aaronsimmons, Author at Marketing, content, & technology to help printers sell more printing

Have you ever shopped online and entered that cryptic code into the promo code box on the shopping cart screen? If so, then you know promo codes can be a great way to entice first-time shoppers to place their first order, or to reward repeat customers for their loyalty. On the flip side, a lot of printers would much rather have a bad rash then offer promo codes … why give up that precious margin? Which side of the promo code debate are you on? Big News for Fans of Promo Codes For those that are fans of promo codes, we have some great news for you! In the past, promo codes on a Websites For Printers website could be assigned to be used by companies, branches, or individuals, but not to product categories or individual products. So, if you were having a sale on, say, business cards, customers with the promo code may have been able to use that code even without any business cards in their shopping cart. We’re happy to announce that that has changed: promotional codes can now be designated to apply only to specific product categories, and even to specific products. With this update, if the customer

We have exciting news…but only if your customers send you files electronically. (That was a joke — of course your customers send you files electronically!) We’re making some major improvements to the Send a File process on our websites, and the enhanced Send a File tool is now available on our demo websites for you to kick the tires. Every single improvement we made was focused on the goal of making it easy for your customers to buy printing from you. Among the improvements are: Your customers can now access the Send a File tool from any page in your website, not just their account page. Files start loading immediately upon selection, while your customers continue to provide file information. This means the files get a head-start on the transfer; your customers will think they hit turbo-boost! The whole process has been streamlined, so your website visitors never have to say, “Just send the file already!” Attaching files to existing orders is now a simple point-and-click. Now your customers can “fire and forget” their files. Once they’ve selected their files and clicked “Send”, their work is done; the website will do the rest. We’ll turn it on for all Websites

Subscriber List Import Reinstated Previously, we announced the removal of the email-list import feature for the Printer@Work email newsletter, to ensure compliance with changes in Canadian law that required “explicit opt-in” for delivering content such as newsletters, and to promote email best-practices in general. Due to several requests to reinstate that tool, we have now added it back, with a warning: use at your own risk — it’s becoming increasingly risky to send messages to people who have not explicitly expressed an interest in receiving them. Legal considerations aside, sending unsolicited email can do serious harm to your reputation and credibility as a business. By contrast, sending a newsletter that provides value to customers who look forward to getting it can be one of the best tools available to you for building relationships and credibility. After all, that’s why we created the Printer@Work newsletter! To import your email list, choose My Website from the Control Center’s main menu, and then select Subscribers from the Printer@Work sidebar menu. Export Customer Lists From Level 2 and Level 3 Sites We’re also happy to announce that you can now export your customer lists from your Level 2 and Level 3 websites. This was

Security has been a big topic in the past several months. As we continue to hear stories about security issues like the Heartbleed bug and the Target breach, security has been on everybody’s minds. So we thought now would be a great time to make an important change to how your websites handle your customer’s passwords. Starting July 1st, your customers will no longer receive plain-text passwords through their email when they indicate they’ve forgotten their password. Instead, we will be implementing the same password reset procedure that is used by many of the web’s top sites: users will receive a link to their email account which they can use to reset their password. You Are An Important Member Of Our Development Team! This update is an example of a change we made to the system based on input from our customers. You and your customers are an important part of our development team. You’re in the trenches, selling printing everyday, and using your WebsitesForPrinters.com website in the process. When something isn’t working as well as it should, you’re often the first to know. So keep those ideas coming, because you’re helping us build a better website — for you!

Customized Shopping Cart Questions Added Have you ever needed more information from your customers for their order, but the questions just don’t seem appropriate for an order form? With our new custom shopping cart questions, you can request that information from your customers much more naturally through the shopping cart. Want to know how your customer heard about you? Use a custom shopping cart question. Need to collect special information for your corporate accounts? Use a custom shopping cart question. Want to conduct an informal customer service poll? Use a custom shopping cart question. To get started, go to your Control Center and look for Shopping Cart Questions in Accounts > Account Settings. Or if you need instructions, check our our Knowledgebase article, Custom Shopping Cart Questions. Note: You must have the new shopping cart activated to use this feature (My Website > E-Commerce Settings > Updated Shopping Cart).

The Rule Of The Day: Explicit Opt-in The Canadians are implementing a strong anti-spam law beginning July 1, 2014. In preparation, we’ve made some adjustments to the way Printer@Work subscriptions are handled. Though it is a Canadian law, we’ve chosen to make these changes for all of our websites, because they represent best practices when it comes to building a subscriber list that won’t get your content flagged as spam. The changes we’re making have two goals in mind: Ensure that every subscriber to the Printer@Work wants to subscribe to Printer@Work Staunchly protect our customers from any allegations that say otherwise We are implementing the following changes as they are developed. Some you may already have noticed on your own site: Remove uploadable subscriber lists Remove pre-selection of the “I want to subscribe to Printer@Work” checkbox Allow printshops to unsubscribe users, but not subscribe them Remove requirement for user to confirm their email address when unsubscribing Moving On To Plan “B” We know these may not be popular changes, because they tend to make it more difficult for you to add subscribers to your newsletter. Meanwhile, your customers are still able to subscribe to it themselves as they always have.

This week, we made a subtle but important update to your Control Center’s Workflow section. Actually, two updates: Faster loading time Users with many thousands of orders in their history were noticing extremely long load times when first going to the Workflow screen. On investigating, we found that including the completed orders in the list was a major factor. Since the Workflow screen is largely for finding open orders that have work that needs to be done, we chose to remove completed orders from the initial load. Of course, you can still look at completed orders when you need to. To do that, just click “Completed Items” in the top of the Workflow page’s sidebar. Filter preference memory We also made a rather subtle change that we hope will also boost your Workflow productivity: the system now remembers your last filter settings. By loading the Workflow screen with the same filter settings you had applied last time, you now get to “pick up where you left off.” Note, this new update does not memorize custom searches using the Dates, Keywords or People tools, though. This is actually a convenience feature — since those searches usually represent special cases, and not

What You Don’t Need To Worry About, And What You Should Look Into You’ve probably been hearing quite a bit lately about a security flaw, called Heartbleed, that was recently discovered on the internet that impacted several big sites on the web. And we’ve started to get questions from you about it. We’ll keep it simple: Your website with WebsitesForPrinters.com was not vulnerable to this bug, and no action is required of you or your customers to protect your accounts. However, our email service partner was affected by this bug. They patched it within 24 hours of the bug being announced, leading to some down time earlier this week as they patched their server. As a result of that change, some of our customers had to update their server settings in their email clients. Meanwhile, several large internet sites were affected. Here’s a list of the biggest sites that were vulnerable as of April 8th: Vulnerable sites report If you use those sites, it’s advisable to change your password (after you’ve confirmed with them that they’ve patched this, that is). And, as usual, it’s always important to use a different password for each website you use.

…And Three Years of Excellence Are Just Beginning! Today, we released an extremely rare production alert to our Dingbat/Coffee Break newsletter subscribers upon learning that it mistakenly reports the day the Golden Gate Bridge opened as May 27, 1981. We’ve corrected the error and uploaded new files to the server. This marks the end of a two-year streak of error-free newsletters across all of our Ink Inc products — but we’re certain it won’t be the last two-year streak, because we have a secret weapon: our bounty system! In our bounty system, every newsletter gets reviewed by every employee, and they get a $5 bill for every error they find! As you might expect, we catch a lot of errors this way. We even catch things that aren’t technically errors but can be improved. So we’re all the more shocked that this absolutely obvious error made it past all those motivated eyeballs! Maybe we just need to brush up on our history? And so, thanks to our bounty system, we now enter the beginning of our next error-free streak for Ink Inc products.

On April 1st, we made some updates to the website’s notification system that sends email updates of website activity to you and your customers. (An example of such an email is the “Order Placed” email received when a customer places an order.) The updates were created to allow the system to function better with our growing portfolio of fully custom websites. Unfortunately, those changes also broke the functionality for all notification recipients except for the designated Customer Rep for printshops, companies, branches and individual contacts. If you’re waiting for the obligatory “April Fool’s”, we’re sorry to say it’s no joke. This file was in place for approximately 26 hours, beginning April 1st at about 8:30 AM CST. The good news is that your customers were unaffected by this error, and the system also delivered all notifications to the customer reps assigned to any printshop, company, branch or individual contact. However, any additional users (other than the customer rep, that is) assigned to the notifications lists in the Control Center did not get their notifications. The error was repaired April 2nd at approximately 10:00 AM CST. Now the notifications system works for our standard Level 2 and Level 3 sites as