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!

Around this time of the year, we always get a significant number of calls regarding one of the most useful features in MerchantOS, Inventory Counts. It’s the perfect time of the year to prepare your shop for the holiday madness, so I wrote up a breakdown of the Inventory Counts Tabs.

Counts

Here’s where it all starts. If you’re starting with a new Inventory Count, then you’ve got “0 Results Found” on this page. To fix that, start scanning or searching for items in the ‘Count Items’ box and hit the ‘Count Item’ button.

After you find your result, enter the number of items you’ve counted. If its easier you can just scan the items barcode again and it will add the quantities (the same way it does in a Purchase Order).

Totals

Want to see what you’ve done so far? This is the tab for you. You can search here to see if you’ve counted something already. You can also make a correction in the count column should you forget that last shipment that just came in that you want to be part of the Inventory Count.

Missed

Oh my Bodhisattva! You forgot to count the hats! Fret not, those uncounted hats aren’t going anywhere. The only items that will be affected are in the Reconcile tab, which I’ll cover in the next section.

So you missed a few items, this is likely where you true losses are. Make sure you take the time to go through this list and if those products are not there were have a very convenient Zero button and even a Zero Selected Items button if you are confident that you’ve counted everything in your shop.
Clicking Zero next to the item does not immediately remove it from inventory, it will add the changes to the Reconcile tab.

Protip: You can use this in place of doing the Count step. All you have to do is put in the quantities here and it will be counted. It might seem lazy because you don’t even need to use the scanner, but it is amazingly effective for spot counts.

Reconcile

This is where the magic happens. We know you were really looking forward to spending hours going into each item and manually adjusting inventory levels. Unfortunately, that Reconcile Inventory button takes all the fun out of that by changing the quantities in bulk for you.

Notice in this tab you have an adjustments column. We get a lot of questions about this, so I have to make use of the bold + italics emphasis combo. Inventory counts measure discrepancies in inventory levels. Sales or added inventory will not change your shortages. For example, if you found that you were short 2 hats, your adjustment will be -2 to quantity on hand for that silly hat. That won’t change as you sell items or receive purchase orders, the Q.O.H. is still off by -2.

Note: Any action button like Reconcile Inventory that has a lightning bolt next to it means that it cannot be undone. Click it by accident and you will invoke Zeus’ wrath.

Print Item List

This is a real time commitment. If you’re going this route, you want to make sure your shop is closed for the duration of this inventory count. This method doesn’t work like the others, you’re measuring the quantity on hand and entering that information later. Sales and purchase orders will mess up this count so make sure that nothing is going in or out of the shop until you’ve finished entering in your results in the Print Item List section.

I hope this write-up answers any questions you might have and if it falls short of that, do not hesitate to give support a call. You can reach us at 866-554-2453 ext. 0 or send an email to support@merchantos.com and one of us will get back to you.

Cheers!

What Happened & And Our Response

Last night (Oct 6th, 2011) we released an update to our system. Printing was not tested before the release. This resulted in customers not being able to print receipts from late on the 6th until 7:40am PST the next morning.

Note: If you are having printer problems now it is not due to the update. Update problems have been fully resolved as of 7:40am PST Oct. 7th, 2011.

Secondly our virtual phone account was reset a few days earlier. We hadn’t fully re-setup our account. This caused urgent voicemails left by customers to be missed. Usually multiple people within the company get a txt message if a customer leaves an urgent. This wasn’t happening.

We take full responsibility for both of these problems. I’m really sorry to anyone who was affected. We take these issues very seriously. Here is what we are going to do to prevent this from happening again:

Testing Before Releases

We have a pretty good run-through of the system that we do before each release. But obviously it was not thorough enough. We are going to create a more explicit pre-release testing checklist.

Phone System Checklist

We will create a checklist for our phone system functionality. That way if our phone system has problems or is being re-setup we have something to run through to make sure all the vital parts are working properly.

Growing = The Winning Team

MerchantOS is growing rapidly, which is awesome. This gives us more resources for development, support, and communication. It means our company is healthy and you as a customer are with a winning team. You get ever improving technology and solid support. If we aren’t moving forward, we are left behind, especially when it comes to technology.

Growing = More Complexity

The downside to growth is that it brings more complexity. Tasks that use to be small and simple have expanded and become complex. We understand and are grappling with the fact that things we use to ‘wing it’ on need to start having a system and safeguards. It’s a balancing act because you don’t want burden yourself with too many slow procedures. We’re working hard at this stuff.

 Comments and Questions

Feel free to leave your thoughts and questions below. Or as always you can email or phone us.

UPDATE!

If you are still having issues printing from Chrome, you can consult our Google Chrome manual page for more advanced setup options.

Yes, you finally have a choice between browsers!

Mozilla Firefox hasn’t worked well for all of our customers, but we officially supported Firefox because it was one of the few good browsers that allowed you to change your Page Setup.

However, Firefox’s monopoly on being able to print reliable receipts and labels is coming to an end today. If you are a Windows 7 user or are a Mac user on Lion OSX 10.7 you can now use Google Chrome to print receipts and labels. Let’s get started with the instructions for both Windows and Mac:

Windows 7

1. You’ll want to create a new shortcut for Google Chrome on your desktop.
2. Right-click, select Properties.
3. On the Shortcut tab you will see the Target field. At the end of C:\Users\”Computer Name”\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe append –disable-print-preview

4. Click OK

Note: If you launch an older shortcut of Google Chrome, say from your taskbar, this will not work. You want to launch Chrome from the shortcut you configured.

OSX 10.7 Lion

1. In Chrome, click File, then click Print.
2. Change your Paper Size to 72mm * 2000mm

3. You will want to change the same settings you would change in Firefox, you will start with changing Layout to Printer Features.

Note: The only difference between the Firefox setup and the Chrome setup on Macs is you do not have to go to File, then Page Setup; it’s all on the Print dialogue box.
All other functions and features work exactly the same in Google Chrome. From our testing we’ve noticed it is a much faster browser and even improves the MerchantOS user interface. We are happy to support this software so if you have any additional questions for us call our support line at 866-554-2453 ext. 0 or email us at support@merchantos.com and we’d be glad to help.

Cheers!

Recently we’ve had a few problems with services provided by other companies that complement our product. What we’ve learned is that very often, companies will choose to ignore problems or blame others for problems that they are in fact causing or have control over.

From this point forward, our response to these situations is, “It’s our fault” – and now that we own the problem, we will help you solve it.

Being Let Down By Other Companies

For the most part businesses we work with are awesome. Every now and then, though, they miss the mark. There can be many reasons for this, such as being too large and unable to manage employees, employees not being empowered to go the extra mile, and not getting your employees invested in your offerings. Whatever reasons they have for failing to meet a customer’s needs, it happens. Worse than that, their response can be seriously lacking.

Before I go on, I do want to say that MerchantOS has certainly failed in the past, and we will probably fail again in the future. We’re not perfect – but we’re aware of it, and working on it!

How We Will Handle the Failures of Partner Companies

Often when a complementary service to MerchantOS fails, it can make MerchantOS look just as bad as the actual service that is failing. That is why it is imperative for us to do our best to correct the situation even if it appears to be out of our control. Here are a few things our support staff will do from now on to help our customers.

• Call the company on your behalf - Often the hardest part of a problem is figuring out what actually went wrong. We will call up anyone we think can help you with your situation. This does a couple of things. First, our customer won’t become the relay of information between us and another company, thus eliminating the risk of confusion over technical details. This will also allow us to gather vital information that we need to resolve the situation. Most importantly, it takes the burden off of you, and you can rest assured that we’re working hard to get you back up and running.
• Not jump to conclusions - In the past, we might have assumed your situation was caused by one problem when in fact it was something completely different. Sometimes multiple customers need to call in to report the same thing before we realize the problem is larger scale than we think. Our support is encouraged to take a step back, be inquisitive, and most importantly, if they are unsure, get help from their team.
• Understand the Customer’s Perspective - Our support is encouraged to be invested in your situation. Our success is dependent upon your success. Support staff sometimes come to me angry about the situation a customer is in, and I strongly believe this is a great characteristic in any employee we have. I want them to feel upset that you are not getting what you need and I want them to do something about it.

The Outcome

The main objective is to get our customers what they need so they can operate their business. Though there are some selfish side benefits for us as well.

• Improved morale at MerchantOS that comes from helping someone, and doing a good job.
• Stronger customer loyalty to MerchantOS
• Customers that will tell other businesses about MerchantOS
• Making other companies we work with look good (or at least not look bad), which hopefully encourages them to do the same for us.

Calling Us Out

Finally, it is critically important that you (our customers) let us know where we have failed. The only way we can improve a situation is by knowing that there is a problem. We do this with the companies we work with, and typically they respond well. Don’t forget that we are far from perfect and that we don’t always know what’s going on, but we do know that together we can ensure that we all succeed!

Have you ever had situations in your business that could have been handled better? Share your stories below.