exxos's webshop forcefully shutdown :(

[exxos]

Yeah its stupid really, get banned off paypal and get kicked off ebay, even though are now "supposed" to be separate companies, yeah right!

<rant>
Reading around the internet it seems a common thing, people who been with paypal since like 2002 and get kicked off for basically no reason. Its like paypal woke up one morning and said "hey lets ban everyone who signed up in 2002 for a laugh".. madness...

I use paypal and in fact ebay a lot, so they both lost my custom over their own ignorance. Then when the share prices start going down and nobody knows why, they will up the fee's... rince and repeat year after year....

Its interesting when I looked at ebay shares a couple years back. Just after ebay upped fees, share prices would shoot up for a month or 2, then people would give up as fees to high, share prices come crashing down again, then they think up some other way to increase fees.. shares go up again for a couple of months.. then come crashing down again. It was something like $10 rise and fall on $50 a share or something like that, if you think of actually how many people would be involved to make a 20% share price fall then you get a idea on how bad things really are.

Personally I would help the little sellers, they can grow and become big sellers, but no , they always seem to shaft the small sellers out of business. Sellers give up close shop, then ebay lose a lot of custom, fees go up again.. it just keeps on going. I used to buy from a lot of nice guys on ebay a few years ago, they all closed shop because of endless issues.

I used to have a ebay shop , closed in 2013, I was doing very well. Then I left and opened up my webshop with paypal only, things just started picking up again, and i get screwed over by paypal this time. So no way im going back to ebay or paypal again after this.
</rant>

There may be some small ray of hope.. I've finally managed to sign up with a company to take payments, but likely I will sign up with more than 1 company in due time so should I ever get kicked off another payment company, I have a backup plan already in place.

The companies I've spoken to so far seem helpful, and you get to speak to "head of department" not just talk to scripted monkey likes with paypal.

[lapja]

I think Chris may consider bitcoin payments as an alternative. It is much easer and cheaper than PayPal.

[Desty]

Within Europe SEPA (IBAN) is reasonably quick and fee-less.

Outside of Europe I'd propose an idea I've been mulling over for quite some time. Use Bitcoin. The transfers will go through immediately, and while it's somewhat of a hassle for the buyer to first acquire the bitcoin, we in the retro movement don't do that many spur of the moment purchases and we might be willing to put up with that? (I'm exaggerating the hassle though, today it's quite easy). On the receiving side Chris could either choose to stay in Bitcoin denomination or partner with a company that would directly convert the bitcoin into GBP and transfer to his regular bank account.

No one can censor Bitcoin.

Now that you mention it, that is an excellent and totally appropriate use-case for Bitcoin! It's ridiculous that the normal situation is that people are dependent on corporations like Paypal who have zero transparency and can cancel your transactions or disable your account for any reason, even a total misunderstanding in this case, with apparently no way back.

I've actually never used BTC for anything (although a few coffee shops nearby accept it), but I would definitely start using it if someone like exxos accepted it. May a thousand farts blow in Paypal's direction.

[lapja]

I am ready to pay with BTC on any other Crypto and I could even help Chris in putting in place a BTC payment if needed. It is really easy, Chris. Check it out: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/How_to_accep ... businesses

[Ragstaff]

The problem is bitcoin is not a very stable currency in terms of its exchange rates to accepted national currencies, so you have to change your prices a lot all the time to make sure you're not losing "real" money. You also need to cash-out a lot if you want to reduce risk of having all your BC crash to a total value of 50 cents when the next big exchange goes belly-up (or you can gamble and keep your BC inventory, it may go up in value.... but this isn't what currency should really be used for)

[troed]

The problem is bitcoin is not a very stable currency in terms of its exchange rates to accepted national currencies, so you have to change your prices a lot all the time to make sure you're not losing "real" money. You also need to cash-out a lot if you want to reduce risk of having all your BC crash to a total value of 50 cents when the next big exchange goes belly-up (or you can gamble and keep your BC inventory, it may go up in value.... but this isn't what currency should really be used for)

Not an issue whatsoever. If you don't want to store funds in BTC you can use a service that accepts bitcoin bit immediately converts into your local currency and transfers to your bank account.

(And the BTC exchange rate seems more stable than british pounds atm )

[leech]

I haven't read every post in the thread, but have you tried selling through Amazon? I have no idea what their fees are, but I've seen a few people sell things through them.

Hell, I've even seen Atari items listed.

Just a thought.

[exxos]

Amazon has been talked about before I think... I tried to sell there years ago, gave up..

Anyways, the company I signed up with to take payments, made some progress.. then it all went bellie up as seems I "overlooked" they were EU only So back to square 1 again..

I'm trying to apply for a photo driving licence, so I can sign up with more companies.. can take 3 weeks it seems, got loads of forms and faffing about, need to get my mug shot done tomorrow in town.. geeze what a epic of red tape BS its all turned into!

I'm working on my new store meanwhile, Its going to look very similar to before, I'm not a fan of "site updates" being "making it totally alien" to the point nobody can figure it out kinda update.. Mostly it will look as before but with some useful options and more real time stock listings. I am hoping to include some better , more automatic postage calculations aswell. Half the time people forget to add postage then it just creates me even more work having to chance up people.. so looking into a better postage system.

Thing like pre-orders and back orders I am not going to do any more, it just takes up to much time, puts to much pressure on me to build stuff and just generally causes to much confusion, so just going to keep to a system I can cope with. Problem there was I would aim to build a PSU up for someone, then 600 things end up taking priority over it, and I really dont want orders "pending" for days/weeks. This is a hobby for me and I do it when I get time, some weeks I have more time than others. So if a item is in stock, then people can buy it, if not, then the store will just say zero in stock and not allow a order to go though with that item.

I will try and build my stock levels up over the next few weeks so my store has more items in stock when it goes back online.

Also I have teamed up with John Cove on ebay who will be starting to stock my items and sell them via his ebay shop. I don't know what items John will be stocking currently, but it could take a while to get in full swing as I still need to build up my stock to send to John. But we are talking about solutions to all this currently. Likely John can obtain and sell any items that was in my store.

I have uploaded a temp store page here http://www.exxoshost.co.uk/atari/last/storenopp.htm This is more of a list of items I produce and stock, I can't sell them via that page as I have no way to take payments.

[exxos]

I am still working to get my store online, I've almost finished the new store and payment system though I still have to sign up issues to sort out, I'm not sure how long that will take to fix.

Meanwhile, I have teamed up with John Cove (jays retro computers) as John has a online shop and sells on ebay. John should be selling items via his ebay shop and has already started listing items. Due to my time being limited lately, I've not had time to work on my stock levels ( theres over 50 items not including the long list of prototype projects on the go currently) which I am bouncing on zero with a lot of stuff, but I hope over the next weeks I can build stock up and John will start listing items as he receives them.

I have also heard that someones been reporting John's store and trying to get him shut down also. Sad times we live in...

[exxos]

I'm spending all my free time and working hard on getting my store back up. It's taking a lot longer to program the store than I had initially thought though

I know there's a lot of people wanting to order items, I am honestly working on this new store as fast as I can. I am making it a priority over everything else, even so, I suspect it could be another 2 weeks of programming before it even gets close to operational. Thats depending on if I find any bugs which may be hard to solve or not...

The main store page is done, and all driven now from my SQL database. So stock levels shown on the store page are now accurate as values are all driven from the SQL database.

The add to basket, remove basket, and data is stored in a cookie. So assuming you use the same PC/Browser, then your shopping basket contents should be kept next time you visit the store. The cost calculations and quantity calculations are also finished.

There have been various enhancements, which I am sure people will find useful. Will explain more about those another time. The store looks almost like it did before, other than the new buy buttons and quantities are set on the store page. In a way everything is all done on one page without having to flick back and forth like it was with paypal checkout.

The "status" of my progress is I am just at the point of integrating my store over to the new payment system. I've got some examples already working there, but need to integrate them into my store. Currently I am working on the postage calculation code. Once that is done, the total amount should be passable to my payment code.

Once the payment code is completed, I then need to work out the SQL backend and deduct items ordered from the database. Also send out order confirmation emails, and program some system to take care of tracking codes and emails once a order ships.

Overall I am trying to make the store as simple as possible to use, and trying to not "bodge" code up into getting things working properly. I do need to tidy my code up.. but thats a while off yet

[1024MAK]

Hello Chris

Sorry to hear about the trouble you have been and are having.

Late to the party, but maybe you would like to take a look at this site: http://sellmyretro.com/

Mark

[exxos]

Not seen that site before, will check it out more later thanks!

I dare say I am 95% finished with my store now. Got a few tiny bugs to iron out and a couple minor things to finish coding. I've got a lot of work on next week, so time limited, I've literally spent the entire past week morning-noon-night programming the new store up. So I have literally bashed out a entire system in under 2 weeks!

I'm not at home on weekends either, but I hope very soon to push the test site out to some people to beta test. The store has a "test mode" so fake credit card numbers can be used to test the whole system start to end. I've probably gone through checkout like 1,000+ times already and not seen anything break for a long time. Hopefully have more news early next week.

[exxos]

STORE BACK ONLINE!

https://www.exxoshost.co.uk/atari/last/storenew/

Store is live as of about a hour ago!

Already taken first payment, think some people been sat clicking refresh on the store page 24/7

According to my site logs 80% of traffic uses Chrome, So my webstore was created using it. I have however done some limited testing with Opera 40, FireFox 43 (on nope its 48 now, seesh!) , Internet Exploder 11.

I can't predict how other browsers will work, and likely vastly lesser versions of browsers will most likely fail. But lifes to short....

Should something crap out, send me a screenshot and I will look into it. I've plasted in a load of error checking already, But its nothing critical to stores operation.. There might be some tiny hiccups, but will ircon those out another time. So rather than keeping people waiting anymore, its gone live

[catmando]

STORE BACK ONLINE!

https://www.exxoshost.co.uk/atari/last/storenew/

Store is live as of about a hour ago!

Already taken first payment, think some people been sat clicking refresh on the store page 24/7

According to my site logs 80% of traffic uses Chrome, So my webstore was created using it. I have however done some limited testing with Opera 40, FireFox 43 (on nope its 48 now, seesh!) , Internet Exploder 11.

I can't predict how other browsers will work, and likely vastly lesser versions of browsers will most likely fail. But lifes to short....

Should something crap out, send me a screenshot and I will look into it. I've plasted in a load of error checking already, But its nothing critical to stores operation.. There might be some tiny hiccups, but will ircon those out another time. So rather than keeping people waiting anymore, its gone live

Looks a lot better, a lot of work but worth it I think

[ijor]

Store is live as of about a hour ago!

That's great news!

[frost]

Great news !

[umberto1st]

Great now I get to be broke again. No really good news

[Dal]

Ah - great to see the store back online. Well done Exxos!

[Maeke]

Just the day my account got replenished, great timing.

[DarkLord]

Congratulations Chris. show those near-sighted corporation types
who is boss!

Damn the man!

[wongck]

Good Show !!

[exxos]

Thanks for everyones kind words and support!

I've found a couple of hiccups so the store may be going offline at random points while I make updates. Mostly it was when people was entering those odd letters , IE not just A-Z stuff, so some overseas addresses were not being displayed correctly when I got the order. For now I did a quick fix to only allow english letters to pass.. I hope this will be fixed tomorrow..

Also a couple of other minor issues ive spotted and need fixing, Mainly noticed that people can actually enter invalid email address's, so the receipts fail and bounce back to me, so need to either validate the email address, and/or add in server messages should emails bounce to warn the user something went wrong.. Its one of those oversights where it wasn't something I considered to happen when I did the email scripts :-\

So if my store goes offline, please wait it out while I make changes and test them out..

[Shredder11]

Bloody well done Exxos and I hope things work out more smoothly for you from now on.

[Maartau]

Good job Chris !

[nukebloodaxe]

Excellent job Chris the shop is looking really nice. I did run into a problem though, detailed below [I hope it's okay to do store debug in this thread.]

I've tried to do a purchase, of one new-type PSU unit, however after going through all the steps [including payment portal] I eventually hit Harry the Hamster and a wait message. From the no confirmation in email, plus no apparent subtraction from store, nor from credit card, I'd say something tripped up on the very last step. I'm also fine with doing this as many times as required until everything is going fine; without charging the card for non-purchases, of course.

Note: My current thought on the problem would be that the payment portal conveys a confirmation to the main site, which is where things possibly went wrong.