Blog
Category: News
Weather Related Outages For Most of Olympia (Delayed MOS Support)
Posted on January 20, 2012 at 12:03 pm by Ivan Stanojevic
I’m writing this post from California as one of the only employees of MerchantOS with power. An unusually large winter storm has covered Olympia with snow and freezing rain knocking out power to most employees houses (some were working from home) and at our main office. Those with power do not have internet. All of our support is run out of Olympia and we are not able to field your calls or emails right now.
I apologize for the trouble. We do have a couple people available with communication to handle emergency situations and continue close monitoring of our systems.
** Point of sale software customer service is now back to normal **
We had a party!
Posted on January 9, 2012 at 5:20 pm by Justin Laing
As you’ve read in recent posts, we’ve been hiring a lot this past year, doubling the size of the company, in fact. We recently had to rent more office space downstairs in order to accomodate the entire development team. In typical MerchantOS fashion, we had a party to celebrate the opening of the MerchantOS Annex!
Now back to improving our point of sale software!
MerchantOS New Year’s Resolutions
Posted on December 30, 2011 at 6:00 pm by Justin Laing
This time of year is always a natural time to reflect on the past, and set goals for the future. In this vein, I’ve asked some of the folks at our company to think about their resolutions for MerchantOS in 2012.
A Look Back At 2011
We accomplished a lot this year and added a number of awesome folks to our team. In 2011 MerchantOS…
- Reached the 1,000 customer mark. We now have over 1,300 retail locations using our point of sale software. Thank You!
- Processed our One Billionth dollar in transactions. We averaged $1.4 milion per day in our point of sale system.
- Added 7 full time employees, a half timer, and an intern.
- Released 28 versions of our software with over 400 individual improvements and fixes.
- 525,570 minutes of up time, 10 slow, 20 minutes of downtime for a subset of customers. 99.994% uptime overall.
- Secured a bank loan for 2012 expansion.
- 2 awesome parties, many ping pong matches, beer-pong games, and trips to the bar downstairs. Along with 2 babies born.
Seven 2012 Apocalyptic Resolutions
It may be the end of the world, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still make plans:
1. Focus on making our point of sale software awesome:
I want to take our point of sale to the next level. Making it easier and more pleasant to use while adding functionality. This is a difficult balancing act but we have a good plan for how to accomplish it and I’m excited about the challenge.
2. Have Fun:
I started this company because I didn’t like the other jobs I had. There weren’t fun. It wasn’t rewarding the way I wanted it to be. In 2012 I want to make sure that everyone that works here (and hopefully our customers) have some fun, enjoy their work, and feel valued.
3. Provide the best dang support:
We spent a great deal of effort searching for awesome support heroes to hire this year (adding Ciara, Ryan, Chris, Vanessa, and Jered). We try to treat our employees like we’d want to be treated ourselves. And we ask our employees to do the same for our customers. We have fun. We also take our jobs seriously and really care about our customers and the product we give them. That’s our recipe for awesome support.
4. Hire awesome people:
We are what the people who work here make us. If we want to be awesome we have to hire awesome. We’ve already got 2 (a programmer and designer) lined for the start of the year. We’ll probably add a few more before the year is over. I’m going to make sure we take the time to hire the right people.
5. Stock pile food, gold, and guns…
To fight the zombies. Oh we might also need this.
6. Sign up another 1,000 retail locations:
This is a high bar to reach for. With purely natural growth and without any change in our marketing strategy, I’d predict we will add somewhere around 700. How will we get those extra 300?
We have a bank loan so we can spend more on Adwords, that will help. We are optimizing our sign-up process. Working on our website marketing. We want to improve the look and feel of our application while we make it easier to use and more powerful. And I’ll just give you a hint there might be something with Mobile and web based accounting systems (no promises! It’s software development, nothing is guaranteed).
7. Build a product we are proud of.
Most of all in 2012 I want to build a product we are proud of. I want to write excellent code, create awesome user interfaces, build solid and reliable server and network infrastructure, and provide awesome support.
I’m Proud Of Our Employees, And Thankful To Our Customers
Without the great people that work for us and all our customers who support us, we wouldn’t be able to take on these goals. So thank you for making this all possible!
Best Wishes In 2012!
Doing what we can
Posted on December 28, 2011 at 11:54 am by Justin Laing
The MerchantOS Corporate Giving Program
I recently learned that for about five years now, MerchantOS has been quietly giving it’s software away to non-profit organizations all over the country that do good work in their local communities. We have no personal connection to them, we just like that they’re giving back, and like the idea that we can support their work. Since it’s my job to highlight all the cool things we do at MOS, I put together the following showcase, partly to show off the cool orgs we support, and partly to give props to VP Christina Gilpin, who originally thought up the idea, and ran with it, right after she was hired five years ago. I caught up with Christina, and asked her how the idea originated in the first place. She said it just seemed natural -
“…these non profits do so much for their communities…and if we can help them be even that much more successful, then that is just awesome” (more…)
New Login Page
Posted on December 20, 2011 at 9:07 am by Justin Laing
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.