Point of Sale Software by MerchantOS

MerchantOS Pride!

Justin Laing — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 23:11:39 +0000

We were stoked to see Jay from Bicycle Cafe (in BC, Canada) wearing one of our T-shirts!

Come see us at Interbike to pick up one of these red hot t-shirts.

We Can Print Jewelry Labels!

Scott Kern — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 19:32:02 +0000

These rat tail labels are perfect for marking jewelry, clothing, electronics or anything else a larger label won’t fit on.

The dimensions of the label are 2″x1″.

After you remove and fold it, it’s only .75″x.5″ minus the tail!

If you would like to use/setup jewelry labels, check out our online manual.

Waiting On Hold When You Call?

Ivan Stanojevic — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 22:48:08 +0000

I’ve never liked being put on hold to wait for a representative. This makes a potentially short support or sales call last a lot longer. Because of this distaste we have never been eager to use a live caller queue where you wait in line on hold to be helped. Instead, if we don’t pickup immediately, we have you leave a voicemail then call you back as quickly as we can.

Here are some benefits we’ve noticed to this method.

Our customers don’t get put on hold.
We can get the most knowledgeable person to call back based on the voicemail.
Other employees can help if there are too many voicemails to call back (they don’t need to be added to a pool of potential representatives to ring).

Disadvantages

Some people prefer to wait on hold.
Leaving a voicemail is unconventional for some which leads to people trying repeated calls on all extensions.

What do you think about how we handle the phones?

Embracing Failure For Better Success

Ivan Stanojevic — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 18:39:10 +0000

Justin and I have come to accept in running a business that we’re going to fail. The trick for us has been identifying and containing our failures as quickly as possible. We believe this has ultimately led to the general success of our company.

Failure = Success?

I would be lying to you if I said we knew exactly what we need to do with every dollar we earn and every decision we must make. Many times despite trying to make as informed a decision as possible, we end up having to use our instincts and feelings. Unfortunately that leads to the wrong answers sometimes. Once we understand a mistake was made we are able to understand more fully why that was the incorrect action. We then use that information in future decisions which will continue to lead to the ultimate success of our company.

Risk vs. Reward

If you don’t take chances, you are going to drastically limit your likelihood of success. Taking too many risks can lead to the ultimate failure of your business. Recognizing failure however, allows you to take more risks with less cost. It’s extremely important to try new things but when you do, you need to be prepared to carefully watch progress and results. Identify small tweaks that need to be made and nurture your decision as much as possible. Just as quickly though, be prepared to recognize a failure and try again on something different.

Our most recent large failure

We make a few smaller mistakes pretty regularly. These are often small enough that they have little or no effect on our business and are easily reversible. But when I think of the most recent large expenditure on a failed endeavor, I think of our attempt to build our own e-commerce system. We went into it with huge ambitions thinking we could do it better than everyone else. As the project progressed, we realized it was distracting us from our point of sale system and we also realized it was going to take a long time to have our system be as good as other already existing e-commerce services.

Eventually we understood we could not continue on that path and killed the project. On reflection I realize that I understood our failure long before we killed the project. The biggest mistake we made was allowing the project to progress the additional time between when I sensed failure and when we actually killed the project. It’s difficult to pull back on something we’ve spent so much effort on but if we’re fairly certain of failure, we need to get out as soon as possible. I think this is the most important lesson we learned out of this particular failure and my hope is you can use our failures to your benefit.

What are your worst failures and how did you use them later towards your own success?

More Workorder Improvements

Justin Laing — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 05:33:18 +0000

We’ve taken a bunch of your feedback and put it to work. It should be a lot faster and easier to fill out a workorder.

Here are some of the changes we just did:

No need to open an editing area to change the workorder status, employee, item, etc. Edit away and your changes are saved instantly.
Added Save Parts check box.
Added “Assign To All Lines” next to the employee selector at the top of the workorder. This assigns the employee to all lines on the workorder.
Arrange the order of all workorder statuses, including the built in Open, Waiting, Estimate, Finished, and Done & Paid.
You can assign custom colors to all workorder statuses.
Plus some other tweaks we hope you like.

How did we do? Please let us know. We’ll keep making tweaks to workorders for a couple more releases before we move away to other areas for a while.

Your Feedback On The New Workorder Interface

Justin Laing — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 00:45:19 +0000

You’ve given us some valuable feedback on the new workorder interface. Here’s a run down of some of the changes we are planning to implement that you’ve suggested:

While Editing A Workorder

Add “Parts” and “Labor” subtotals under the workorder $ Total.
Add a “Save Old Parts” check box.
Add a Price column to labor tasks that shows calculated price if hours/minutes have been entered and the shop has a service rate set.
Have the add “Labor” dialog have the same fields as when you edit a Labor task. So you can do things like set the employee while you’re creating the task.
Add a way to set the employee for the entire workorder and all lines at once.
Set colors on your custom statuses, highlight the workorder with that color when you’re editing it.

Workorder Listing

Custom workorder status colors will be displayed here as well.
Add columns for Hook #, Total $.
Add color to item description.

Future Planned Changes

Better Tag Printouts: we know the “Tag” print out needs a lot of improvement. We’d like to make something that resembles a traditional workorder write up.
Remove the Misc. Button: we are either going to completely do away with Misc. charges or at least make having the button optional (and off by default).
Custom Quick Add Menus: these menus would give you a quick way to navigate to commonly used parts and services. The main register interface is going to get these as well.

Removing Cost From Labor

We’d like to remove cost from labor. I know a lot of you are going to say “no, we need cost on our labor to see our profit and margins!!” Here’s the thing: Putting in a cost estimate on your labor is going to really mess up your books, and give you incorrect information. Here are some examples of why putting costs on your labor is a bad idea:

Double Entry Of Labor Costs: When your information from MerchantOS is imported into your accounting software (probably QuickBooks) it’s going to enter costs associated with your labor sales. Then when you enter your employees payroll, your rent, utilities, etc, you are double entering your labor costs.
Fake Profits and Margins: You can’t exactly predict the cost of your labor before hand. What if your mechanics are especially slow or fast this month? That will change your labor margin.

In short labor costs, profits, and margins should be calculated after everything (payroll, rent, utilities, tool purchase, etc) is entered into your accounting software.

Keep The Feedback Coming!

Goal Reached: 500 Retail Locations Using MerchantOS

Justin Laing — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 00:03:05 +0000

We recently reached a milestone: Over 500 retail locations are now using MerchantOS. We’ve processed $358 million in sales on 3.59 million transactions. Awesome!

Thank you for helping to make our dream a reality! We couldn’t do it without you.

We are dedicated to keep improving our software and customer service as we grow. And with your help we are racing towards another goal: 1,000 retail locations using our services.

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions we would love to hear them. Your input is what keeps our company constantly improving.

Get ready for the workorder update

Ivan Stanojevic — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 00:46:51 +0000

We’ve finally worked in a lot of improvements on workorders based on our last whiteboard session. New workorders have been available as an option to enable/disable in the system under Admin->General options for around two months. We want to thank the users who gave us their feedback during that period. The new workorder system is very similar to the old system giving you very little trouble adjusting. This is the plan for updating your shop if you haven’t already made the switch.

Email Announcement (1/14): All accounts that have recent workorder activity will have emails sent to every user regarding the update.
Soft Force Update (1/18): All accounts will be switched to the new workorder system. Users not ready for this switch can switch back.
Old Workorder System Shutdown (1/27)

What’s Different?

You will find two major changes. In new workorders you can not edit a workorder until you first attach a customer. Upon creating a workorder, you will see a screen with blank fields for all the customer’s information. Start filling out this form and a list to the right will start suggesting customers that match the information you are typing in. The form doubles as a way to create new customers or find existing customers. Most importantly this will help you avoid making duplicate customers.

The second difference is workorders can now be edited from the register in addition to being edited from the workorder menu as they always have been. This should not interfere with the way you use workorders but we hope it will give you an additional way to easily edit workorders while working with a customer without leaving the register.

There are more new features coming to workorders that we hope will make them even quicker and easier for you to use. This includes the ability to add in custom status options and a way to have a menu of common tasks and items you can display on screen and add to your workorder.

If you need help during any part of this process please call support at 866 554 2453. If you notice anything you think we can do better in new workorders, we would love to hear from you as well.

Meet Us At A Trade Show

Ivan Stanojevic — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 06:48:10 +0000

We’re booked for a few trade shows the first few months of the year. We would love to see any of you customers who can make it by the booth. If you’re not a customer come on by the booth for a live demo and to meet Justin and I.

Want to see us at a show you like? please comment on those shows below this post. We’re always looking for more shows where we can spread the message.

Outdoor Retailer Winter Market
January 21-24 | Salt Lake City, UT | Booth 177
San Francisco International Gift Fair
February 6-9 | San Francisco, CA | Booth 1716
Frostbike
February 20-21 | Minneapolis, MN
SPREE
April 13-15 | Las Vegas, NV | Booth 203

MailChimp Integration Brings Marketing Solutions

patrick — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 23:33:27 +0000

As a new member of MerchantOS my first project has been to integrate MailChimp as a MerchantOS Addon. If you haven’t heard of MailChimp,

MailChimp, a leading do-it-yourself marketing service, provides tools to over 200,000 small businesses, design agencies, non-profits, restaurants, and e-Commerce organizations worldwide.

As a web developer I see them as a great web service with a powerful API. They also offer a helpful API wrapper that can get any PHP project off the ground quickly. So quickly that our service with MailChimp should be available early in 2010.

Our integration revolves around populating the primary unit of storage MailChimp offers, the member list. We will allow our merchants to sync their customer list to a member list in MailChimp. Accordingly, if a merchant edits a customer’s information in her customer database, that change is reflected in the MailChimp list auto-magically. This means you’ll be able to send emails to your customers in mass or send an email on your customers birthday automatically (for example).