Ok, now for a little GoodGeeking on MeCommerce™. First things first: a big huge shout out to the MeCommerce beta participants. Thank you… thank you… thank you!!! Your comments during the last 3 weeks have led to dozens of improvements. No quality assurance team could have done better. The wisdom of the crowds live!
The pop-up product details window has been released. This appears on the order frame, and on the product/ISBN/UPC search page.
In two weeks or so, a blog/website partner can write up information or a review on the products that he or she sells.
I have picked out some features and bugs that we improved based on beta user feedback.
Load/Save feature on Create page: People were not happy that they could not save their product lists so we responded quickly to this. So now people can save their lists and rotate them as they see fit.
Merchant FAQ and home page changes: This should have been obvious to us because we got hundreds of the same questions over and over again. Since we improved the FAQ, general questions dropped dramatically. The bad news is we miss all the questions: So ask any question, what’s our horoscopes? …name of the GoodStorm mascot? …the weather in San Francisco. Really, you can ask us anything and we’ll try to answer.
Inventory updating/integration with our search engine: Another duh! missed item. After agreeing to ship some orders out, we found that they were not available so we tightened our real-time inventory systems. It will be hard to perfect this because we have a very fluid and dynamic inventory but we think we’re as good as it gets here.
Fixed bug in searches that was causing some product boxes to only fill with half of the tags, and then the remaining as random: Ok this was just plain annoying and we squashed this bug with gusto!
"Shipped" email notices fixed: People who ordered were wondering what happened to their order.
Automate credit card captures at shipment notification time: “You mean we need to get paid to do Capitalism Done Right?”
Added option to disable the "support this website" text at top of product box: Some folks really hated the “support my website” message. Someone said they felt like they were begging. Sorry about making you feel that way.
Re-arranged Create page, including a full preview box so you can see how your product serving box would look like. A lot of people wanted this feature.
We also released version 1 of the basic MeCommerce API. If you’re developer, we think you’ll really appreciate this API. It will only get better. Moreover, there is documentation, plus a developer registration page.
For developers on the program, the script function you currently use is unchanged, except that it defaults to returning in the XML format now. That function can return as XML, JSON, or plain. The catalog search does XML or JSON.
Finally the MeCommerce API with developer registration, logging, and queries: This was a big win for us. We heard through the geekvine that Mambo (http://www.mamboserver.com/) and Joomla (http://www.joomla.org/) developed extensions for their respective environments using our MeCommerce API. We can’t wait to see the final implementation.
We will have a lot more coming in the next few weeks and we are confident that we are on our way to empowering people, non-profits, small companies, really everyone who shares our philosophy of doing good whenever and wherever we can.
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