We celebrated the opening of the new shopping cart at 12:01 am Pacific Time on August 15. Cecily, our daughter, and I watched for an hour as the first garlic aficionados pounced on our new offerings and when we logged on the next morning there were 40 orders in place!
Cecily helped us get all our new technology connected and smoothly running. Ken Klages and his team at Klages Web Design did a wonderful job of tailoring the Xcart technology to our needs and with lots of help fom him, our web designer, Muriel Neale, our local tech, Jeff Berryman, and the folks at PayPal and QuickBooks, Cecily has learned, tweaked and documented a smooth system for taking orders and tracking inventory.
I am handling the manual orders - the ones coming with a cheque in the mail. I also do the orders for people who have run into difficulties placing their orders online. In the first 250 online orders we have only had four or five people who have not been able to complete their orders online for one reason or another; I have entered the orders for them and processed their payments on the virtual terminal or they have put a cheque in the mail.
Cecily can handle ten times as many orders as I can in the same time! We thank all of you who are willing and able to enter your own orders online.
A reminder to those who really wanted to give me their credit card information over the phone, rather than trust the internet. There is no getting away from the internet if you want to use a credit card. If you haven't entered your information online I will have to. We have chosen to use PayPal for our online credit card transactions as it offers the highest level of security available.
That said, we are happy to accept cheques. We will always continue accepting cheques from those who prefer them.
Sonia
August 20, 2011