July 16, 2020
I've heard reports in the news that the pandemic hasn't affected online businesses, or if it has, it's been in a positive way. I'm here to tell you, that's nonsense. At least it's nonsense for online businesses that rely on international sales. Take for example our last sale of FLASH synths in March 2020. A majority of the synths were bought by customers in the USA. Before the pandemic, the cost of shipping a synth to the USA from Germany was reasonable. The virus has caused international shipping costs to skyrocket more than five times the normal costs. For some time it was not even possible to ship to the USA without paying 60 €. After some diligent research, I found out about a special application available through DHL which would cut those unreasonably high costs at least in half. I applied and waited a few weeks for my application to be reviewed. Because my business is so small, I was a bit surprised but grateful that my application was approved. My next challenge was implementing the new shipping rates into the website. The DHL contract gives better international shipping rates, but the fees are also more complicated than before. Whereas I used to be able to offer a flat rate for international shipping, now the rates vary quite a bit by location. I made a new shipping calculator to handle these changes.
The shipping changes, along with "pandemic downtime", became an opportunity to continue improving the website checkout process. Before the pandemic, I had added a new feature to customer accounts, namely addresses. Since the start of automatic order handling, Hπ has relied on customer data coming from PayPal to complete orders. From time to time this has caused problems, when a defunct email address or outdated shipping address is given in the PayPal details, so that software licenses are sent to an address nobody sees. I have always taken special precautions against the worst case, that a physical item should be shipped to the wrong address, by contacting customers to verify their address before shipping anything. That works, but it's tedious. It would be better to give customers more control over their contact email and shipping address as part of the order process. So that's what I've done.
The new checkout process follows a chain of events which should be familiar to anyone who buys things online, with aspects peculiar to businesses operating from an EU member state. The steps are as follows.
Step 2 is important for EU businesses, so that Value Added Tax is handled correctly. Customers outside of the EU don't need to pay the tax. The popup menu defaults to the location provided by your IP address, but since that is not always reliable, it's up to you to verify the correct location. If the order is for a physical item to be shipped to a location within the EU, the order needs to include the tax for that location.
Steps 3 & 5 together constitute the main reason I went to the trouble of updating the user accounts and checkout experience. I assume you want to receive messages from the email address you use for your Hπ account, and that email address is often not the same as the address you use for PayPal. Previously I had to check these addresses and sometimes update things manually when there were discrepancies. This new system should change that. When you have stored a shipping address in your account, if you log in at Step 3, you can select your stored address at Step 5. A primary billing address doubles as your primary shipping address by default, so this is not a lot of work for you, but it saves me a lot of trouble.
It's taken a couple of months to sort all this out, and getting these things to function properly is not exactly easy, but after thorough testing the system is now live. I'm confident that the bugs have been worked out, but it's not possible to test every circumstance that might occur in actual use, so if you run into any problems during checkout or with managing your address information in your account, please let me know.
Special thanks to anyone who made it this far reading about the (somewhat thankless) work I've been doing here over the past couple of months. To everyone, I wish you good health and pleasant days — now, and in the time to come.
If you've got a moment, why not login to your account and set up your shipping address? When you place an order, you'll be glad you did it.
Stay well,
Aaron
[ Showing 1 entry | Previous entry | Next entry | Show all entries ]