With the advent of the new 2checkout community content forums, all departments
in our company have an outlet to communicate directly with our vendors. All of
us are still trying to figure out how best to use this voice to benefit you.
Angelo and I, both developers here at 2checkout, want to start by using this
forum to present the new purchase routine to everyone and to listen, actually
listen, to your concerns, suggestions, fears and compliments; the latter being
my favorite.
We have redesigned our purchase routine. It has had a significant facelift and
considerable “under the hood” work done to it. Everyone that has worked on this
project is proud of the way it has turned out; it’s sleek, professional, robust
and fast. We want to share it with all of you. We do understand that the
purchase routine is an important component of your business and we want to
release our changes in a way that is best for you. This is where these forums
and our new beta sandbox come into play.
You are probably asking yourself “what is the beta sandbox?” I am glad you
asked. The beta sandbox is our purchase routine made available to you before we
release our changes. The beta sandbox will have a full working version of the
new purchase routine for you to use however you want. Look it over, make some
test sales and even take a shot at trying to break it.
From now into the foreseeable future whenever we have changes for our purchase
routine we will post the changes to the sandbox three weeks in advance, these
changes will be accompanied by a forum thread in which in which you can post
your comments about it. After a two-week trial period, we will be closing the
specific forum thread. At this time, Angelo and I will gather up and review the
feedback we received. We will typically review this feedback within a day or two
of closing the post.
This will give everyone that is interested a chance to evaluate our work and
comment on it. We encourage you to check it out then return here to tell us what
you think. In exchange for your efforts, Angelo and I will read over all the
comments you post here and make a list of them. We will try our best to satisfy
every request and listen to every suggestion. During this time, we will be
taking action on the feedback provided. In the cases that we can’t, we think
it’s only fair that we post a response explaining our reasons to the community.
I believe that having this open dialog will yield positive results that will
benefit our company and yours.
We look forward to hearing from you.
~Angelo & Brandon
10 Comments »
+0
-0
I think right now I am asking myself WHERE is the “beta sandbox”? Is there a link I am not seeing or part of the post I that isn’t sinking in?
+0
-0
If I click on the logout link I remain logged in! I have Windows XP and IE 7! The most popular OS and browser. Just an example of the poor quality programming we have had to deal with until now. I am skeptical that these new changes will improve anything. They might even add more bugs to the current platform. Just to name a few known bugs in the current platform:
1. User permissions don’t work. If I want to restrict a user’s access to my financial information on my 2co account it doesn’t do it. For that matter, none of the user permissions work. Whatever permission you assign to a user it will not matter. I contacted tech support about it and they said they knew about it. But it’s been like that for more than a year. If you are not going to fix it, at least remove it from sight!
2. If you have items that use a return URL different than your system-wide return URL the purchase might get passed to the wrong URL. For example, product A has a return URL of http://www.mysite.com/return1.php and product B has a return URL of http://www.mysite.com/return2.php. When a user adds product B to the shopping carts, then removes it and later on the same sessions ads product A to the shopping cart, the purchase gets passed to http://www.mysite.com/return2.php instead of return1.php.
3. Now your forum logout link doesn’t work. When I want to change my password, the system won’t ask me for the original password on top of being supposedly logged off.
4. If you have a declined recurring sale there is no easy way to keep track whether the user has updated their billing information or not. Why do I have to keep coming to your site to do everything? Or even worse, why do I have to go through all the emails that you send me with every transaction? I don’t want to manage my account using my email! You should provide a more robust automated solution, the same way that Paypal does.
I can see that if only two people are working on programming this stuff (Angelo and Brandon) you probably have little time to undergo rigorous testing and tend to put less important things off. If there are more than 2 developers then I don’t know why you would lack the more advanced features and have so many important bugs.
Maybe those vendors who aren’t programmers will think that I am picking on every little detail but I feel that those who are programmers will agree with me.
A frustrated vendor.
+0
-0
Hi,
I welcome openness of 2CO, and the way you are goint in regard to communication.
A lot of 2CO assets have usability issues and bugs (Website, Vendor Console, Vendor Interaction, etc). But this thread is for purchase routine only. Isn’t it?
Let us know, what had you reworked out of all that 2CO offers us. Let us know, what “Purchase Routine” is and what is its responsibility. You have variety of purchase types, and purchase methods, let us know what your changes influence. I mean regular/recurring, tangible/intangible, single/combined, supported/unsupported carts.
And links, docs, examples. Is there a chance that you’ll have wiki for vendors to contribute documentation? Sometimes there is experience that is either locked by vendor in-house implementation, sometimes obscured and dispersed in forum posts…
And as a last question is new purchase routine a step to REST-ful approach?
Thank you,
m.
+0
-0
OK, but how to begin? I cant find new beta , customizations?
+0
-0
@keith:
The links will be posted today in the thread specific to the release candidate.
@javier:
I am currently looking into the return URL issue that you posted. The other items have been logged into our issue tracking system.
@myroslav:
This specific iteration is a complete architecture and development overhaul of the purchase routine as a whole. We kept encountering roadblocks, implementation, and usability issues while attempting to add new features to the checkout pages. Therefore, the entire flow, content, and executable portions of the checkout pages has been re-built from scratch.
This specific architecture change was focused around making the checkout pages much more modular so that they can form the basis of improvements to specific types of purchases. In this first iteration it was 3rd party cart parameters that received the most attention. There have been substantial improvements in both checkout and admin displays with respect to these parameters.
When the release candidates are posted in the specific threads we will most certainly include change descriptions, example links, as well as specific points of interest. We are currently looking to expand our “beta” data set, for this first release candidate to be posted there will be only a single vendor account available to use. This vendor account will be one of the internal test accounts that we use. Given that fact we will need to post example links for you all to use.
In response to the vendors contributing documentation, I think that’s a great idea, I will check with the team responsible for the community site and see what we can get set up. I’m already going to pester them about polls being enabled on the site so that Brandon and I can post some ideas we have that we need some vendor feedback on. I don’t know that it will be available right from the start, what I will suggest is that if you would like to contribute to it please post it in the specific release candidate thread for the time being while I get the documentation area set up for external access.
Now onto the fun parts. You asked if this was a step towards a REST-ful approach. In essence, it is. I doubt heavily that it will ever be fully stateless but we are doing our best to ensure that this set of checkout pages is put together in a logical manner that allows easy modifications. Currently, in this release candidate you will notice that we have fractured the “shopping cart” from the payment methods. This is the first step expanding the routine to allow for a more predictable flow and reliable execution path. As time goes on we will be making the shipping specific portion of the checkout pages more modular as well as expanding the parameter sets available to the vendors.
@crv747tropic:
As I stated above the links and such will be available today in the release candidate thread.
As for customizations I assume you mean changing the look and feel of the pages? While the new checkout pages do have a completely new look and feel, you still cannot customize them any farther than providing a logo and product images. We are still in the process of seeking leeway on some of the contractual issues that have forced some of the content changes/standards in the past.
If my assumption is way off base, please let me know what you mean by customizations.
Also, if you have any examples of customizations you like to see that would be nice too. Say for instance would you like the ability to choose your own full CSS scheme, colors, fonts, sizes, etc? Let me know what type of customizations you would like available. The one thing I can say is that we cannot restore the old “custom header/footer” behavior but we might be able to allow options like selectable CSS themes.
+0
-0
What we REALLY want is some sort of API or IPN (instant payment notification) like paypal …… ESPECIALLY for recurring sales.
I can show DOZENS of orders which have failed to rebill and never received any notification from 2co. Even the admin area shows the orders as if they never even attempted to rebill.
Another thing, on some orders we received successful recurring billing emails. However the admin area shows that these orders NEVER rebilled. How can this even happen?
+0
-0
It would be very useful to provide a way to mark your orders as shipped without having to log in to 2CO. It wouldn’t necessarily have to authenticate using the same login credentials as the vendor console. So in case these credentials get compromised the worst that could happen is that the vendor’s orders are marked as shipped by an unauthorized user.
As for the CSS, having the option to choose your own CSS and background color would improve the experience a lot.
+0
-0
I am sorry Brandon, but I have hard time finding the Release Candidate thread in the forums. Instead of answering the question about the url to the beta several times, wouldn’t it be easier for everyone to simply include the url in the message so that anyone can go ahead and click it to get to the actual page? Just a friendly question…
+0
-0
I apologize for the delay in posting the first RC beta link. Our testing group found some last minute usability issues that we found it prudent to correct prior to releasing the first beta RC.
The RC is going through it’s final QA today and I will have the results tomorrow. I will post again when I have the results prepared.
+0
-0
The thread for Beta RC 7.5 is now open.