eCommerce and

You may already know that Gordian Project users are in the cloud.  Well, on Tuesday, we hit our second bump in the road with Google Apps. An outage. You may say to yourself, "An outage? With Google Apps? Really?" Well. Yes. Really. Totally freakin' down. Apparently, Google had an issue Tuesday morning that brought down the email interface for apps users.  Déjà vu?

Here is the error I got in Chrome:

At first I thought to myself, "Hmmm. That's weird." So I literally waited 30 seconds and tried again. Same thing. So I asked the person next to me to try. Same thing. So, I tried my iPhone and got:

OK. Seems likely to be a global problem. So, I alerted users on our network that I was aware of an issue with Google Apps and was looking into it. Because the error says, "Please try again in 30 seconds.” I figured it would be a temporary outage and waited only a few minutes. The problem persisted. So I checked Google News and, sure enough, there's a widely recognized outage. From the news, I noticed two things that were particularly interesting:

1. I wonder if the "tip-toeing" of wave into apps created yesterday's havoc.
2. Google has an Apps Status Dashboard

So, after I found out that there was an Apps Status Dashboard, I checked it out and here's what I got:

Google, why didn't you show this to me on the 502 error page? Instead, you told me to try every 30 seconds. I can't imagine how many people wasted hours of their day refreshing every 30 seconds to try to get to critical email. You may remember this article highlighting good custom error pages.

After the incident was stabilized, Google posted an incident report here. According to the report, Google "underestimated the increased load that some of the new updates placed on request routing." Not sure what the "new updates" were, but it doesn't seem like Google should underestimate the anticipated load.

Noting the red "X" by Google Mail, I clicked on it at 1:48 PM to find:

It says there will be an update at 1:53 PM, so I waited until 1:58 PM and clicked again:

Hey! Wait just a second! Ten minutes ago there was not an update at 1:02 PM. What gives Google? Don't you know that 45 minutes after I announced it to everyone, people are still coming to my desk to say "Hey Josh. My email's down."? Please, just tell me what I need to know when you know it! Also, I love that there is a link to the "How to use IMAP or POP", where the first step outlined is to "Enable POP or IMAP in your Google Apps email account". I can't get to my apps account! Then I realized, I already had IMAP enabled on my account and had it set up in Outlook. So, I started up Outlook... only to be woefully reminded of why I wanted desperately to switch to Google Apps to begin with. I quit Outlook before I even used it, as it was either Outlook or every other application, and a choice had to be made. Instead, I waited for the Google update. At 2:40 PM I refreshed the Status Dashboard to find:

Hooray! We're back up! Not without a few lessons.

1. Google, or any other cloud service provider, when a critical service goes down, don't show me an error that tells me to retry every 30 seconds; especially if that's not really what you want me to do. Send me to the place with the relevant information. I know, based on your incident reports, that you "published ongoing reports to the Google Apps dashboard, Gmail Help Center, the Enterprise and Gmail blogs, and the GoogleAtWork and Google Twitter feeds, to help provide customers with the latest status and available workarounds.", but the error was unhelpful. Please don't make me Google it.


2. IT managers, if you're going to start using SAAS and cloud enabled services, find out, in advance, what the notification mechanism is for outages. In this case, it would have been a simple thing to have added the Apps Status Dashboard to one of my feeds.


3. Don't count on Google Apps, or any other cloud service being available 100% of the time. If you have a critical meeting or a conference call that requires you to have a cloud stored document or email or presentation up and ready to go, make sure it's ready and pulled up long before your event, or make sure to store it locally, as well. Also, based on Google's comments, it may be good to enable IMAP on your account just in case you can't web-surf your email; at least then you can get to critical emails with Outlook or Thunderbird.
   

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On July 2, 2009, at approximately 11:15PM PST, as I was lying snugly in bed, I had nary a clue that Authorize.net was going down. Apparently, there was a fire at the data center. Many of you have probably already read this story; or, perhaps you are/were a customer of Authorize.net's and were made aware by errors. I wanted to share our experience with the major outage and why the lesson is valuable for others in eCommerce. I could be writing a blog post about how much it sucks that Authorize.net even went down, given that it was only one data center scorched. I could be asking, "Where in the world was the backup data center? "Rackspace, how does a sprinkler system kill backup generators? Where is the backup for your backup's backup?!" I could also be writing about how quickly the status was updated on the situation thanks to some smart person at Authorize.net building a Twitter account that day. But this is a post about a shift in our philosophy.

So, as I slept I had no idea that our payment gateway, Authorize.net, was getting wrecked by a fire. When I woke up at about 7:30AM I had already received a text from one of the managing partners alerting me that we had received a pile of errors related to Authorize.net failures. Let me explain what that means for us. An error from our order system that there was an Authorize.net failure means that an order was placed, but no payment was collected. You might be saying to yourself, "Why in the heck would you guys place an order without first confirming that payment could be collected?!" Well, the reason is simple and goes back to our roots. Early on in our eCommerce venture, we prayed for orders every day. Our strategy on many fronts, including payment processing, was to protect orders; in this case, let the customer place the order on the customer site without failure or error (or some other barrier to transaction) and clean up the mess manually. As a consequence of this strategy, when we made a call to Authorize.net for payment processing and it failed, we would have a placed order in our system with no payment from Authorize.net. So, an email with the customer info would be forwarded over to the tech team to review and contact the customer to process a manual payment. This was a good solution for us, early on, as we didn't want to miss a single transaction. We needed the business!

This process worked for us for a good long while, since downtimes on the Authorize.net front were very rare, but when they did happen it was usually only one or two and could be resolved easily. Well, we hadn't had this issue in quite a while and it had not occurred to us that we would need to update our strategy as we grew. Then we grew. By a lot. The consequences of having more than ten times the volume of four years ago becomes readily apparent when your payment processor goes down for more than eight hours. The morning that Authorize.net went down meant that we had a few dozen orders that were placed without payment but had already begun processing for shipment at warehouses across the country. So, we had quite a cleanup effort on our hands. First, ensure that the orders don't get processed out the door, since they haven't been paid for. Second, disable the Authorize.net payment method until we can figure out what happened or is happening and identify when they're back up. Third, contact all of the customers to see if they would like to complete a manual transaction over the phone or retry their checkout using Google Checkout or PayPal (two services that we did not offer at launch). Four, document and share the happenings with the management team. Finally, fix our outdated checkout so that orders do not get placed when the authorization transaction fails.

Our checkout process and a redesign have been on our radar for an update for some time now. This, however, is one issue that escaped us until it became a pain. Hopefully, this will help us to think critically about updates to our site as we examine where we were, where we are, and where we're going.

Kohler is arguably one of the most innovative brands in the home improvement industry. The new Karbon faucet has completely transformed the kitchen and more specifically revolutionized the kitchen faucet. Meanwhile Kohler seems to effortlessly create bathroom fixtures that are not only sleek but save water, like the Escale toilet.

We were recently able to upgrade our phone system. We had spent time, energy and effort to build a better system under the assumption that it would improve a number of important metrics. More importantly, the new phone system made it easier for us to see those metrics. Consequently, I was able to get better reporting on phone utilization, especially as it related to customer service. One of the first things that struck me was our maximum load. We had gone from 8 lines available to 23 lines available. With 8 lines, extra calls would roll over in to voice mail, creating havoc later in the day as we scrambled to try to call people back. Many times, people would call two, sometimes three or more, times to try to reach us. Also, with eight lines, it made it very difficult for us to make outgoing calls during peak periods. With 23 lines, surely we would handle the load. Not so fast! Over the first few weeks I checked our maximum load on all 23 lines and, on several occasions, we had exceeded our maximum load during peak calling periods! We nearly tripled our call capacity and still had overflow. Thankfully, the overflow is not frequent enough, at this point, to justify another 23 lines.

Alrighty then, what about our connect rate? Given all the customers that try to reach us, to what percentage do we actually connect? I was more struck by this metric than our load. Let's just say it was less than half of what we would want it to be. It turns out, we were literally turning away hundreds of calls a week, probably mostly due to long hold time. Even more striking, our average hold time for a connected customer was approaching 30 minutes! 30 minutes?! Dreadful! Sales customers simply will not hold for 30 minutes to buy something. What made this even scarier was the fact that our mix of callers (known by the queue that they select when calling) was more than two-thirds sales calls. We were turning away hundreds of sales a week. This means we were turning away customers who wanted to buy something (and were probably at the end of the buying cycle) in order to provide support to customers we had already acquired.

OK. Now we know. What do we do? We could hire 10 more reps. Nope. Don't have the budget. OK. We don't have an unlimited budget. What else can we do? We could slow down marketing and sabotage our own SEO to get fewer sales calls. Nope. That's dumb. So what do we do then?! How can I get more work out of existing resources? How can we add hours to the day to get more done?... wait... Eureka! We needed more hours in the day! It was ultra-clear that our call and chat volume was much higher earlier in the day than late in the day. Once the clock gets to about 3:45 pm, things tend to slow down. With reps struggling during our rush periods to perform administrative and follow up tasks, it would be near impossible to be more efficient during regular 8:00 am to 5:00 pm business hours. So, why don't we have some reps come in at 7:00 am, instead of 8:00 am, to finish any lingering issues from the previous day and get a head start on the new day before we start taking calls and chats? We could even perform some proactive functions that prevent customers from calling for support reasons in the first place! Why didn't we think of this sooner?! Oh yeah, we didn't think of it sooner because we didn't have great data to stare at.

The effect of having half of our customer service team come in one hour before business hours has been exponential in its positivity. We still have load issues, two or three times a week, during peak times we exceed our capacity. However, our connect rate has doubled! Our hold time has gone from nearly 30 minutes on average to less than 10 minutes! Interestingly, sales are up, but we have reduced our volume of calls and chats by about 10%. Fewer calls and fewer chats, coupled with increased sales, is a strong indicator to me that we are servicing customers more efficiently. We still have a great deal of growth opportunity, but one simple scheduling decision has drastically improved our ability to service customers and, as a positive consequence, also greatly improved morale in the customer service department. Go team!

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I was struck recently by a video I watched on Fora.tv, Google's Vic Gundotra: Mobile Phones as Answer Machines. In the video, Vic Gundotra describes how he was having lunch with a friend and his four year old daughter. His friend asked him a question and he replied, "I don't know." His daughter piped in, "Daddy, where's your phone?!" At first he thought nothing of it, but then he and his friend realized that his four year old had surmised that when information was needed, one could simply pull out a phone to obtain it. Remarkable! I have a two year old, and even he has displayed what I perceive as a shift in thinking about information retrieval from my generation to his. We were recently watching "Mickey Mouse Clubhouse" on TV and I said to him, "You and I are going to go to the store." He got in the car, climbed into his car seat, and asked me for my iPhone. He turned it on, unlocked it, and started the YouTube app so that he could continue to watch "Mickey Mouse Clubhouse" clips in the car. Naturally I had to search for the clip, but I am amazed that he is aware of this resource portability.

Until I owned a "cloud-enabled" phone, I was skeptical of the mobile revolution. Sure, I have recognized Generation Y as the text message generation, but until recently I hadn't seen the utility in being connected to cloud applications via a sensory-based platform. My 49 year old father-in-law once proclaimed to me that online shopping would never overtake physical retail shopping in overall revenues. Though I am sure people will still want to go to the grocery store to make sure their melons feel ripe, I'm not sure I believe that the shopping experience or buying decision process will look anything like it does today in 20 10 5 years. More and more, I use the cloud to make buying decisions. What's more, I find myself diving ever-deeper into my phone while I'm shopping in physical retail stores. Whether I'm doing price comparisons, or reading product reviews, or searching for similar products or services, I find that I'm more inclined to trust information found from reliable sources in the cloud than I am information found at a retailer's store. 

I wonder… how will cloud-connected customers affect eCommerce and vice-versa? More specifically, how will this affect PlumberSurplus.com, OutdoorPros.com, and any other venture we decide to undertake? Well, in order for us to be able to make an impact in mobile, we have to know what success looks like in order to understand whether or not we can execute in an easy and scalable way. With this type of marketing in its infancy, how can we really measure this? 

I came across this article today, Search Giants Encounter Challenges in Mobile Ad Market.  In the article, Frank Reed discusses a company that starts off with mobile ad campaigns running on five mobile Internet networks. After only one day, the company pulled Google and Yahoo campaigns because they were not effective. Frank cites two reasons as the primary hurdles for behemoths like Google and Yahoo in the mobile ad market: "First, the ads that are run on their traditional platform don’t often translate or fit well in the mobile environment... Secondly, the position of the ads on a mobile device will not correspond to the ‘top of the page’ and ‘right hand column’ look that is now ingrained in everyone’s way of seeing and reacting to the ads." These seem like relatively easy problems for resource heavy organizations like Google and Yahoo to overcome over time. However, it's a good indicator to me that mobile advertising isn't mature (certainly not mature enough for a small business like ours to throw money at).

In order for us to be able to be effective in mobile, I think three things need to happen. First, testability. We need to be able to stare at an anticipated baseline of performance and easily test and measure performance. Second, match ad campaigns to targets. Mobile advertising seems like a moving target at this point. This seems pretty tough to do. Finally, figure out how to take advantage of the sensory aspect of today's mobility. Phones have eyes, ears, skin, they know where you are, they know where you've been, they know who your friends are... how do we leverage these to create an experience that leads a customer to buy?

No matter what happens, at this point, I'm pretty convinced that the way my son finds information and shops when he's my age will be very different than the way I do those things now. I can't wait to see what happens next.

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I was about to leave my house for work the other morning, when my phone rang. It was Vanessa. I say, "Good morning, Vanessa!" She says, with a pinch of panic and frustration in her voice, "We're down." I panic for a moment; my mind was whirling through yesterday's development activities and I was trying to remember any update or job that we scheduled that could have taken us down. It occurred to me that I was still pretty depressed after watching the Lakers lose to the Jazz in game three of their playoff series and this would not help my already poor disposition today. Thankfully, she was referring to the internet connection at the office and not any of our eCommerce sites. Whew!

Getting the internet connection back up should be easy. We had recently faced an issue with one of our ISPs, so naturally I thought it was them, again. So I go through some steps to test that connection... Everything looks good there. So, I test our backup connection... Everything looks good there, too. Hmmm. I run through some other issues via remote connection, but I can't see why she's down. So, I proceed to work, since I don't have any other network savvy employees on site to help. I know that I'm going to be there late, as I stopped to troubleshoot remotely.

I show up to the office at about 8:10 AM, fully expecting chaos and disarray. I was pleasantly surprised that when I walked in I was greeted by smiling faces and mild applause. People were delighted that I was there to fix the internet connection. But what's more, is people were delighted to be at the office. Folks were chattering and laughing and seemed genuinely happy. It made me feel nice when I walked in. Knowing fully the weight of my responsibility, however, I rushed past everyone to get to the task at hand. A few of my more technical colleagues pointed out that one of our building two access layer switches was freaking out and was lit up like a Christmas tree. Indeed it was. A switch had simply gone bad. So, I ran to my pile o' old equipment to find an extra 24 port switch and a crossover cable.

I worked feverishly to plug in the first few users to test my dead switch theory. ¡Viola! It worked. So I started the task of migrating everyone on the dead switch over to the temporary switch. As I am doing this, I notice noise in the office. Somewhat annoyed, I turn to find people are still talking and laughing. Granted, we work for an ecommerce company and, as a consequence, working without an internet connection can be a challenge. But I was, again, surprised by what I saw. The noise and commotion was coming from people who were cleaning their desk area, vacuuming, cleaning our whiteboards, discussing business strategy, etc. The whole office full of employees was happily chugging along like busy bees in a hive. People were communicating and moving and working outside of their normal routine. As I was getting everyone back online, I noticed folks settling into their desks and getting back to their routines. The noise died down and it was back to business, but a nice tone was set for the day (aside from the catch-up that now had to ensue subsequent to our downtime).

There are three simple observations I had on this morning, few but all important:

1. Always have at least one backup access layer switch.
2. A little bit of "downtime" can be a good thing. I'm certainly not suggesting that someone pull the plug on the office internet connection to create downtime! I simply mean that it was nice to hear the camaraderie when I walked in. Maybe I should come into the office 10 minutes early and just greet people as they come in?
3. Losing the routine for a short period created interesting work of even mundane tasks. People seemed excited to be able to do something other than what they always have to do. Maybe, as a manager, I should consider mixing it up a bit and allow some of my employees to work on other things on occasion?

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Alright, if you haven't read Challenges of an Internet Retailer’s VOIP Implementation Part 1, please read it first. I think you'll find that the differences between Part 1 and Part 2 of the posts are pretty staggering.

We've finally made the transition from our digital-to-analog-to-digital lines over to full digital. To be clearer, we had eight phone lines coming into an AdTran over T1 that were converted from digital to analog. We then took each line and converted it back to digital using an Audiocodes MP-118 analog gateway. The tweaking required to make it work well was intense and not a project I ever want to repeat. In place of our analog lines, we've added a PRI line with 23 channels (plus one D channel), greatly expanding the number of lines available and drastically improving quality. Surprisingly, this change only increased our monthly bill by a few dollars.

We are still using a trixbox solution and I did a fair amount of research, mostly on the trixbox forums, to determine what PRI card would be best/easiest/least expensive to install and configure. In the end, I decided on the Sangoma A101DE.  The reason I went with Sangoma, and not the, perhaps, more natural selection of a Digium card, was the wide spread vocal support in the VoIP community. Not only did users swear by Sangoma products, but the vendor's presence among the community was also readily apparent; so I knew I would be able to get help when I ran into a snag (which we all knew was going to happen).  I used the same VoIP vendor that I had used in the past as I knew I could depend on them to get me the A101DE I needed.

Since my last phone system post, I have also found a Grandstream GXP-2000 firmware that seems to work well, but we have transitioned most of our call center users over to softphones. While I was waiting for the Sangoma card to arrive, a friend of mine that works for a large multinational corporation dropped off a huge box of Polycom phones. Apparently, his company has a very liberal "dead phone" policy and all of these were going to be junked. Picture this, a user says, "Hey IT! My phone doesn't work!" IT provisions a new phone, brings it to the user, and puts the old phone in the trash pile. He brought me the trash pile. More on this in a minute...

So, I received the Sangoma card within a few days of the order and proceeded to replace the production system with a temp system. I swapped out the systems and proceeded to install the card on the production system. Sangoma had recently posted a very simple installation walkthrough on the trixbox forums, so I just followed instructions found there. Piece of cake, right? Maybe not. At the same time, I was also coordinating with our T1 vendor on the PRI installation. Keep in mind, I have never been involved in a PRI build-out or a trixbox system that consumes PRI. I was flying in the dark, other than community documentation. I had already read a considerable amount about users who had installed this card on similar systems. I spent a fair amount of my time learning to match settings between the Sangoma setup and the PRI. The majority of the rest of my time was spent building out a scalable queuing solution that would support multiple customer service queues for separate ecommerce websites, business queuing for various business functions, and individual user assignments to queues and DIDs (Direct Inward Dial). There was also some up front maintenance in ensuring that the box was secured (no default passwords, alternate ports, etc.) and provisioned for our company's network.

Everything was ready to go, except for one glaring issue... the system could not be truly tested until our T1 was live! The months of research, preparation, planning and building would all come to an exciting "everything works" climax or a dismal "nothing works" thud! When I mentioned the impending go live to our development department team leader, he asked, "How long have you been preparing?" I replied, "A few Months." To which he replied, "Well, nothing ever goes 100% right on a project that you're months deep in without live testing." My confidence was obliterated. Was he right? What would I do if something went wrong? I only had a window of a few days to get it to full functionality once our T1 was live. Would I be able to get the necessary support from Sangoma or from the trixbox community in that short window? Would I be forced to buy really expensive support time from someone much smarter than me? Had I done enough research to have a clear understanding of what I was doing? I panicked a bit. But, I calmed down quickly, since I knew that there was nothing I could do until testing.

On testing day, I arrived early, checked all systems to ensure readiness for testing and waited for the telecom tech to arrive. I paced nervously, knowing that I was helpless and alone until my hour of glory or defeat... At 7:00AM, on the dot, he arrived, Customer Premises Equipment in hand. He came in straight away and began the work of testing our new PRI. As he tested the equipment that he had provisioned the night before, he noticed something that prevented the go live. So I waited as he called his project manager to ensure that everything was set up appropriately. I hovered over his shoulder to see what was going on. I'm sure I annoyed him enough to make him want to punch me in the face. As I peered into the screen of the battered field laptop he was using to telnet into the gateway, I could see all of the settings used to prepare my connection. I could see everything I need to confirm that my setup was appropriate! So, I continued to hover, elated as I watched him work through all of the settings. Everything I had set appeared to be correct. By 10:00AM, he had worked through his bugs and we were ready to get the party started. So, we did. We plugged it in, turned it on, and I pulled up a softphone on my laptop. I placed my first test call, a local call, to my cell phone... it worked! I placed another test call from my cell phone to my softphone... it worked! I went down the list of test calls, international, emergency, information, toll-free, etc. I tested queues, DIDs, ring groups, caller ID data, reporting... everything worked! The first time! Was I dreaming? Did I escape from this project unscathed? The answer was an assured "YES!"

The only thing that was really left to do was to get a phone for everyone who didn't have one in the past. Thanks to my very generous friend, I had a pile of Polycoms to go through. So, I brought one home, tested it out and used trixbox's endpoint manager to make provisioning the phones a snap. Eight of the first eleven phones were (nearly fully-) functional! A few had non-functional speakers or broken microphones, but they worked well enough for most users. I even spent the three extra minutes it took to build a customized logo.

My development team leader had put doubt in me, and I knew he was likely right, that not everything would go as planned. The phone system has been such a thorn in the side of the IT department from our humble beginnings with a two-line Vonage solution, to our analog hunting solution, to our digital-to-analog-to-digital line solution, to this. I did not want to see another half-completed phone system that barely meets the needs of the organization. I wanted to build it out to its fullest potential and I wanted it to be scalable and I wanted it to be inexpensive. I think I accomplished that. This one feels good.

An interesting thing happened at the Gordian Project this Christmas. We had Christmas shoppers! This may not sound too startling, considering Christmas just passed, but this year's Christmas crowd was different from years passed. In March of 2008, Gordian Project launched OutdoorPros.com. This Christmas, with OutdoorPros.com, we've uncovered some really great opportunities for good solutions.

For a few years, with PlumberSurplus.com, we had successfully navigated Christmas shopping without too much disruption to normal work and without the need to significantly augment our staffing or resources in customer service. With the addition of OutdoorPros.com, however, we were facing an entirely new animal. I have worked in retail before. I remember the days when I worked at the Gateway Country store selling computers to people who lined up like cows at Christmas. It was busy, it was crazy, and gifts flew out the door. But customers that came into our store at least knew that when our door was closed, we couldn't be much help to them. Even though Gateway was, at the time, a multichannel retailer, I didn't see much in the way of integration of the different customer bases (online vs. walk-in traffic). The customers’ expectations were, I'm sure, very different about how Christmas gift orders should be handled. This year, with OutdoorPros.com, we learned about the customer expectation during a busy holiday on a site that offers more gift-oriented wares.

PlumberSurplus.com gets busier in November and December with folks dressing up their homes to be ready for Christmas. We also sell some items that could be gift items, like a nice shower head  or a towel warmer or a nice drill/saw combo. But, for some reason, PlumberSurplus.com customers seem to plan really well for the holiday. OutdoorPros.com customers, on the other hand, have a very different up front expectation. Customers want a really great deal, they want to know what is in stock or what the lead time is going to be.  They want to know when it will ship and how long it will take to get to them, they want tracking information when it ships, or a backorder update when it doesn't ship.  They want it to be guaranteed because it's a Christmas gift. These are completely reasonable expectations and, for us, really great opportunities to improve. If you control 100% of your inventory and fulfillment, envisioning solutions to these customer needs are easily in focus. If, however, you control only some or none of your inventory and fulfillment and rely on strategic partners, and you haven't worked out solutions to the above customer pains, you may be due for some lumps around Christmas.

Also, our volume of inquiries for our OutdoorPros.com property easily quadrupled for the six weeks leading up to Christmas. It was not unexpected that our volume would balloon, but we didn't expect the kind of volume we were getting in terms of customer inquiries. It's a week into January 2009 and I can see our inquiry volume back at October levels. Concurrent with our unexpected explosion of the volume of inquiries were some staffing issues. We had some personnel changes for various reasons. A number of factors contributed to a poor staffing situation and we ended up providing a poor customer experience to a number of customers who had to wait extra time for a reply to voicemails and emails (this is my public apology... I am truly sorry to any and all that were forced to wait.). We did come together as a team and even pulled some resources from other departments to get the job done, but it's no excuse for not properly resourcing the customer service department during the busiest time of year. It's not easy to find and train qualified reps in a short amount of time, so we should have done this long before.

We found that when working with customers whose orders were filled by one of our strategic partners, we hadn't planned well enough for meeting the above customer needs on those orders. This coupled with our poor resourcing of the customer service department and we had not prepared well for a busier-than-expected Christmas season. I will chalk it up to "lesson learned" and plan for the extreme rush for our next Christmas season. This is going to be especially important as we expand our offering and even launch new sites with more gift-oriented products.

Something is going to happen this week at the Gordian Project that I didn't expect when I started work here three years ago. We are beginning our transition to "The Cloud".
 
That's right, we're testing a transitioning of our users over from the clunky and resource intensive (and expen$ive) Microsoft Outlook, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, MSN Live Messenger, etc over to Google's cloud model of Google Apps, Gmailesque email, Google Docs, Google Talk, and Google Sites.

So, this week, I will be "living in the cloud" and completing 100% of my work on email, documents, spreadsheets, and presentations from Google Apps. This may not sound too revolutionary, since Apps has been around for awhile now. But, it's a challenge to transition your daily life away from what you're used to and what's comfortable to you. Over the next several weeks I'll also be transitioning our departments over to Google Apps, one at a time. The initial test is mostly about me ensuring that no individual user will be without key features for which they currently have a critical business need.
 
With any major software or interface change, there will be some user soreness. I fully expect moans and groans from a number of users that don't know what to expect. So, we're going to try to make the transition as painless as possible, by adding a function (email, calendar, chat, etc) by individual departments first, then, once all departments have transitioned to a new function of Apps, we'll move on to the next function.
 
We've used Google Apps for some time, but I am curious to see how others have fared in cloud computing for an entire organization. I'll have an update with thoughts and challenges once we're fully deployed.

chat will brb thx 4 ur p8ience 

I recently read a blog post by Frank Reed at Marketing Pilgrim called "R U 2 Casual w Your Biz Talk?"  In the article, Frank is reacting to a WSJ article that discusses the casual use of the abbreviated shorthand, textspeak. I understand that, for Gen Y, textspeak is a clear and concise means of communication. They live in a world where they have unlimited (or hundreds of) texts, but maybe not unlimited calling minutes with friends. A world where it may be easier and cheaper to send an IM or a text than to pick up the phone to call, not only that, people can't hear what you are texting, so it's potentially more private than a voice conversation. Truly, there are some great reasons that Generation Y prefers texting to calling.  For the professional world, textspeak is not considered to be...well...professional; and when it comes to Live Chat for our customers, it definitely does not fly.

Customers want to know that the person that they are dealing with is both competent and capable, and the use of textspeak can diminish the customer’s confidence in the abilities of the representative. The use of textspeak in a service environment is unprofessional and can reflect negatively on your company and its staff. It diminishes the customer's expectations of what your company can do for them. Perhaps a company that sells "really cool" products might find it acceptable to use loose language with sales clientele. However, when dealing with a support issue, where a customer has a potential problem, they need clear language that isn't left to their interpretation. Textspeak can also come off to a customer as smug. Do not presume that a customer is ok with textspeak if they use it during a conversation. They are counting on you to be professional, especially if there is an issue that needs resolving.

If your business uses Live Chat as a communication option, be sure to review "speaking" guidelines with your staff. Additionally, review transcripts of chats to ensure that your service reps are representing your company in a pleasing way, and that they are not communicating with your customers in a way that is confusing or juvenile. According to LivePerson in face-to-face communications "55% of what we communicate is through our tone of voice, 38% of the message is by our appearance or body language, and only 7 % is by the words we use". Clearly, live chat is does not present a face-to-face option, so the words we use become much more important. LivePerson recommends paying attention to spelling and grammar as part of your basic “netiquette”. They have provided a rather useful list of basic rules to follow:

• Use correct punctuation.
• Use proper capitalization.
• Use of exclamation marks are okay, e.g. "Sure! I'll be glad to help you."
• Maintain a friendly, but professional tone.
• Write complete sentences.
• Use articles (a, an, the) and sentences with subjects and verbs.

Talk to your reps about professional language and what that means for your company. Let your people know, when they are hired, that your office is not a place for "OMG" and "brb" and "ROFL"; especially not with customers!

Recently, one of the Gordian Project properties, OutdoorPros.com, faced a frustrating and probably unnecessary conundrum with PayPal. Launched in 2008, OutdoorPros.com is a pure play online retailer offering a tremendous assortment of outdoor products. In June of 2008, after months of negotiation, OutdoorPros.com launched PayPal as a payment option. At no time during our initial exchange with PayPal did they ever mention that a portion of our offering may be in violation of the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy.

Then, on August 6, 2008, we received an email from service@paypal.com with a subject that read “Notification of Limited Account Access”. In the body of the email:

“Under the Acceptable Use Policy, PayPal may not be used to send or receive payments for firearms, firearm parts or accessories, ammunition, weapons or knives.”

According to the email, the rug had been pulled from our account and we were prevented from accepting PayPal as a payment option because we sell items that are in violation of the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy. I will quote Adam Sandler, “Information that would have been helpful YESTERDAY!” The email continues:

“To appeal the limitation on your account, you will need to:

1.  Remove those items from your website that violate PayPal's Acceptable Use Policy.  For example, <All Batons, & All Training Batons> http://www.outdoorpros.com; and

2.  Submit the online Acceptable Use Policy affidavit.

This is not intended to be an all-inclusive review or list of your Internet sites in violation.  Furthermore, the violations of the Policy described above are not intended to be an all-inclusive list.  It is the responsibility of the user to ensure that all transactions comply with the Acceptable Use Policy.   

For more information about the status of your account and for instructions on how to restore full use of your account, please login to your PayPal account.  We encourage you to log in and restore full access as soon as possible. Should access to your account remain limited for an extended period of time, it may result in permanent limitation.”

We sell tens of thousands of products. Now the data team here has to filter out products that violate the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy by removing any firearms, firearm parts or accessories, ammunition, weapons or knives. Oy! We have an entire top level category dedicated to cutlery! Did we need to take down all of our knives and swords?

We emailed our PayPal rep and asked this very question. He contacted the PayPal Acceptable Use team and discovered that we needed to remove all guns, batons and butterfly knives. That’s simple. Except that we don’t sell guns or butterfly knives! We do, however sell training products  (red plastic weapons for duty training purposes) and balisong training knives (like butterfly knives, but they have blunt edges and are only used to learn to use the knife properly). So we asked PayPal again and found out that our training products did not need to be removed.

To PayPal’s credit, they did give us a much more detailed response the second time we asked. They let us know that we needed to remove all batons and automatic knives (switchblades) that do not visibly contain a ‘thumb screw’ or ‘thumb hole’ on the blade. Also, our United Cutlery UC702 Eight Piece Ninja Warrior Sword would need to be removed as it includes throwing stars in the package. They also included the following (not a fun read, but at least someone is publishing the information):

Question :
What types of weapons and knives does PayPal prohibit?
Answer :
PayPal prohibits transactions for certain hand weapons or knives that may be illegal or restricted in some jurisdictions.

"Weapons – PayPal generally prohibits transactions for these types of weapons:
•    Nunchaku
•    Brass or other metal knuckles
•    Leaded canes, staffs, crutches, or sticks
•    Zip guns, shurikens or throwing stars
•    Hand grenades or metal replica hand grenades
•    Billyclubs or batons, sandclubs, sandbags, or slungshots (also known as saps or blackjacks)
For other hand weapons, sellers must ensure the weapon is lawful in both the buyer's and seller's jurisdiction before completing the sale.

Knives – PayPal generally prohibits transactions for switchblade knives and disguised knives. A switchblade is any knife resembling a pocketknife with a blade that can be released automatically or by use of a trigger. Other names for switchblades include spring-blade knives, snap-blade knives, gravity knives, and butterfly knives.

A disguised knife is a knife designed to look like a harmless item. Examples of disguised knives include belt buckle knives, cane swords, shobi-zue, lipstick case knives, air gauge knives, and writing pen knives.

Other Related Items – PayPal prohibits transactions for destructive devices and the sale of military equipment or supplies that violate laws or regulations in the buyer's or seller's jurisdiction."

Well, that is much clearer, but would have been beneficial to know during negotiations. However, the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy is much more broad in its scope of unacceptable products, citing “…PayPal may not be used to send or receive payments for firearms, firearm parts or accessories, ammunition, weapons or knives.” If we followed PayPal’s very broad policy, we would be forced to take down a large portion of our offering. If we don’t take the products down, and someone buys a violating item, our PayPal account may be permanently disabled. If we don’t follow the broad policy, but rather use discretion with regard to the items offered (based on their further recommendations) we risk listing an item that PayPal may decide violates their policy. We have taken a relatively conservative approach based mostly on the more detailed information we received via email. But we still needed to decide whether or not we should completely take down products that could be identified as violators.

To solve this dilemma, we proposed that we continue to offer the products that are in violation of the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy, but not offer PayPal as a payment option for those products. We suggested that we programmatically identify products that are flagged by PayPal as violators of the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy and remove PayPal as a payment option from the payment flow entirely where those products are concerned. Surprisingly, PayPal responded with the following:

"In regards to disabling PayPal as a method of payment for the violating items, this is acceptable however; you must also remove any PayPal logos from these items and place a disclaimer stating that PayPal cannot be used for this product. Also, if a potential buyer wishes to send you a payment for any violating item via PayPal, you must ensure that this is not done as any payment received into the account for a violating item will result in further action being taken on the account."

With PayPal’s acceptance of our solution, we set out to update the website appropriately. Below are screenshots of our solution with a comparison between a Pay-Palalbe and a non-PayPal-able product:

With PayPal Logo 

Without PayPal Logo

With PayPal as a Payment Option 

Without PayPal as a Payment Option

This solution allows us to continue to sell all of the products in our offering and helps us to continue to conform to PayPal’s Acceptable Use Policy. There is still some worry that new products may violate PayPal’s Policy. However, our data team has added a “PayPal Acceptable Use Filter” to our data entry process. This will mean that new products that are questionable will have to be submitted to PayPal’s Acceptable Use team for preapproval. We would have preferred that PayPal contact us proactively (before taking our account down) when an item was found to be a violation, but they advised us that they would not be able to do this, which is understandable, since they want us to be proactive in preventing the sale of disapproved items.

In the end, I was surprised that PayPal was flexible enough to allow us to build a mutually beneficial solution. Thanks PayPal.

Update 

About the time I finished writing this blog post we received an email from the Google Checkout team. Lo and behold! Google Checkout has a content policy similar to PayPal’s. The portion that we’ve focused on is:

"Weapons    Firearms, ammunition, and other items including but not limited to firearms, disguised, undetectable or switchblade knives, martial arts weapons, scopes, silencers, ammunition, ammunition magazines, BB guns, tear gas or stun guns."

Google Checkout’s terms are less ambiguous than PayPal’s and Google Checkout contact us proactively to request that we remove violating items. They didn’t yank our account and prevent customers from using Google Checkout. They let us know. They have formed a payment partnership with OutdoorPros.com and we’re, consequently, more inclined to be happy to oblige their requests (Thanks John).

So, what did we do about Google Checkout products? We have expanded our filter to include all products that should be filtered by both PayPal’s and Google Checkout’s terms of use. We have also removed Google Checkout as a payment option where violating products are concerned. It was really quite easy to piggy-back Google Checkout onto our PayPal solution.

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