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.

If you don’t know what an API is; ignore this and carry on.

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!

1. Tree

2. Tennis Balls

3. Surf

4. Sunflower

5. Snowman

6. Scrapbooking

7. Scrabble

8. Gift

9. Golf

10. Giftbox

11. Flower Design

12. Fireworks

13. Pattern

14. Electronic Devices

15. Dog

16. D20

17. Chess

18. Hi! Cat

19. Bike Rack

20. Bike Row

21. Bike Pavement

22. Bike Ride

23. Bike Wheel

24. Bike Wheel 2

25. Electronics Grid

26. Clouds

27. Bike Silhouettes

28. Happy Birthday

29. Scrabble

30. Antique Bikes

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!

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.

We’re overjoyed to announce that as of April 1st, 2012 MerchantOS is finished. Today we’re releasing the absolutely perfect point of sale.

“We’ve been using MerchantOS Final Edition for 3 months — it’s absolutely perfect in every way” Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, proprietor, Kwik-E-Mart, Springfield

After 8 years of constant development we’re incredibly proud of this final version of MerchantOS. We’re absolutely sure that “MerchantOS Final Edition” will solve every problem for all of our customers (and any retail business for that matter). Now that we’ve reached retail software nirvana we’ll no longer be releasing updates (it’s not possible to improve on perfection) we will, however, continue to offer customers our heroic phone and email support absolutely free.

About the Final Edition

With this final, perfect version of MerchantOS, we’ve upgraded the system to use cutting edge features such as haptic feedback, the latest in color-coded currency, high-speed inventory lookup (15 items – more than enough for any store) and an all-new ultra portable form factor – it weighs less than 3 pounds!

As always, you can purchase the new hardware directly from MerchantOS or any other vendor (amazon.com).

For those customers that aren’t ready to upgrade to this new cutting-edge point of sale we’ll continue to support our web-based point of sale for the time-being but we expect massive adoption of this new platform and encourage you to upgrade to MerchantOS Final Edition today!

Obviously “MerchantOS Final Edition” isn’t a real product (note the date). That said, we don’t consider incredible point of sale software to be a joke – we’re always working to build the perfect point of sale for you, our customers.

1.) Create a new item and select non-inventory from the Type dropdown. Give it a relevant description such as “Awesome coupon” or “$5 off”.

2.) Give this item a NEGATIVE price point, like ” $-5.00″ or “-5″ and make it non-taxable.

3.) Add this item to any sale that you want the discount applied. It won’t show up in the “Discounts” portion of your sales totals, but you can see the subtotal is correct.

Option: For promotions like “Buy 1 get 1 free” where the discount will vary depending on the free item, you can create a coupon item the same as above, but leave the price at “$0.00″. In the register, when this item is rung up MerchantOS will prompt you to input a price and you can put a negative amount equal to the free item. NOTE: This has some security holes in it (associates who aren’t allowed to add discounts can add any negative amount here) so only use this item if you trust your employees. You can always require a PIN before each sale and look at sales history of the coupon item if you’re curious and feeling sleuth.

Additional information:

 Reports:

Want to see how much money you’ve discounted using this item? Search for the coupon  item in inventory, then go to the “Sales” link on the left to see a subtotal of how much money you’ve discounted.

If you create a new product category just for coupon items (called “Coupons” or “Discounts”) you can search your reports for this specific category — excellent idea if you want to create different items for different promotions.

Marketing:

MerchantOS generates a system ID and a matching barcode for every item created — including non-inventory items like the ones we just made. You can use this to your advantage a few different ways:

-Print a label for this item like you would normally. You can keep this label on an index card or “cheat sheet” at the register, so you and your associates can easily add the item to the sale.

-Design and print out an actual coupon for your promotion, and cut out and add the barcode from this label to the design. Make copies and pass them out to your customers.

-If you create a coupon design with that printed barcode, you use a flatbed scanner and save it as an image. Use our Mailchimp integration to email the coupon to those subscribed to  your email newsletter. They can print out the coupon and bring it into your shop and all you have to do is scan it!

What do you think? Have you come up with a creative way to use barcodes or coupons in MerchantOS? Leave your comments and questions below! You can also reach us at support@merchantos.com or give us a ring at 866-554-2453 ext. 0

The MerchantOS-Perkville Webinar will be hosted on April 10th at 3pm PST. Mark your calendars!

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!

Working with designers is hard, especially now that projects are regularly outsourced to contractors. Collaborating on visual projects via Skype/email leaves a ton of room for interpretation, which often leads to misinterpretation and wasted energy.

Brad Heller and Clifton B are the founders of Revisu.

“Revisu is a communication tool that makes it easy for designers to share their work, collect feedback, and track revision history.”

But this elegant solution didn’t come from a stroke of genius, it was forged from necessity. Brad and Clifton were originally working on a version control system for Dropbox. It was a solid idea that got them into the Portland Incubator Experiment, a highly competitive startup incubator in Portland. Just weeks before the program started, Dropbox released an update that negated Brad and Clifton’s entire project. They needed to find a new use for the technology they were developing, otherwise they were dead in the water. Says Brad, ”We quickly identified that there’s a lot of pain involved in communication between design teams and developers. From there, we pivoted our business to address that problem.”

The Portland Incubator Experiment (PIE) helped them launch their new idea by providing a collaborative  work space, mentorship, workshops, and an opportunity to pitch investors. Their beta product is already being used by industry giants like Wieden+Kennedy, the largest privately owned advertising agency in the world, and Revisu is positioned to take over a very profitable market.

What contributed to Brad and Clifton’s success? It seems like a combination of technical brilliance, flexibility, access to a startup incubator, and proximity to a city that has hundreds of creative design agencies. Their ability to adapt their ideas and technology for a new purpose is typical of the most successful startups from the last few decades.

When asked what advice they’d give to startup wannabes, Brad dodged the stereotypical answers, and insisted that the most important thing you can do as a budding entrepreneur is to interact with other entrepreneurs – that’s the only way you’re going to learn and get ahead.

“The community is your biggest resource.”

Amen. Do you have an exciting startup idea bouncing around your cranium? If so, you should look at startup incubators like Portland Incubator Experiment, Y Combinator, and TechStars. These programs give entrepreneurs the tools and resources they need to succeed. Have questions or need advice? You can find Revisu’s co-founder on Twitter: @BradHe.

Here’s an interview transcript for the hardcore readers:

What is Revisu?

Brad: We’re a communication tool that makes it easy for designers to share their work, collect feedback, and track revision history as that project goes on.

We have some really, really interesting things coming up in the next few months, but we can’t really talk about them yet. We do have a couple of interesting integrations planned though. One of the integrations we recently did was with Basecamp because most of our creative teams use Basecamp internally – so plugging into that was really natural. Our goal is to figure out how to address and improve team workflow, so a lot of the features and things that you’ll see coming out of us in the next six months are going to be around helping teams work.

Was Revisu a fully formed idea from the beginning or did it grow organically?

B: The technology we originally applied to PIE with was just a version control system for Dropbox files. This was just a few weeks before the revisions API got released by Dropbox, which totally negated the need for our product. But I’m a technologist so I built this technology and then I said “Well, who could use this technology?” and I thought “The design field is always using Dropbox to store their files and move things back and forth.” Then we quickly identified that there’s a lot of pain around communication between design teams and developers. From there, we pivoted our business to addressing that problem and it’s just kind of grown that way.

Anyone famous using your product right now?

B: Wieden+Kennedy, Tangible Worldwide, and Grady Britton all fell in love with the idea and validated the fact that this vision makes sense to the agency world. So now it’s a process of just refining the vision in terms of this product.

Revisu was a Portland Incubator Experiment (PIE) startup. Can you tell us more about incubators?

B: Every incubator is different. TechStars is different from YCombinator, which is different than PIE. They all are different in the philosophy that they take and how they approach – I mean, the core of an incubator is to take an idea from one stage to the next, so for TechStars it’s more about taking an idea that’s already in the market place and moving it to the next level. Whereas YCombinator is known for just getting a team together and then making a product from there. So PIE falls more into the YCombinator bucket. It’s more about taking an idea and turning it into a product. It’s heavily team oriented, but it’s also product oriented. When I say that, I mean they focus more on creating a great product and less on “How do I raise a million dollars.” There’s nothing wrong with having an incubator that’s focused on that, it’s just a different philosophy.

In terms of our experience with PIE, when we first thought about applying to PIE we working on what would eventually be the prototype of Revisu as a side project and we thought “This is awesome, we should apply to the PIE Project and see if we can turn this into an actual business.” So we applied and got accepted. It was a whirlwind for the first four weeks or so. Going through the initial meetings with the core mentors of PIE, polishing our vision, and coming up with a go to market strategy. The first four weeks were a total blur.

When it comes to actual programming, PIE is pretty loose. At its peak they would have like two to three people come in to talk about running and launching a software startup. For instance, James Keller from Small Society (recently acquired by Wal-Mart) came to talk about usability, and Alan Wizemann came in to talk about product pricing, and there were some people who came and talked about financing – all of these different areas. But it kind of had this bell curve to it. In the middle we had the most people coming in and towards the end of the program most people had a product on the market place, so the last quarter of the PIE experience was about getting ready for Demo Day and really nailing your pitch.

Are there benefits to being in the same space as other entrepreneurs?

B: Yes! Oftentimes, when we talk about incubators, this issue of co-location comes up. Some programs don’t co-locate their startups, but having the startups in a room together every day is a critical component of the incubator experience because you get way more out of the interaction between these people than you do in your mentor meetings. PIE did a really good job of selecting the startups that came in. I think we had some startups that were ahead of us, and I think there were even some startups that were behind us. So for the latecomers, we were able to say “As you’re growing your business, this is going to come up and this is what you should probably do.” And for the startups that were ahead of us, we’d be able to say “Oh crap, our accountant is really screwing up and what should we do?” and they’d be able to help us through that sort of thing. So I think the interaction between startups is really critical.

You’ve been living in Portland since starting Revisu, but were you from there originally?

B: I guess you could say that. I had lived here since before the program started. I had also worked for a couple of other Portland startups – About.Us, WebMD, and JivSoftware.

Is Portland a good location for startups?

B: We normally tout the capital efficiency we have here. Rent is cheap, you don’t have to pay developers as much as you would in the Bay Area, and there’s a good amount of talent because we have OSU, PSU, University of Oregon, and people from Seattle who come down. So Portland is good in that regard. We talk a lot about how Portland can be the next Seattle, or the next Silicon Valley, but that conversation happens in every city across the United States.

I think what’s really important is this notion of playing to your region’s strengths. Like in Portland, startups should conform to the lifestyle of people who live in Portland. The 80 hour work week that they do in Silicon Valley doesn’t necessarily fly up here. Also, in terms of markets, we should address regional strengths. Like with Revisu, the design community in this area is massive. There’s like 120 design agencies in Portland – which is crazy huge density. So it makes sense to do something creative in Portland. Or things that are based around food and hospitality makes sense for the Portland scene.

That’s a really roundabout way of answering your question. I kind of got sidetracked, but Portland is a great place for startups.

Do you have any advice for people who want to launch an innovative idea?

B: The most important thing you can do as a budding entrepreneur is to interact with other entrepreneurs. I think that’s the only way you’re going to learn and get ahead. The community is your biggest resource. Almost every single city has some kind of startup community these days, so participating in that community is really important if you’re a budding entrepreneur. The Startup Weekend system is an awesome thing. Even established entrepreneurs should be attending Startup Weekends.

I think getting engaged in the community and connecting with the right people is the most important thing.

That wraps up this week’s interview! You should take a look at Brad’s product and send him your feedback via Twitter: @BradHe. Next week we’ll be interviewing an expert from the retail industry, so check back on Wednesday for exciting retail strategies and ideas!

As an individual consumer you end up losing an average of $427 per year, because merchants compensate for the fees by increasing their prices. In other words, the average person ends up spending more money on hidden swipe fees than they do on Christmas presents for their family.

Typical swipe fees cost you $35.58 per month, but what do you actually get? Not much. Transactions are now processed electronically, so there’s very little cost to banks and credit card companies. That means you’re just paying for the honor of using their system (and a few yachts, jets, and sports cars).

**Sad Fact: Swipe wipe fees increased by about 270% between 2001 and 2009.

How can you avoid these fees?

Pay cash. Merchants can make up to 30% higher net profits on cash transactions; which results in lower prices for consumers. Small businesses all over the country are starting to either offer discounts for cash payment or refuse to take credit cards altogether.

Cash keeps more money in your local economy, lowers consumer prices, and allows small merchants to make better profits.

Money Saving Resources

FeeFighters.com – Sometimes swipe fees are a necessary evil, but Fee Fighters can help you minimize the damage. Their service is ingeniously simple, you just provide them with basic information about your business and they help you find the cheapest services. This is one of the easiest ways to instantly improve your margins.

Dwolla.com – Want to eliminate swipe fees entirely? Dwolla offers an incredible transaction service that is moving us one step closer to a fee-free world. They process micro-transactions for free and charge a flat $.25 fee for anything over $10.