Hello MC Merchants,

Thank you all for your understanding today while we dramatically reduced the number of sites on each of our shared servers.

In total, we will move about 2200 sites onto new servers.

We have moved 1604 so far.

Because we have not completed the site transfers, there are still about 4 servers that are moving slower than we would like. We plan to finish up the other 600 moves tomorrow night. This will give us a chance to address any issues that you all found today and get caught up in general.

If you are one of the unlucky ones to still be on a slower server, hold tight, we will get you taken care of by tomorrow night.

If you are on a new, faster server, give us a shout out so we know our efforts have worked (we know they worked because we can see it, but it is still nice to hear from you all )

Finally, Thursday night there will be a bug fix release going out to correct all the issues that you all have so diligently reported yesterday and today. We appear to have all the issues fixed and have that release in testing right now to double check everything.

Please do let us know if you have any questions or if there is anything with which we can help.

Regards,
Steph

That might explain why my admin is down, although my site appears tp be up. Any idea what might be going on there?

www.readynutrition.com

Greg

Greg- Yep let me take a look. Chances are you trying to access the admin panel securely. If so, you are probably using your OLD shared security checkout path. Let me check and see if my suspicion is correct....Be right back.
Steph

Yep, it is up for me with no problem.
Make sure you go to readynutrition.com/admin and login (if you accessing it from a bookmark).
Let me know if this takes care of it.
Steph

Yep, its working fine now. Looks like it was just a little delay getting my SSL Cert carried over.

Thanks Steph!

Greg

Steph,

Thank you very much for the update. I only wish my numerous conversations with tech support yesterday would have yielded this type of information. It would have saved your staff and me an hour or more worth of time had they been able to give me this type of information.

I have a few questions for you regarding server performance and the migration of certain sites onto the new shared server #3.

#1) Our performance on our site yesterday was very poor and my concern is that if you had already migrated many sites off of our server, why wouldn't we see performance improvements rather than performance getting worse as the day carried on.

#2) Am I being moved to a new server? I don't believe I'm on the list to be moved, but I'm only assuming that because I haven't been informed. Considering I wasn't informed that my site would come to a grinding halt yesterday due to known issue's involved percentage discounts given for quantity purchases, I'm now beginning to assume that I'm not going to be told pertinent news up front regarding changes made to our website (can you tell I'm still bitter about this?).

#3) Have you been able to accurately measure the performance hit version 4.2 has taken on the sites to give me an idea if performance of my site after this migration will be similar, faster, or slower than what it had been in the past. In other words, if the software has a 30% performance penalty and you move 30% of the sites off our server, than I presume performance would roughly be the same as where we started. Would this be true or is it much more complicated than this? Bottom line, will there REALLY be a performance increase, or are we just fighting to maintain the old performance levels (which I honestly found to be lacking).

I would like to say I appreciate the improvements that have been implemented in the 4.2 release. I also appreciate the fact you chose to implement this in October versus November/December. I don’t consider myself an unreasonable person and I would expect there to be bumps along the way of any migration into newer and better technology. What's been really lacking here is a strong level of communication between and their customers in terms of known issue's prior to the 4.2 upgrade.

I was (fortunately) on the last group to be upgraded yesterday only to find my store was virtually disabled for the known issue that no longer had the ability to support product discounts being given based on percentages when a customer orders a certain quantity level. Because all 451 active products on my site operate this way, the shopping cart wouldn't checkout anybody who bought more than 3 of any one item. To make matters worse, the error customers received didn't help them at all in understanding the situation or give them any confidence in me as a supplier.

The real problem here continues to be the lack of information regarding "known" issues inside your organization and us. I've received the numerous emails and notices you've been sending out over the past 2-3 weeks regarding this update but nowhere was I able to see this issue (as well as other discovered issues) were at hand. A good example of this would be the new shipping checkout feature where the shipping information from multiple carriers on one screen has been eliminated for reasons beyond your control. I accept this and assume you are doing the best you can for us, but there's really no good reason why we were not informed prior to the update.

Recommended Fixes
#1) MonsterBooks hasn't been updated in nearly a year. Upon the release of 4.2, Monsterbooks is now not able to handle customers in the same way it was before. The only way to get it to work properly is to disable the "checkout as guest" feature on the site. Though I can live with this, it's not ideal. I can very CLEARLY see the issue in how new customers are treated and why that would be a problem for the MonsterBooks transfer, but again, what is so irritating is that you either knew it and didn't disclose it to me(us) *or* you didn't know it which means you didn't test 4.2 enough. Either way, you're at fault in my eyes on this issue.

#2) Upon checkout in the 4 step process, the radio button for "ship to same as bill to" is defaulted to no. We really need the ability to set this default one way or another. I suspected it would be a problem for my customers and sure enough, one of my very first orders had somebody go through the process of filling both bill to and ship to exactly the same (obviously didn't see the button).

#3) I appreciate the new button theme's you've made available to everybody and I think they look pretty good in general. The problem is that your design department didn't take the two seconds to make the white box around the buttons transparent so essentially, we all start off with round blue buttons inside of white boxes. This is great if you have a website with a white background, but many don't. I'll obviously make this change myself, but as you pointed out in a previous post, no stone should be left unturned, and this would have been a small step for your graphics department and enhanced the look/feel of everybody's default website.

#4) I'm shocked that in this newest update that the checkout still doesn't have a default button for "Continue Shopping" on all the checkout pages. Once people put stuff in their cart, they may want to go back and shop a little. How do they really know they can navigate out of the cart and everything stays in the cart. 99% of all the online stores I buy from have the obvious "continue shopping" button somewhere on each checkout page so I can comfortably navigate away. I was almost in disbelief when you didn't have this feature from the very inception of your shopping cart software, but the fact it's not in this release (particularly considering the pains we've just endured) I'm flabbergasted.

Anyhow, just my two or three cents worth (or if you really want to quantify it into lost sales dollars, probably closer to $1,500 worth). I surely hope all of these "issues" will soon be behind us all and everybody can go back to working their sites the way they intended to when they started.

Jon

This one huge thing I see wrong with this new checkout...Iv brought it up before but kind of died off.....I agree..Every site I shop with has a continue shopping button...It is a huge feature that is used in a major way.


RAZ

easytogrowbulbs,

Thank you for the time and consideration you must have put into your post. Your questions are very well posed and your points very well stated.

Answers -

1) The additional processing power required to transfer sites off of existing servers and onto new servers contributed to slower performance throughout the day yesterday. Yesterday was NOT an indication of the final outcome. We have 400 sites left to transfer. A little over half of our network is balanced out (50 sites per shared box). The majority of you should have seen a performance increase today and this will only get better moving forward.

2) We do not know if a site is moving until it moves. The script automatically cycles through all of our shared servers and identifies, based on a long list of defined criteria, who moves and to which server. Doing it this way allowed us to move 1600+ in 15 hours.

3) Because the application offers infinite flexibility, I cannot provide you with a concrete percentage. Variables include traffic on other sites on your shared server, HTML, size of images, product variants, number of categories, connectivity of real-time shipping, added JavaScript menu systems, site wide settings, site layout, etc. What I can tell you is that this very topic was discussed internally when we were deciding what to reduce shared servers to. Honestly, we could have reduced them to 75 sites per server and it would have likely leveled out added performance vs. available processing power and memory allocation. However, every MC team member was in agreement that we not only wanted to level it out (ie, get it back to where it was) but to increase it and ensure that MC Merchants would see the best performance and stability possible - especially during the Holiday Season. Steph agreed wholeheartedly and we got to work!

So, to answer your question, you will definitely see a performance increase

Thank you Jen for the response!

I am really looking forward to around Thursday when you guys feel the bugs will, for the most part, be corrected and the servers sites moved to the appropriate servers and performance being increased.

Thanks so much and good luck over the next few days,

Jon

At a lot of the sites I've shopped at however, the CONTINUE SHOPPING button is really there to correct the problem that the site navigation - top / left / right / bottom - does not appear once you enter checkout. They disappear. The CONTINUE SHOPPING button is the only way out of checkout without retyping the domain name manually.

With the MC software this is not a problem, obviously, as the top and everything else continue to be part of the design through checkout. If a customer wants to 'Continue Shopping' all they have to do is click a category or perform a search or click any other link.

You might be right that your customers would still benefit from a continue shopping link or button on the checkout pages. My suggestion, since the checkout now contains new HTML header and footer sections on each and every pages, is to put a Continue Shopping button or link at the top or bottom of each page manually and this will help direct your customers if they need it.

I hope this helps!

James,

Thank you VERY much for that reponse! I do find it helpfull and I was pretty sure I would be able to implement a "continue shopping" button based on the new customization features available to me, but I'm glad I know it can be done now. My point really wasn't based so much on my ability to but why wouldn't it be there by default.

But your point made regarding the shopability of sites versus others is well taken and I do agree with your perspective on this.

THANK YOU!

I have posted another post regarding an issue I would like to have your input on. It's in regards to what I perceive as a failure in the checkout process involving customer login, etc. If you dont' mind spending a few minutes reading it and giving me your thoughts, I'd greatly appreciate it.

Jon