Really Really Close
Hello all. In my last blog, I was celebrating the first successful synchronization of our QBPOS and our PDG Commerce shopping cart software. I'm still on cloud nine. Every time I open the product listing and peruse it, I'm amazed at the speed with which I can move around and tweak things in the database. It's a breath of fresh air compared to my one and only nightmarish experience with a "rented" shopping cart. The part that really gets me is that my out-of-pocket cost for the GoDaddy cart for one year in advance was pretty comparable in cost to the shopping cart I now own and love. Live and learn.
All that said, we had a little computer incident the day after the synchronization. What are the chances? I'm at work and I get a frantic call from Carol that there is a strange error message and the QBPOS bombs after every transaction and requires a restart. Imagine how much fun it was to work at the store that day. Needless to say, my gut reaction was to link it to the synchronization I did the day before. Now what? I called PDG and spoke with the tech. He was very patient and told me "we've never had a report of this". Ok, this makes me a little nervous as I've heard this line before from another company. PDG's tech told me to call them immediately if I find out out it was related to their software.
Later that night when I'm home from work.... my husband has diagnosed the computer and we no longer think it's related to the PDG stuff. I'm biting my nails in fear and my husband is calmly coaching Carol (at the store) and myself (connected remotely to the store computer). Surprisingly, I won't go into the detail as to what ailed our store computer. It would take too long to explain and it would be too embarassing... trust me. The cure was to uninstall and reinstall the QBPOS software... joy.... and move on. Even though I back up our data obsessively, I just about require sedation at the thought of this. My life passes slowly before my eyes and I see myself spending the next year working a 10,000 piece database jigsaw puzzle.... and it's tax time!
Everything worked out fine thanks to our resident software geek and life is good. Moving right along, I began the weird little process of setting up our merchant services for online credit card transactions. It was a piece of cake. NEXT.... I need to set up an account with UPS. I thought we had one but, oops, we don't. I don't anticipate that being too painful. Once I complete that step, I'll configure our shipping rules in the shopping cart. After that, prepare to be amazed..:-)
So, will all 6000 items go online at once? Technically they could but they wouldn't have any pics or good descriptions. Instead, I chose to have everything going into an "inactive" category until I'm ready to let it go public. I also have my software set to bring any new items from QBPOS straight to the inactive category. So I still have to touch each and every item, but I'm doing it via spreadsheet.... waaayyyy faster.
I should also mention that we had a little issue regarding the timing of our servers. The host server, where the PDG Commerce lives, and the local server, where the QBPOS lives, need to be in sync. I contacted PDG with this issue and they resolved it quickly. It took a few short phone calls... they called me... isn't that amazing. Their guru fixed it and it works just fine. Life is good.
Moving right along. I've had my morning latte, soy of course. My brain is ready to do business. I have my regular weekly accounting chores to do, then off to the land of UPS to set up an account. After that it's to the kitchen to make Super Bowl chili and goodies for tomorrow. If all goes well with UPS, I may sneak back in here later to get a few items out on the web. Stay tuned.
Till next time,
Sandy
This post is filed under By Merchants, For Merchants and has the following keyword tags: design, development, shopping carts.
