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Doing what we can
Posted on December 28, 2011 at 11:54 am by Rob Richards
The MerchantOS Corporate Giving Program
I recently learned that for about five years now, MerchantOS has been quietly giving it’s software away to non-profit organizations all over the country that do good work in their local communities. We have no personal connection to them, we just like that they’re giving back, and like the idea that we can support their work. Since it’s my job to highlight all the cool things we do at MOS, I put together the following showcase, partly to show off the cool orgs we support, and partly to give props to VP Christina Gilpin, who originally thought up the idea, and ran with it, right after she was hired five years ago. I caught up with Christina, and asked her how the idea originated in the first place. She said it just seemed natural -
“…these non profits do so much for their communities…and if we can help them be even that much more successful, then that is just awesome” (more…)
New Login Page
Posted on December 20, 2011 at 9:07 am by Justin Laing
You’ll soon be greeted by a different looking login page. Don’t panic, nothing catastrophic has happened. Here’s what it will look like:
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.
Weekly Rewind Christmas Party Edition
Posted on December 16, 2011 at 8:00 am by Rob Richards
The end of the year is coming up fast and at MOS we are busy little bees, taking care of business, as well as planning for big things in the new year. As 2012 approaches, keep your eyes peeled for more on our hopes and dreams for the coming year.
Christmas is right around the corner and we’ve got the spirit! Our Christmas party was a blast! Ivan even made a surprise visit to Olympia to join in the festivities. There was dinner, drinks, conversation, drinks, karaoke, dancing, shouting, and there was also some drinks.
From the ether…
What Louis C.K. Teaches Us About the Power of the Web For DIY Content Distribution – My favorite comedian, Louis C.K., has just self-released a stand up special that he’s selling for $5 on his website. By skipping all of the traditional methods, he’s been able to keep the price way down, and still turn a profit. Has he just changed everything? Read his latest statement here
Fight Club Soap, Sex Panther Cologne, And More Pop Culture Holiday Gift Ideas From Omni Products
The Milky Way’s black hole may spring to life in 2013 – My New Year’s Resolution? Don’t get sucked into a black hole.
Hipstamatic Introduces ‘World’s First Social Camera’
Credit Sesame Brings Your Credit Score To The iPhone. For Free.
Buying Wins – a brilliant blog post from HappyCog’s Joe Rinaldi on business development.
Weekly Workaround Mass Imports
Posted on December 14, 2011 at 8:00 am by Chris Lange
Mass importing from the catalogs via Purchase Orders:
The vendor catalogs in MerchantOS can be used as an excellent resource and a total time-saver. Rather than typing in all of an item’s details, you can search these catalogs and simply import items. But you might have noticed that if you go to the standard ‘Item Search’, you have to search and import these items one at a time. Not ideal! But within ‘Purchase Orders’, you can select multiple items, even entire pages of results, and import them swiftly into your local inventory, with or without quantities on hand. Here’s how:
- Create a new Purchase Order. In case you’re brand new, these are found within the Inventory tab, then Purchase Orders. Click the New Purchase Order button near the top.
- Select the vendor that your inventory is going to be imported from, then click Save.
- Go down to the Item Search field. In this box, type in either something specific you’re looking for such as the exact item(s) or something more generic, like “wheel”. If you only want to search this vendor’s catalog, uncheck the “Search All Catalogs” checkbox.
NOTE: You can technically import/add items from ANY catalog into the same PO — however, they won’t have a VendorID and they’ll be marked as received from the vendor attached to the PO.
- Unless you got an exact match (unlikely), you’ll get a search results page. Now find all the items you’d like to import and check their boxes on the far left of each item. Once all have been checked, go to the bottom of the results page and click the Import/Add Selected button.
- NOTE: MerchantOS won’t save the boxes you’ve checked if you move onto another page of results. If you want more results to show up so you can import more at once, change the amount of results per page by clicking the underlined number per page:
- If all you want to do is have those items in your local inventory, then you’re good to go. You can leave this Purchase Order or change its status to Finished and you’ll see those items within your local inventory with 0 quantity. If you’re importing these items as a way of adding inventory, change the quantities to the amounts on hand for each item. Now continue with the PO like you normally would — change the status to Check-In:
- Click Mark All Items Received and Add Items to Inventory
- Change status to Finished
You know have all these new items imported from the catalog with their current quantities.
Accounting Note: If you finished the PO and added inventory, this will reflect on your reports. If you need to avoid a double entry in your chart of accounts in QuickBooks you may not want to include POs in your next export.
“We Are A Lifestyle Business…”
Posted on December 12, 2011 at 5:31 pm by Justin Laing
“…And Proud Of It”
…This is a sentence disdained by Venture Capitalists and others who would look to turn a quick buck off of our hard work. What does this mean to us?
- We’re doing what we love. We’re geeks, we love technology, we love building stuff, growing a business, and learning new things all the time.
- Building a place to work where I would myself want to be an employee. I can’t in good conscious approach being an employer in any other way.
- Treating our customers how I would want to be treated. It constantly amazes me when I see business after business treat customers in a way they themselves would never want to be treated.
- We put building a great product, service, and company over profit. Of course we want to be rich, that would be awesome. But we’re not sacrificing our product, our work environment, or how we treat our customers for the sake of eking out a better profit margin.
- Growth at a rate we can handle. We have no problem with growing, and I think it’d be awesome to build MerchantOS into a huge company. But we want to grow at a rate that allows us to do great work. Often when companies grow too fast they start producing crappy products and services. They hire people they shouldn’t, they stop listening to their customers, and waste a lot of money in the process.
- Staying focused. We’re here to help small retailers by providing awesome software. We aren’t chasing some giant customer that will double our revenue overnight and change our business completely. We’re in this for the long haul.
- Surfing. I love surfing. As Yvon Chouinard said: Let my people go surfing.
Venture Capital
As our business grows and our good fortune continues we get more and more requests from VC’s and other institutional investors. They see a good thing and they want in. But here’s the rub…
They don’t want to invest in a lifestyle business. Specifically to them this means we should:
- Chase the big opportunities. Grow big as fast as possible, add revenue as quickly as possible, go after those big fish that can make this happen. This leads to…
- Hire a sales force. We love the fact we don’t have dedicated sales people. We want you to buy our software when you are ready. We want to provide a service that is so clearly superior and offers so much value that you can’t resist paying us the small monthly fee. We don’t want to take the money and run. As I said… We’re in this for the long haul, we want a sustainable sales model.
- Scale up engineering, fast! If we’re going after those big fish with sales people who will promise the moon, we are gonna need a horde or engineers to implement all those new features. It won’t matter so much how easy those features are to use, as long as the C-level executive can put a check next to all the things on his list, you’ll make the sale. But what about the users of our slapped together feature invested software?
- Put profit before employees and customers. No matter how nice an institutional investors is as a person, they still have a primary responsibility and it isn’t our customers, employees, or us. It’s their investors, the people they took money from with the promise of a high return. That’s their job, return more money to their principals.
- Take a Series B,C… Once we’ve taken $8mill in cash and ramped up our sales and engineering team, our burn rate is going to be off the charts. It’s unlikely that our subscription revenue is going to catch up with our costs. Our costs are front loaded and our revenue comes in over time from each customer. This means if we’re growing fast we’ll be back for a Series B and C round of investment. Further down the rabbit hole we go…
- Win Big Or Go Home. VCs are looking for a big win. They are making a number of investments and on average they are going to fail. They need their winners to win big. What would be a good outcome for Ivan and I, might not satisfy them.
For now our answer is “No”
So at this point we don’t want institutional money. We don’t have a big need for it, and we don’t want all the negatives it brings with it. This means we might be sacrificing some speed that could lead a competitor to over take us. But we’re betting that focusing on our core values of creating a great place to work, building an awesome product, and providing excellent support will win in the end.
Alternatives
We’re currently working on another source of capital. We did some thinking and came up with a list of everything we wanted to do and how much it would cost in the short term. This led us to a number that’s not so big. So we’re going the traditional route: a loan from a bank. No strings attached, just a promise to pay the money back and an interest rate.
Never Say Never
There might come a time when the stars aline and a knight in shining armor appears on the hill carrying a huge brief case full of cash. So I wont’ say we’ll never take VC investment. But not right now.
What Does This Mean For You?
For our customers, this means we’re focused on creating an awesome product and providing excellent support (from our happy employees). We’re in it for the long run and we hope you are to! We’ll keep working hard to make that true.
Weekly Rewind
Posted on December 10, 2011 at 11:57 am by Rob Richards
The first week of December 2012, and we’re as busy as ever at MerchantOS.
We’ve got three new employees settling into their jobs. A big MOS welcome to Ellen, Jered, and Vanessa!
A new system update was launched which addresses a couple of small issues pertaining to: employees restricted to a shop, and tax rates shown on sales by line report. Contact our amazing support staff if you have any questions.
Also bouncing around the MOSiverse…
- NASA found an Earth-like planet, and only 600 light years away.
- Wired Magazing tells us The Right (and Wrong) Way to Die When You Fall Into Lava
- Amazon, in what seems like an attempt to undermine local retailers for their own gain, are offering people money to go into local shops and price-check products. The L.A. Times covers it here.
- Everything about the way we publish content is changing because of tablets. ReadWriteWeb’s Jon Mitchell walks us through ‘Web Publishing’s Next Level’
- He’s NOT on fire! John Timmer, over at ArsTechnica, debunks the myth that basketball players “get hot” during games. ‘NBA players wrong about “hot hands” from three-point land’
- Last but not least, Mashable gives us a look at their Top 8 iPhone games for the Holiday Season.
Happy reading, and see you next time!
Everything You Need To Know About Integrated Vendors
Posted on November 30, 2011 at 9:29 am by Murdoc Trammell
With the growing list of integrated vendors, this seems like a good time to recap the benefits of using them. Previously, this feature only benefited our customers in the bicycle industry.
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.
Weekly Workaround
Posted on November 28, 2011 at 2:00 pm by Chris Lange
As you know, MerchantOS is a pretty rad point of sale system. But we’re not perfect (yet!). There are a few features that we know you’d love to see, but for one reason or another we can’t quite offer at the moment. But don’t lose hope! I’m here to help you trick our software into doing something pretty close. This is the Weekly Workaround.
Rentals!
This is one of our most requested features, but for us to implement this, MerchantOS would need to be rewritten from the ground up (or so the almighty programmers tell me). Here are a couple of different methods to get you there, hopefully one works for you:
Method 1: The Quick n’ Dirty
Pros: Easy! Quick! Fun?
Cons: Doesn’t keep track of anything.
- This one is simple. First, create a new item, non-inventory type, and call it something like “Bike Rental: 1 Hour”.
- Ring up this item, before or after the rental, with the amount of time they want to rent for. For example, for three hours, ring up “Bike Rental: 1 Hour” x 3.
- Finish sale.
(Optional: add a deposit that can be refunded after the rental returns.)
Method 2: The Invoice
Pros: Keeps track of time.
Cons: Lengthy setup time. Two transactions needed if a deposit is required.
- This method is good if you’ve got to keep track of a rental time down to the minute. Like the method above, you’ll want to create a non-inventory item such as “Snowboard Rental: 1/4 hour”.
- Open up a new sale and attach the customer’s name to the sale. Add the “Snowboard Rental: 1/4 hour” to the sale.
- Click the “Invoice” button on the right hand side, and print out the invoice receipt on the next page. This printed invoice receipt can be given to them to keep track of, or kept in store for your records. There’s a time at the top of this receipt that can be referenced as the rental’s “Start time”.
- When the customer returns with the rental, scan the receipts barcode to re-open the sale. If they don’t have it, you can search for them in your customer database, click their name to get into their Details, then click the “Invoices” link on the left hand side. Find their rental transaction (should be the most recent) and click the “Re-open” button.
- This will re-open the original transaction back up in the register. Now adjust the quantity of the “Snowboard Rental: 1/4 hour” to reflect the time passed since the “Start time”. For example, if 2 hours and 17 minutes passed, let’s round down, and charge them for 2:15. That would be “Snowboard Rental: 1/4 hour” x 9.
- Finish the sale like normal.
(Optional: To do a deposit, you’ll have to do it in a separate transaction after you Invoiced the rental, and you can then refund the deposit when they return.)
PHEW! That may look like a lot, but these methods don’t take much time at all, especially after you’ve created all your rental items in inventory.
They’re here! Gift cards are finally here!
Posted on November 21, 2011 at 8:11 am by Murdoc Trammell
Gift cards, we have them. It was a long process going through two different printers but we finally have 500 of each type sitting in Christina’s office. They are ready to be shipped to you just in time for the holidays. I imagine you want to know more than just their availability so I’ll take on your hypothetical questions in this blog-
How do I order them?
We’ll be selling these in units of 50 gift cards at $75 (shipping included). You can order them directly through our web store.
How do I use them?
The first thing you’ll want to do is make sure you have the Gift Card module installed on your account. Not sure if you have it already? Go to your customers tab, if you see this then you’re all set. If not, you’ll want to call or email support@merchantos.com at 866-554-2453 ext. 0 and we’ll add the module to your account. This is a service we provide at no cost to you.
Now that you have the module let’s look into selling a customer a gift card.
1. Go to your Register, click New Sale
2. Attach the customer to the sale
3. Click the Gift Card button, you will be prompted with this screen-
4. Enter the Amount to put on the card and then scan the barcode into the Card Scan field
5. Click Create
6. If you see Gift Card Purchase followed by the barcode number you can proceed to Done / Pay and finish the sale.
Now how do I use these Gift Cards as payment?
1. Ring up your items just as you would normally then click Done / Pay.
2. Click the Gift Card button in the Payment section.
3. Scan or enter the barcode number into the field and click Go.
4. Finish Sale.
I don’t like your designs, how do I make my own?
Our designer Chris may be stung by this request, but that’s no kind of pain that a bottle of Knob Creek won’t numb. You can go through any third party printer you can find locally or online as long as they can provide EAN13 or UPC-A barcodes on your gift cards. We have section in our manual under Ordering Gift Cards that gives the specifics of our barcoding requirements. Any reputable card printer should be able to provide you with these type of cards.
What it comes down to is MerchantOS requires a unique 12 digit number on each card to associate the balance with it. Whether it’s written in crayon on the back of a sheet of construction paper or encoded in a EAN13 barcode what matters is the number. Scanners have just proven to be more reliable than swipes or manual entry.
What about gift cards that you swipe?
That’s a difficult question to answer. If you are using our integrated credit card processors like Element or MerchantWARE, then no. Your swiper will not read the information correctly. It’s encrypted, remember? If you happen to have an old swiper that is not encrypted you could use it to pull that data from the gift cards magnetic strip.
These gift cards should have been available to you much sooner but due to circumstances beyond our control, we weren’t able to fulfill your requests. We want to extend another apology to the customers who have waited this long. If there is anything else we can help with, do not hesitate to give us a call at 866-554-2453 ext. 0
Cheers!
What I’m Looking For When I Interview You
Posted on November 16, 2011 at 9:50 am by Justin Laing
We just completed a seriously exhausting and rigorous hiring process to find three new team members for MerchantOS. By the numbers our process looked something like this:
- Two Posts to Craig’s List, one each for Customer Hero, and Office Admin
- 117 applicants for Customer Hero
- 203 applicants for Office Admin
- 106 phone interviews (~10 minutes each)
- 43 short in person interviews (~10 minutes each)
- Seven long in person interviews (~1 hour each)
- 30+ Hours Of Interviewing Candidates
- Three awesome folks hired.
I’ve already covered our phone interview process pretty extensively: Why You Failed Our Phone Interview. So, here’s what I’m looking for in an in-person interview.
Preparation – You Ready For This?
At this point, we’ve weeded out the truly un-prepared during our phone interview. Yet still, amazingly, some people walk into an in-person interview completely unprepared. There isn’t too much to say on this one, except: do some preparing. Eat your Wheaties, get a good night’s sleep, dress appropriately (I’ll cover this a little more later), read over our website, and generally do whatever you need to do to walk in confident and prepared.
Bonus: Take some time to think about why you want this job in particular. How does it fit into your goals professionally and personally?
Nerves – The #1 Interview Killer
This one is especially hard for me to critique because I wouldn’t consider myself a super confident person socially. However, I think I can fake it long enough to get through an interview, and I think you can too. For the lucky few of you who don’t have this problem, skip on down to the over-confidence section!
Here are my main tips for playing it cool and not letting your nerves get between you and the job you want:
- Pump yourself up for the interview. Do some laugh yoga, or whatever it takes to get yourself in a positive mood.
- Cover the basics: smile, make eye contact (with each person in the interview), shake everyone’s hand, introduce yourself clearly.
- Don’t be afraid to joke around during the interview. This is a little tricky, because you don’t want to treat the whole interview as a joke, but don’t be afraid to laugh or throw out a few puns.
- Remember: we are people just like you.
- Speak clearly.
- Bring some water with you. If your mouth gets dry and it’s bothering you. Take a second to take a drink. If Steve Jobs could sip from a water bottle during a key note, you can definitely do it during a job interview.
Why it’s hard to give a thumbs up to a super nervous candidate: I just can’t accurately judge your personality. Your nervousness obscures who you really are, which is what I’m trying to find out. If I can’t find out who you really are, what motivates you, how you’re going to interact with me and the rest of the team, then I’m left with a big question mark. I’m looking for a candidate that gives me positive signals that they are the right one for the job. Nerves obscure these signals.
You Can Be Overconfident
Nervous people, skip this, it doesn’t apply to you.
Don’t walk in thinking you’ve ‘nailed it’ before you actually have. We’re interviewing a lot of people. Assume that a lot of those people are awesome too. There isn’t a lot I can say on this subject, it’s fairly straight forward–have some sprinkling of humility. Typically this is more of a problem for men, for whatever reason.
What Not To Wear
What to wear to an interview totally depends on where and with whom you are interviewing. If you’re not sure if you should wear a suit or sweat pants, you should probably ask. You need to wear something that fits with the company and people you are interviewing with. This doesn’t mean you have to look just like us, it just means you shouldn’t come in a 3 piece business suite and tie if I’m gonna be in jeans and flip flops (well that’s really Ivan’s role). It’s going to make us both uncomfortable.
Why is it important? Whether we want to or not, in some ways we are going to judge you based on your appearance. It’s just human nature and it’s extremely hard to override.
Tip: Figure out the company culture. Is it super professional (lawyer’s office?), or is it casual and laid back? Try to fit your apparel choices to this. But, I’d say it’s ok to dress up more than you think you would just coming to work on an average day. You still want to look put together and like you are taking the interview seriously.
Bonus: Think about the position you’re applying for and what sort of personality we might want to hire for that. We usually give some clues in our job description. We are not totally superficial, but again it’s human nature, and it definitely can’t hurt your prospects to try to craft your image a bit to what we are looking for.
Age, Race, Gender, Or Other Protected Status
We’ve had candidates draw attention to these issues regarding themselves during the interviews. If you do feel the need to bring it up, say, if you want to make sure it’s not an issue: Keep it brief, to the point, and then move on.
Why? Because we won’t be able to say anything in response. The only thing we can say is something really generic like “we don’t discriminate on the basis of…”. If you bring it up over and over, it makes it an uncomfortable conversation because there is nothing for us to talk about.
For example if someone is significantly older than me and they repeatedly mention this throughout the interview. I start to think “is this person going to have issues working for someone way younger?”.
We keep these issues off the table when making a decision on a candidate, and you can help by not making it the focus of your interview.
Motivation
This is a big one. Why do you want to work here? We know that no one is going to work for us forever, but we still want to know that this job is something you want to do (for reals) and you are going to be happy doing it. Hopefully you’ve thought about this before you even applied because if you really don’t want to do this type of job you’re wasting both of our time.
Personality
This is like ‘Location’ in real-estate. And unfortunately it seems you either have it or you don’t. That’s not to say that one personality is right for every job. It takes all kinds. But there are certain personalities that don’t work for a particular job. For example, if you don’t like to talk, then talking customers through problems all day on the phone is not going to work for you.
Most of the stuff I’ve written about up to this point is to get you to the point where we can fairly evaluate your personality and fit with the position. I’ve come to rely on personality as my main final criteria in picking candidates. I’ve been burned when I’ve ignored it, and delighted when I’ve focused on it.
That’s what it looks like from our side of the table. I’d love to know your opinion. Please leave a comment below.