The past few weeks have been very busy for the dev team here at BinderPOS. We’ve rolled out a few updates that many of you are already using and have done a ton of work on the back end to get ready for more. Let’s take a look at some of the highlights.
Native eBay Integration
For the average Shopify user, the native eBay integration is a great way to list products simultaneously on both your Shopify site and eBay. Unfortunately, we aren’t average Shopify users, and this doesn’t scale as well as hoped when syncing large numbers of products. We’re currently in the early stages of building an integration that connects directly to Binder, allowing you to list 10,000s of products conveniently through BinderPOS. There isn’t much shine to show for it yet, but expect that to change in coming updates.
Environment Upgrades (Neo)
Many of the challenges that come with bringing new features stem from the way we access data within BinderPOS. As we have grown over the past year, so has the need for our tech stack to grow with us in order to continue bringing new features fast. A large portion of our development pipeline is committed to architecting and testing this major upgrade. These changes will happen parallel to our current offering until a point in time where we migrate to this new system. Once that occurs you’ll see a flurry of upgrades appear and new features will take an order of magnitude faster to develop. This is a huge undertaking and will take many development cycles to complete, but we know it will be worth it and necessary to continue growing the product like we want.
Account Managers Portal
This is an internal tool we’ve been working on for some time. Basically it’s an interface for our account managers to more quickly action day to day tasks for customers. Price changes, variant updates, and card pushing can all be accessed here in a centralized place. Many of these tasks can now be automated, and that means much faster actioning on support tickets that get submitted to us. Part of this upgrade also includes global card fixes, and automated missing card scans that we will roll out to reduce the number of catalog issues.
Overview
- (New) Added a collection template to Shopify.
- (New) Account Managers Portal for our account managers – This tool allows the account managers to update and fix any issues in the product databases without developer intervention.
- (New) [BETA] Price updates on products
- We have migrated to using a new price updater. Overall, this price updater will update the prices as soon as we get the price updates in our database. As we roll this out, prices will be more consistent across the board.
- Large price updates for currency conversion and price updates will be fired off in a more controlled fashion.
- (In Development) Completed a good chunk of work towards a BinderPOS native eBay integration, including test product listings, shipping details, and orders.
- Client: Update existing offers
- Client: Add/Delete/ Get inventory Groups
- Add/Update inventory items to sellers
- Authentication for old XML API.
- (In Development) Standing up a new environment that will better allow us to manage and upgrade the system in the future, this is an ongoing piece of work.
- Using new tools such as Hasura, Terraform, optimizing Kubernetes, and leveraging RabbitMQ and Kafka and splitting parts of the project into microservices.
- Migration strategy moving from BinderPOS v1 to BinderPOS v2 using Debezium
- Better auditing logs
- Better historical cost and inventory level logs
- Basic user permissions with more advanced permissions to be implemented on top of this.
- BinderPOS to become the source of truth for inventory and products, and Shopify will become a sales channel.
- Reserve stock – ability to reserve stock and have x amount pushed through to Shopify
- (Update) Updated the legacy pagination on the portal.
- (Update) Updated all Shopify modules to handle currency localization correctly.
- (Update) Adding a visual cue to the buylist to highlight items with no quantity when adding a new item.
- (Update) Fixed the contrast on the buylist screens for better readability.
- (Update) Can search customers by phone number on the POS.
- (Bugfix) Fixed Sliders – Updated the SliderJS CDN.
- (Bugfix) Altered the filtering for carts to return the same ordering pre-filtering update.
Collection Template
In this last update, the BinderPOS default theme offering for Shopify received a collections list “face-lift”. Each Collection will now show a preview of the products contained within.
Currency Localization
Utilizing the inbuilt Shopify JS libraries, we updated all references within our Shopify theme to correctly handle currency localization. Prices on all BinderPOS Shopify modules will not only show the correct currency symbol but be formatted correctly too.
Buylist UI
The development has taken the time to release a QoL UI/UX upgrade for the buylist review in the portal. Previously the modification of price, condition, or quantity was done via multiple popup modals. We have updated it to a table of inputs allowing for quick and easy buylist reviews.
eBay Integration
Although still work in progress, the development team has made leaps and bounds towards building our own eBay integration. Below is an example listing on eBay’s sandbox environment.
