Recently, our office finished reading Tribal Leadership as a group. Since Justin and Ivan discovered this book, we have been trying to identify our values here at MerchantOS. During our first quarter reviews, we all wrote down some things that we value as a company. Continue reading
Recently a challenge appeared before the Support Heroes locked away in their Olympic ivory tower. A MerchantOS customer wrote in to support asking us, what is the best way to pay for the customer’s sales taxes? This was a promotional sale and another good strategy to keep that momentum going from this past holiday season.
I remember when we used to do these workarounds weekly, but we’ve all been pretty busy staring out into the Puget Sound from the new MerchantOS HQ. Well some days, not as much.
Now the point of this article is to go over this often asked question, how do I set an item aside for store use?
Centralized ordering has come to MerchantOS! The model behind this feature is having one location (warehouse or distribution center) that handles everything your business needs to (re)order across all shops. The Master Order feature can be utilized by single location shops to easily manage orders between multiple vendors.
It wasn’t impossible to do this before, it just wasn’t easy. What I’m about to cover now is just how easy it is to order inventory from one location, yet manage multiple stores. If the shelves are looking bare at your shop, you can use transfers to place your order from your warehouse instead of your vendor. This can save your business the shipping expenses and the time it takes to manage your warehouse.
Read all about Master Orders in MerchantOS Help →
While we do have a help article covering the basics, I’m sure some of you will have questions or feedback about Master Orders. Feel free to leave them in the comments below or contact support at support@merchantos.com or chat now with one of our reps.
Cheers!
I wish I could say that riding a Komodo dragon and snapping pictures of my friend trying to make out with a bronze Orangutan was the strangest thing that happened to me on this last trip. But it wasn’t, this was Toronto – a strange and wonderful megalopolis in Ontario, Canada. Here’s what I was up to while avoiding your emails and calls.
I felt an unease as my 26th birthday approached. I began to panic, I didn’t know what I wanted to do but I knew whatever it was, I didn’t want to do it in Olympia. A few Skype messages later I decided to meet up with my old drinking buddy from college, Matt Funston, the aforementioned primate lover. He’s a soft-faced, loveable man-child that likes to use a Scottish accent while drinking. To this day I’m not sure if he has control over that or not.
Matt and I met at the iconic Sneaky Dee’s on College Street where our empty stomachs could not meet the challenge of The Destroyer – a TexMex mutation of the Canadian staple, poutine. We were, as our clever waitress put it, destroyed by The Destroyer – easily a meal for two and probably the calories for a large family with a golden retriever. Happy birthday, to me.
While The Destroyer may have not made the best first impression of fries covered in gravy and cheese curds, Smoke’s Poutinerie on Queen Bathurst certainly made up for the overwhelming monstrosity from the previous evening. I’m not sure how the Canadians came up with it, but I am convinced that it is in fact, the best bar food. It’s delicious, soaks up alcohol surprisingly well, and practically every place that takes money serves it. The other trademark Canadian thing was the Caesar, a fiery Tabasco infused Bloody Mary, it didn’t help my daily hangovers, but it was a good drink to start the mornings with.
There’s this saying that if you choose a job you love, you will never have to work a day in your life. If any of that is true, then I enjoyed not working during my visit to Evymama, a nursing – maternity store that uses MerchantOS to its full potential. I made a special trip out to their shop to say howdy and see if there was anything I could help with. Of course the day I show up, nothing is wrong except for the mystery of the ghost customer. A customer that no longer frequents their shop would constantly appear in the register. This mystery was cracked by my nerd super powers, which involved updating their bad link to MerchantOS from https://east1.merchantos.com/register.php?form_name=select_customer&customer_id=22 to https://shop.merchantos.com. Matt managed to snag this stock-quality good photo of my heroic deeds. With the phantom customer slain for eternity, shop owner Sarah rewarded us with local knowledge and guidance on our next quest to find authentic Greek food. Little did we know what perils were ahead of us on our journey down Danforth Ave.
Danforth Avenue is home to one of Toronto’s most vibrant, blue and white pride neighborhoods, known as Greektown. We found Avli, a lovely Greek restaurant managed by a passionate football fan. The prix-fixe lunch consisted of a beautiful collection of dolmades, a hearty moussaka, and a dessert I still don’t know how to pronounce, Galaktobouriko. Pairing this with an Alfa and Mythos, both wonderfully hoppy Greek beers was what we needed to prepare for the engagement ahead of us. Unbeknownst to me and my comrade, the Eurocup Finals were going on that week. The Greek vs. Poland game was winding down as we paid our tab, so as we left the restaurant we were greeted by a mob of proud Greek football fanatics spilling out into the street. As we made our descent into the madness a voice static and loud let out “IMAGINE IF WE HAD WON!” followed cheers and forest of hands sprouting to the sky. These folks were just happy to have tied with Poland. That neutered momentum was still a joy to behold and this kind of exuberance for the Eurocup was not exclusive to Greektown.
Toronto is reputed to be one of the most culturally and ethnically diverse cities in the world. With more than 80 ethnic communities represented, it is a real treat to go into those vibrant neighborhoods. The hostel I stayed in was between Little Italy and Kensington Market (a fantastic place reminiscent of Portland, OR). During what brief time I had to myself, I made my own adventures to Koreatown, walked in amazement on Spadina through an enormous Chinatown, and got lost in Little Portugal.
The neighborhoods I visited flowed with unusually polite and beautiful people. Some hopped up on Tim Horton’s, other faces glistening red with tears of joy or sadness from the rush of the Eurocup, and just a handful of sleepy faces loosely smiling as they recover from the night before. After just six days of falling asleep to sounds of street car bells, chirping like birds at 5 am, Toronto became a place I feel like I can come home to.
Cheers!
If your shop is planning on taking in used items for consignment, trade, or both, here’s the simple setup for the best workaround.
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:
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.
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!
You may have noticed that dollar discounts can’t be applied to a final sales total, only individual line items. Coupon items allow you to work around this by subtracting an amount from an entire sale.
Visit MerchantOS Help “Workaround: Coupon Items” and learn more →
You may have heard some scuttlebutt on our latest integration, Perkville. You probably have more questions about what features it offers, pricing levels, and how it works with MerchantOS. You can get those questions answered in our upcoming Perkville Webinar featuring the founder of Perkville and the developer, Sunil Saha. He will be joined by two staff from MerchantOS, Christina Gilpin (VP of Customer Relations, aka, our Customer Advocate), and Ciara Wolfe (Customer Support Hero).
Now if you haven’t heard anything on Perkville, now would be a great time to look into this up and coming software as a service. Rob Richards took the time to set up his integration in just 30 minutes, so I’m sure you can do in half the time. Here’s what he had to say about it.
How can it benefit your shop? MerchantOS does not have every feature in the book. Our design philosophy of Retail.Easy couldn’t realistically be met if we added every feature someone thought would be a really good idea. It would complicate our software and our developers are not going down that route.
One of the more common requests we hear of is a rewards program. Sunil would agree- you should be rewarding your recurring customers. It can help build retention and increase your shop’s revenue. Perkville integrates seamlessly with MerchantOS, so you get a robust rewards program and no further complications in MerchantOS. It’s definitely worth trying out, the first 30 days with Perkville are free.
We hope to see you there! We will continue to update you with the details of the webinar as it gets closer. If you have any additional questions in the meantime you can reach us at support@merchantos.com or give us a call at 866-554-2453 ext. 0
Cheers!
