In the last few years we updated and polished the look and feel of our web site and branding but the actual product’s look and feel hasn’t gotten a lot of love from our design team. That’s about to change in a major way – we’re working on a significant refresh of the MerchantOS look-and-feel and we want to get your input early and often as we work towards releasing this exciting update to MerchantOS.

We will host our second online “User Experience Open House” on Tuesday, April 16, 2013 at 3:00 PM (PDT). This is where you can see a preview of the new user interface, ask questions and make suggestions about what you’d like to see in both this current project and future ones.

Technical Note: We’re reworking our online presentations to (hopefully) offer much better audio and video quality as well as high-quality recording so you can check out the open house content later even if you can’t make it to live event.

Tagging gives you the ability to organize your products by putting them under one or more tags. We’ve had the ability to tag items for sometime but with the next release you’ll be able tag customers and filter most reports by tag.

Filtering

In listings you can now filter for records with and without tags. For example you could find all items tagged “food” and exclude all items with the tag “organic”.

Tag:Groups

We’ve also added tag groups. Simply prefix any tag with a group name and “:”. For example you might tag a few items with the following tags: “bike:road”, “bike:mountain”, “bike:bmx”. If you searched for “bike:” in the item listing, you’d see everything tagged with the “bike” group. If you searched for “bike:bmx”, you’d see just items tagged with that specific tag.

Customer Tagging

Customer records can now be tagged! You can use tag groups with customers as well. You might use tags to separate customers into lists you will target with various marketing campaigns.

Removing: Season, Department, Shelf Location, Model Year

New accounts will not have season, department, shelf location, and model year. Existing accounts will keep all of these fields for now. Down the road we will be migrating data stored in these fields into tags, and eventually turning these fields off for all accounts.

You will be able to choose when to make the transition for your shop during a transition period. You’ll receive notices and instructions on how to convert when it’s time. All the filtering you do now with your the existing fields will be possible with tagging and more.

We’ll do our best to help all customers with the transition to tagging.

Serial Number Tagging

We plan to add tagging for serial number records in the near future. This will help track the status of serial numbered items that may need to be built or have other statuses.

While some of you have been enjoying personalizing your receipts and labels there was a large demand for several changes that needed to be implemented. The main criticism of receipt templates was that the credit card receipts did not print out a signature copy. Great news, that works now.

We fixed some other buzz-killing issues in our latest revamped template code:

• Per-line discount is now a special template in GitHub. You can show the breakdown of each item if they have varying levels of discounts. In the default.tpl it just groups all the discounts in the subtotal.
• Timezones are now accurately reflected. This was only broken for a very small window, but it didn’t go unnoticed.
• Fixed the requirement for HTML <br> tags in shop headers. If you have those in Admin > Shop Settings / Setup Shops > Receipt Setup, you’ll want to remove them.
• Account Deposits and Charges now shows correctly.
• Fixed an odd formatting issue that involved padding – this should correct the issue where wouldn’t utilize the full paper width.
• Gift Receipts never revealed prices, but they would show discount names, now they won’t (this is true of non-template generated receipts as well).
• Remaining balance now displays the correct amount. Earlier it did not subtract the amount On Deposit from the Open Orders.
• Totals for Open Orders now include the discounts.

It was a long road to fixing all of these and it wouldn’t have been possible without the awesomeness that is Luke Bowerman. It only took a few weeks of Luke’s time, a kilometer of receipt paper, and several death threats by mail directly to our office to fix these issues but that’s all behind us now. There is a lot of potential in using templates to personalize your storefront. I recommend starting with our default.tpl, see how it looks and then move on to one of our other print templates or start editing your own.

One note: our support staff cannot help you with designing custom templates - we love all our customers but designing custom templates is simply too time-intensive for us to offer. If you’re having issues with printing receipts we should be able to help, we just can’t help with per-customer tweaks to the templates. With that said don’t hesitate to send us an email or give us a call at 866-554-2453 ext. 0

Cheers!

Things have been busy around MerchantOS lately and we’re proud to announce a new feature for our integration with Giant Bicycles. We have added real-time stock checking to purchase orders with Giant when you use our integration with them. Previously we updated stock information once daily. By the time you created your Purchase Order in MerchantOS the stock levels could have been hours out of date.

Real-time stock checking will allow you to see the actual stock availability for the products you are ordering as you are creating your order. This allows you to know if a product would be back ordered or if there are more available for you to purchase for your shop. You can find information about setting up the Giant integration in the MerchantOS Manual.

We are also working on several updates to existing integrations and a few new vendor integrations in several different industries. Check back on our blog for updates as we release them.

You’ll soon be greeted by a different looking login page. Don’t panic, nothing catastrophic has happened. Here’s what it will look like:

You may also notice that when you login you are directed to a different URL (address) than before. Something like “east1.merchantos.com” instead of the normal “shop.merchantos.com”. We’re making this change so we can better handle our growing customer base and give you better reliability.

We’ve found that the biggest reliability issue is your internet connection. Sometimes your provider will lose connectivity to a portion of the internet, and sometimes this includes the data center where our system runs. We’ve designed the new login page to help work around these problems. After we phase in the new look/feel of the login page we’ll be turning on this new feature.

Use Your Email Address As A Login

We’re switching to email addresses as the primary way to login in to MerchantOS. For now this is optional and you can keep your normal login name. But we are going to encourage you to go to Admin->Employee Setup and change your employee logins over to their email addresses.

Why? We are adding the ability to reset your password via email. The easiest and most straight forward way to do this is to have your login name be your email address. This is also becoming a fairly standard practice across the internet so this should be comfortable to most users.

We are also implementing a Users email list that you will have the option to subscribe to. We’ll email you about once every 3 months to let you know about changes to the system and other important news. We won’t spam you every day or week with it. Promise! You can unsubscribe at any time.

For The Geeks

The login page uses some clever javascript to detect which of our data centers you have connectivity to. It will then direct you to our preferred datacenter if you can connect, but if you don’t have connectivity there it will use a proxy in our secondary data center to get you there. This means that if you can connect to at least one of our data centers you’ll be good to go.

At first we are just turning on the new look/feel of the login page but keeping it hosted at our primary data center. Meaning this new whiz-bang functionality won’t get you much benefit. But over the course of the next month or so we’ll be moving the login page to a more high availability setup that you should be able to access even if you have limited internet connectivity.

Templates you say?

Yes, templates I say. Our advanced users (read: tech savvy) now have a way of customizing print jobs from MerchantOS. This feature has been out for a few months now and I thought it’d be nice to give it some deserved recognition. It allows you to safely create a template for your sale receipts, product labels, transfer receipts, workorder receipts, and even purchase order receipts.

We have some stellar examples of templates in our GitHub repository to get you started making snazzier burn marks on your thermal paper.
 

What if I don’t want to make snazzy templates, how about practical ones?

Well fine! Let Uncle Sam down you unpatriotic heathens! For all you busybodies, templates are a great feature for you to experiment with. Want a Facebook footer on the bottom of your receipt? Done. Think we give too much customer information on our receipts? What do you say we hide your customers email and phone number for you? Want to include the Vendor ID on your labels? Ivan took care of that request for you.

WOW! Is there anything that templates can’t do for my shop?

As much as I’d like to write down “iron your clothes, babysit your kids and run your business for you” there are some actual limitations to the current build of our templates. If you are using integrated credit card processing you will notice you won’t be getting a signature copy. That is something we will be implementing in the near future. There are some other limitations, but a general rule – if it’s in the XML, it’s possible to display.

You didn’t answer all of my questions! Where can I find more information on templates?

Your first stop is our manual page.

If you need to learn more about the template language you’ll be writing in you can review the Twig documentation here.

Now that you understand what you’re writing in and how to implement this, the only thing you’ll need to supplement creating said snazzy templates is our API documentation.

We’re looking forward to seeing what you folks can come up with. Now do your patriotic duty and go make us all proud with your .tpl renditions that will help our staff get groped less by TSA agents. Or better your shop, I guess. If you feel like sharing your creativity you can send those templates to murdoc@merchantos.com and we’ll review the .tpl and host it on GitHub.

Cheers!