drchilds
#1 ASL Hype Man
- Joined
- May 24, 2005
- Messages
- 769
- Reaction score
- 98
- Location
- Santa Fe, NM, USA
- First name
- Dave
- Country
Perhaps we can sticky this.When you register and look at pre-order history does it only show present pre-orders or also old ones (games that reached pre-order, were printed and shipped)? I registered and looked and saw nothing. If I recall correctly on the old sight it had my full pre-order history going back to the 1st MMP item I ever pre-ordered (and which was subsequently printed...so was no longer really a pre-order). I have nothing on pre-order presently...just want to make sure I did everything properly.
The new website does things thusly:
First and foremost, not one single pre-order has been lost between old system and new. There have been a few instances where a customer indicated that they had ordered something in the old system, and was not present in the old system's database. Most were solved by tweaking the postal/zip code or name, but one or two others were just not there. The latter I cannot explain, as I was not responsible for that system, and not privy to its machinations. If you truly think you had a pre-order in the old system, and cannot import it, please notify the good folks at problems@multimanpublishing.com. They have a copy of the old pre-order system's database, and can search on additional fields than those presented. Please also note that the fields presented for you to search on are identical to those in the old system: the name on your credit card, and your zip code. If you are not finding pre-orders, please take a few moments and try your zip code with the +4 extension and without. Please also try to recall which names may have been used on the credit cards, if you used your mom's, your roommate's, your *ahem* partner's etc.
MMP has explained why this is necessary, but I'll repeat it here. The old system did not have customer accounts. Whenever you entered an order, you re-entered your name and address, etc. This may have been convenient at the time, but it did not allow us to tie any order to a specific person. If you recall, back at the end of last year, MMP wanted to ship two ASL pre-order products together (DB3 and J8, IIRC). Due to the fact that there were no customer accounts, and the time between these products going on pre-order and shipping, this was nearly impossible to automate with any acceptable rate of error. Trust me, I tried. This led to the current situation with pre-orders. We discussed several approaches, but frankly there was no good solution; the best was to simply have customers look up their pre-orders as they did in the old system, and verify what was theirs.
To reiterate: we still have the old database. Really. We do. Honest! If you ordered something in the old system, and have not created an account in the new system and imported your pre-order, you will still receive your pre-order. If you want to cancel your pre-order, that will make us sad, but you have two options: contact problems@multimanpublishing.com or call the office and tell them so; or create your account, import your pre-orders, and cancel them yourselves. Beauty of the new system right there, eh? (Shout-out to the Canadians)
To address John's specific question: The new system now keeps all orders in one database (the old system was stored in two un-related databases) so your complete order history from this point forward will be available under the "Cart & Account" menu item, and the "Order History" link on the page therein. This is the same place where you import pre-orders. I hope to soon have the products in each order grouped under each order header on this screen, but haven't gotten to that just yet. We did not see any reason to import old pre-orders that have already shipped, since we have that data for warehousing and reporting purposes, and asking customers to import them would only cause (more) confusion. King Phillip's War was an accident as I included that in the importable list by mistake. It will make no difference if you import that or not as processing occurred before the new website was launched.
Okay... international shipping charges: this has been covered quite a bit on ConsimWorld, but the simple truth is that the new site charges actual shipping rates based on a lookup from the USPS or United Parcel Service. Seriously, you can check on it yourself on their websites. The shipping charges are based on weight (not price or number of items) and passed into the USPS or UPS online rate calculator. Right now, that means that some shipping charges are higher. Hopefully in the next week or so, we'll have an update that will ship anything less than 4lbs internationally via USPS International First Class. This has some down-sides, but should quell the uproar regarding high international shipping charges.
What else... security? Trust me, it's a lot better than the old site. No credit card information ever leaves the server either complete (last 4 digits only) or non-encrypted. The card information is encrypted in the database itself, so even if that's acquired somehow you'd need the source code and config, which are not accessible from that box. And if you want me to prove it all, I'll happily post my personal credit card info as it appears encrypted in the database here in this thread. I'm not going to post what method I'm using, but it's a standard and trusted encryption algorithm.
Hopefully that covers it all. And if the Two Half-Squad dudes want to discuss beer, homebrewing, and website development for wargame companies, they can PM me here.