for requests. Previously we could output JSON, but now we can accept JSON for requests that require a request body.

Disabled WWW-Authenticate header for AJAX Requests

If you are sending an AJAX request we will no longer be sending the WWW-Authenticate header as this causes UI issues with browsers. All other clients will still receive the WWW-Authenticate header when their request could not be authenticated.

Setting a Default Limit on Listing Requests

Previously we did not page results by default. This was causing issues with very large result sets. Now listing requests (such as requesting all items) will by default return 100 objects per request. This behavior can be over-ridden using the limit and offset query parameters (see the API search manual page: https://manual.merchantos.com/index.php/API_Searching). We are also returning the total count of objects, the current offset and limit for a request as attributes on the outer object tag when we automatically limit a request.

Tagging

We have added the ability to write tags through our API. Objects supporting tags (currently only Items) will have a Tags element containing the tags on the object if there are any. The count of the tags will be returned as an attribute of the Tags element.

Tags can be added to an Object by adding xml similar to below:

<Tags>
    <Tag>
        <name>foobar</name>
    </Tag>
</Tags>

The tag does not have to already exist in the account you are accessing, it will be generated when your object is submitted.

All Tags can be accesses through the new Account/<AccountNumber>/Tag endpoint. This will show you how many tags there are as well as what objects are associated with that tag.

Bug fix to IN queries

We fixed a bug that was preventing queries with the IN search operator from executing properly. Queries like the following should now execute:
https://api.merchantos.com/Account/<AccountNumber>/Item?itemID=IN,[2,4,6,8]

More Improvements to Come!

We’re open to your feed back. If you have any questions about the changes we’re introducing please feel free to contact us. If you are having a problem with our API let us know and we will work with you to resolve it. Thanks again to all of the developers using our API for their valuable feedback. We’re working on even more improvements and we will post again when they are released.

Templates you say?

Yes, templates I say. Our advanced users (read: tech savvy) now have a way of customizing print jobs from MerchantOS. This feature has been out for a few months now and I thought it’d be nice to give it some deserved recognition. It allows you to safely create a template for your sale receipts, product labels, transfer receipts, workorder receipts, and even purchase order receipts.

We have some stellar examples of templates in our GitHub repository to get you started making snazzier burn marks on your thermal paper.
 

What if I don’t want to make snazzy templates, how about practical ones?

Well fine! Let Uncle Sam down you unpatriotic heathens! For all you busybodies, templates are a great feature for you to experiment with. Want a Facebook footer on the bottom of your receipt? Done. Think we give too much customer information on our receipts? What do you say we hide your customers email and phone number for you? Want to include the Vendor ID on your labels? Ivan took care of that request for you.

WOW! Is there anything that templates can’t do for my shop?

As much as I’d like to write down “iron your clothes, babysit your kids and run your business for you” there are some actual limitations to the current build of our templates. If you are using integrated credit card processing you will notice you won’t be getting a signature copy. That is something we will be implementing in the near future. There are some other limitations, but a general rule – if it’s in the XML, it’s possible to display.

You didn’t answer all of my questions! Where can I find more information on templates?

Your first stop is our manual page.

If you need to learn more about the template language you’ll be writing in you can review the Twig documentation here.

Now that you understand what you’re writing in and how to implement this, the only thing you’ll need to supplement creating said snazzy templates is our API documentation.

We’re looking forward to seeing what you folks can come up with. Now do your patriotic duty and go make us all proud with your .tpl renditions that will help our staff get groped less by TSA agents. Or better your shop, I guess. If you feel like sharing your creativity you can send those templates to murdoc@merchantos.com and we’ll review the .tpl and host it on GitHub.

Cheers!

If you are still having issues printing from Chrome, you can consult our Google Chrome manual page for more advanced setup options.

Yes, you finally have a choice between browsers!

Mozilla Firefox hasn’t worked well for all of our customers, but we officially supported Firefox because it was one of the few good browsers that allowed you to change your Page Setup.

However, Firefox’s monopoly on being able to print reliable receipts and labels is coming to an end today. If you are a Windows 7 user or are a Mac user on Lion OSX 10.7 you can now use Google Chrome to print receipts and labels. Let’s get started with the instructions for both Windows and Mac:

Windows 7

1. You’ll want to create a new shortcut for Google Chrome on your desktop.
2. Right-click, select Properties.
3. On the Shortcut tab you will see the Target field. At the end of C:\Users\”Computer Name”\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe append –disable-print-preview

4. Click OK

Note: If you launch an older shortcut of Google Chrome, say from your taskbar, this will not work. You want to launch Chrome from the shortcut you configured.

OSX 10.7 Lion

1. In Chrome, click File, then click Print.
2. Change your Paper Size to 72mm * 2000mm

3. You will want to change the same settings you would change in Firefox, you will start with changing Layout to Printer Features.

Note: The only difference between the Firefox setup and the Chrome setup on Macs is you do not have to go to File, then Page Setup; it’s all on the Print dialogue box.
All other functions and features work exactly the same in Google Chrome. From our testing we’ve noticed it is a much faster browser and even improves the MerchantOS user interface. We are happy to support this software so if you have any additional questions for us call our support line at 866-554-2453 ext. 0 or email us at support@merchantos.com and we’d be glad to help.

Cheers!

How Automatic Inventory Checkins Work

When you sell inventory and you have none in stock, our system will now check if you have any inventory on your PO or transfers. If you do, the system will automatically add enough units from the PO or transfer to cover the sale. You can still check in the remaining inventory and complete your POs and transfers when you are ready. All inventory that has been automatically added from your POs and transfers can be seen in the new sales tab within the PO or transfer. For this feature to work, the PO needs to be in the status ordered or check-in. Transfers need to be in status sent.

Why is improved inventory logging important?

Every single change to your inventory is now recorded in a log. We’ve also made it easy for you to see these logs and filter them into sets of changes (for example all changes made because of sales) or by individual changes (eg. inventory automatically added for a sale).

With the new logging functionality, you’ll always know how your inventory has been affected. Also our support will be able to know exactly what’s going on with your inventory and give you more informed answers to your questions.

What has changed because of inventory logging?

Some reports have been replaced with the inventory logs report. The Inventory Adjustments, Sales, and Purchases reports have been removed. The new Inventory logs report can quickly generate the same information for you.

In the item view you’ll notice the history tab is different. There used to be four listings for the ways the item’s inventory has been affected in the past. This tab now shows only the item’s inventory log which is all the same information but will be more detailed and easy to filter for all future inventory changes.

Wording Change On Special Orders

We have made no changes to the functionality of special orders but you will notice that we have changed the wording of a special order that is ready for pickup from “complete” to “ready” or “ready for pickup”. The term complete was causing some confusion about the entire special order being complete and given to the customer when really it just meant the order process was completed and the customer could now come by and grab their order.

Development Progress

We’ve been working hard to speed up our development cycle and I’m happy to say we are at a much more acceptable pace. Expect to see some more awesome enhancements and more of your feedback in our system soon.

What do you think?

Please share your thoughts and ideas in the comments section after you’ve had a chance to check out the changes.

How To Get Setup To Accept Debit Cards

If you are already processing through Element, you just need to contact them at 866.435.3636 and ask to purchase a driverless PIN pad for use with MerchantOS. If you are not with Element, you will need to get a merchant account setup with them and be sure to ask for a driverless PIN pad during that process.

Why Might You Want To Accept Debit Cards?

Debit card processing fees may be cheaper than credit card fees depending on the size of the majority of your transactions. Element can do a rate quote to let you know if you would save money on Debit transactions by looking at your transaction history. Also, due to the use of a PIN number, the payments are less susceptible to fraud and chargebacks. There are some drawbacks though which include lower spending limits than normal credit cards.

What Took Us So Long?

Since we are web based, it’s difficult to communicate with hardware such as PIN pads from the web browser. We had to wait for the right technology to come along that could allow our software to securely communicate with the PIN pad. Element Payment Services understood this need and was the first we are aware of that can allow us to process these transactions from a browser using their driverless pin pad.

Other Advantages To The PIN Pad

If you use a driverless PIN pad for all your transactions with MerchantOS, including manual entry credit card transactions, you will be at the lowest level of the PCI questionnaires for retailers (SAQ B) to achieve PCI (Payment Card Industry) security compliance. This is because no unencrypted cardholder data ever gets on your computer. It is encrypted by the driverless PIN pad before it leaves the device allowing the device to be considered a stand alone terminal. This also means that while compliance is easier, actual safety of your customer’s cardholder data is dramatically improved.

More PIN Pad Support Coming

We plan to support PIN Pads with other processors as the ability to do so becomes available.