BINDER INSIGHTS – UPDATE #4

The past couple of months have been a hectic period for the dev team. We know this insights post is a little late, and we apologize for that. However, we are making efforts to maintain this blog post going forward for our valued customers along with any new prospects looking to join BinderPOS.

Over the past few months, we have had plenty of tasks on the go. We will go into more details below, but as a summary, we have been working on the native integration for eBay, the customizable premium theme, more upgrades to the account managers portal, infrastructure upgrades, and buylist 2.0 and starting with our own catalog service that will house all the information for TCG’s, sealed products and more.

Premium Theme

The team at BinderPOS has been extremely busy developing the “Premium Theme” In short, the premium theme will be dynamic and modular, allowing for plenty of customization. 

We are working towards having six unique theme designs to start, with the ability to chop and change your favorite aspects of another theme. The premium theme will also offer improved SEO optimization and a bucket list of unique sections to add to your website..

Native eBay Integration

The core integration to eBay is working great in the initial tests we have been doing. The missing piece of the puzzle at the moment is what we call our integration controller. This controller is the tool that will allow customers to define rules for pushing products to eBay, including customized titles using templates. E.g. {game-short} – {setName} – {cardName} – #{cardNumber} | {condition}. If we turn that into text that will be displayed on eBay, it will look something like: “MTG – Aether Revolt – Fatal Push – #57 | Near Mint”

For the first release of the integration, we are looking to have a static eBay template that will allow customers to customize a banner and pull images and content from the customer’s listings. Please note this is for the MVP of the product and will be upgraded to an HTML editor soon after for customers to define better how they want their listings descriptions to look on eBay.

Part of this integration will have the ability to adjust prices on groups by percentages and have the ability to list a maximum of ‘x’ amount on eBay along with a reserve stock that will be the amount allocated from your store before pushing to eBay.

See the screen snippets below for a sneak peek at what to expect. Please keep in mind that these still need some work and will be improved over time.

Environment Upgrades

We have made some significant advances with the environment upgrades mentioned in the previous binder insights posts. We have working in our staging environment, debezium to read the bin logs from our database (in less technical terms, the bin logs are where all logs go from the database including inserts, updates, and deletes, and we digest them using debezium to ensure we have less load on the database when changes are coming in). Debezium streams to our message broker, for this we are using Apache Kafka. Within Kafka, we create topics that different services listen to, and these services either forward or process these messages to perform the desired outcome. The first service on the list is the Shopify service that will process updates to Shopify. We are continuing to test and improve this workflow and build additional services to consume the different topics we have in Kafka.

Another note is that we have been testing, and we will upgrade from MySQL 5.7 to 8.0. This is our database and where all the data is stored. We also have a new DevOps engineer who is working hard to help us improve the system’s current architecture and how we can better leverage some of the cool products that Google Cloud has to offer to better improve the services we provide to our customers. This includes some cool ways to use Cloud Dataflow to process Price Updates in the future and to bring a better pricing rules engine.

Account Managers Portal

We have added a few additional features in the account managers portal for the account managers to fix better problems with TCG’s and the ability to update TCG’s that have incorrect data that can then be pushed out to our customers.

Buylist 2.0

As you all know, the buylist is one of the earlier features we had in BinderPOS. It has worked well for smaller buylists. However, with the continued growth of BinderPOS, we have collected feedback showing our customers want more flexibility with the Buylist we have decided to build Buylist 2.0 from the ground up. What does this look like? Well, here are some bullet points to summarize what it will look like. As the weeks go on and the buylist gets closer, we will go into more detail.

  • All products can be included in the Buylist, not just the singles that we support in BinderPOS.
  • Rules will be set up differently, with price ranges being the norm to remove confusion from the current setup.
  • Ability to set up rules for “finishes,” e.g., Foil, Holofoil, etc. Including the rarities that you currently have the ability to update
  • Dynamic steps set up by the customer and the choice to send the emails at each of the steps with templated messages set up by the customer

Catalog Service

As you know, some of the data we have can be sub-par, and we are working hard to get the data a lot cleaner for our customers and to have the data available sooner rather than later. This catalog service we are building will not be just for singles, it will be for sealed products as well. See the screenshot below for some of the data we have captured so far for Pokémon. 

This still has a little while to go, including linking it back into BinderPOS correctly; however, this will be huge for the customers and us to not rely heavily on other 3rd parties for their data.

Also a reference image attached here: 

Overview

Please note that we haven’t included the above core modules in detail below.

  • (New) Calendar Design
  • (New) Card Castle CSV Importer
  • (New) The frontend and backend of BinderPOS have now been split into two separate projects.
  • (New) Have added the ability to sort buylists as well as submitted carts in the portal by the table headers E.g. name, email, date etc.
  • (New) Decklist now processes faster on the front facing website
  • (New) Export buylist to CSV
  • (New) Can update event prices from the events page now
  • (New) Changing ticket images now flows through to ticketed events on Shopify
  • (Bugfix) When a custom item isn’t added correctly to the cart, it will now notify you before going to checkout.
  • (Bugfix) Logout button was not visible on mobile devices, it is now
  • (Bugfix) Super Rare is sometimes duplicated in the backend and not selectable on the Buylist screen for Yu-Gi-Oh! 
  • (Bugfix) Buylist card names and set names are now encoded for better search results
  • (Bugfix) Leave POS button, no longer closes the chrome tab.
  • (Bugfix) Fixed freshdesk recapture so customers can now use the ticket creation widget again
  • (Bugfix) Can no longer check out on POS with no Items.
  • (Bugfix) Fixed an issue with tax being calculated incorrectly on refunds – This was an edge-case issue.
  • (Bugfix) Fixed an issue with the Buylist where it would throw a random error about the game missing
  • (Bugfix) Closing Till Ledger Fix – For EFTPOS ledger option.
  • (Bugfix) Till float reports are now working correctly.
  • (Bugfix) Fix event scheduling appearing incorrect due to time zone cross over.
  • (Bugfix) Optimized the CSV uploader, TCG csvs should work better now.
  • (In Development) Premium Theme
  • (In Development) Buylist 2.0 Foundations started
  • (In Development / Testing) Adding Flesh and Blood Support
  • (In Development / Testing) Improve buylist load speeds in Portal