Blog
Support Is Now Live… With Chat!
Posted on May 16, 2012 at 10:07 am by Murdoc
Some of you may recall last year that we were looking for ways to improve our manual. While our old MediaWiki-based manual served a purpose it wasn’t really addressing the needs of our customers so our developers took the Mythbusters approach to fixing it.
With that explosive end to our old ways of thinking, we start anew with the Help page. Along with our dancing lawn flamingo César, you may have noticed some of the new features:
- Finally, a robust search engine. You can get the answers you’re looking for by searching! It feels good to be in the 21st century.
- The articles are complete with integrated videos. There is no longer just a laundry list of Video Lessons to watch. Say for instance you’re trying to learn about Employee Rights; all the information on the subject will be at one location in the Help section.
- We now have feedback buttons for the articles. We’ve made strides in improvement, but we’re far from a perfect solution. Let us know how we can improve our documentation.
- Now most importantly at the bottom right you’ll see a Chat now option. Is this a trick to get you to speak with our robot overlords? Hardly.
Our newest feature in support is our integration with LiveChat, an easy way for you to get a hold of one of us. Our phone lines have been tied up more than usual lately and we don’t expect them to die down any time soon as MerchantOS continues to grow. While it may not be the same as talking with one of our awesome team members, sometimes a chat session is just what you need to get the info you’re looking for. We encourage you to try it out and let us know if our support staff is giving you the information you need.
We want you to have the epic level of support you can’t get anywhere else. Why? Because you deserve it. This isn’t flattery (okay, it is) but if you’re reading this you’re likely a business owner with more things to worry about than your point of sale.
We want MerchantOS to be the easiest part of running your business. You’re the folks that work on the weekends, that driving force that keeps the wealth away from the corporate big box stores and pumps it in to the local economy.
Let us know what you think we can do to be the easiest part of running your shop.
Developers API 2.0 Changes
Posted on May 15, 2012 at 2:49 pm by Nathan Horter
In the coming weeks we will release version 2.0 of our API. Version 2.0 includes changes to the default behavior of our API. Developers please check our post on the changes: MerchantOS API Version 2.0.
If you don’t know what an API is; ignore this and carry on.
MerchantOS is looking for input on gift card designs.
Posted on May 10, 2012 at 3:07 pm by James
Hello everyone, my name is James, one of the in-house designers at MerchantOS. I recently put together various gift card artwork to provide more options for our point of sale system users.
The designs range in many styles from bike shops, holiday, electronic stores, to random sport and pet related designs. We are hoping to get some input/feedback in order to focus on what kind of card designs you guys would prefer. Some of the designs feature generic shapes/artwork, while others are more targeted to fit with certain retail departments.
While these are not final proofs, if you could comment with your top 5 design choices, listing them using the numbers indicated in the gallery slide, it’ll make it easier to steer us in the right direction in determining where we go with this.
If you have ideas as to what kind of gift cards you’d like to see in the future, please feel free to express that in the comments. Together we can add some spice to the current pool of MerchantOS gift card designs!
Perkville Webinar Reminder!
Posted on April 9, 2012 at 2:19 pm by Murdoc
Hey there. I just wanted to give you a reminder about the MerchantOS-Perkville webinar tomorrow April 10th at 3 pm PST. You’ll learn about Perkville, a service that enables you to create a loyalty program in minutes with plans starting as low as $9 per month. It helps you get more email addresses from your customers and it drives loyalty, referrals and social media for your business.
The webinar will be setup through Fuze Meeting. You can use this link to join the meeting tomorrow at 3 or sooner, as there will be a limit of 45 attendees.
We’ll see you then!
For more information you can refer to the original post here or contact our support office at support@merchantos.com
Cheers!
Weekend Credit Card Processing Woes
Posted on April 5, 2012 at 9:14 am by Ivan Stanojevic
Last weekend a subset of our customers were affected by a Saturday morning outage on one of the gateways we partner with then later on all customers were affected by an outage by Visa. This post is to fill you in on the details of what happened and what we are doing to try to prevent future occurrences
Payment Gateway Outage Saturday Morning
On Saturday morning customers using the Element payment gateway were unable to process credit cards. This was due to an upgrade Element attempted to perform on their systems that morning. Element quickly discovered the problem and rolled back the upgrade. This happened early enough in the morning that most west coast customers probably did not notice but the parts of the country that already had their day well under way did notice leaving us 49 urgent voicemails with many more non-urgent messages while we were investigating the problem.
Element has recently contacted us directly to let us know what exactly happened and how they will safely perform this upgrade. They also decided to perform the upgrade over the next three Monday mornings when retail traffic is much lighter. I am now confident they will be able to get this done without further interruption and we’ll be standing by watching out during the upgrade.
Visa Outage
Visa decided the weekend wasn’t exciting enough for MerchantOS and had a major outage of their own Sunday afternoon. Fortunately Sunday is one of the lowest retail volume days of the week but customers still noticed and called in. We don’t know too much about what happened here but they did let the press know.
We’re Doing What We Can
These particular events were out of our direct control. Our systems might have been able to handle the Element outage with more grace and we are looking into ways to do that. These kinds of issues are the worst for our customers as they prevent sales and we are doing everything we can to prevent future incident.