Just in time for the holiday shopping season, the BMOW store has been completely rebuilt using an entirely new technology platform! This brings an armload of major improvements, including new payment and shipping options, the restoration of Australia and New Zealand shipping, and overall much improved features and stability. This is something that’s been on my to-do list for years, but I kept putting it off, as there was always something more urgent. My procrastination continued until the old store mysteriously imploded on the night before Thanksgiving, leaving BMOW unable to process any new orders. Ouch.

 
The Store Died, Sorry

Some time on November 23rd or 24th, the old store’s payment processing quietly stopped working. There were no errors or other problem indications, except a mysterious lack of new orders and a large number of abandoned shopping carts. I didn’t notice anything was wrong until late night just before Thanksgiving as I was making pie. I found that customers could begin the checkout process, enter their payment details, and see the final order review page. But when they clicked the button to submit their order, it redirected them to a blank page. No visible error, nothing in the logs, but no payment was made, no order was submitted.

Unfortunately there was no one I could ask for help; I needed to solve the problem myself. I’ve done it before when something unexpectedly broke, sifting through logs, updating plugins, patching PHP files, changing security settings, or increasing server memory limits and timeouts. The old BMOW store is an awkward collection of cheap and free components, including a generic web hosting plan (Dreamhost), content management software (WordPress), e-commerce software (Woocommerce), a variety of different WordPress and Woocommerce plugins, and a payment gateway plugin (PayPal Express Checkout, from the PayPal for Woocommerce plugin). This system frequently breaks at unexpected times, when one of these components gets automatically updated, or a database table grows too large, or an external dependency changes. But I’m responsible for keeping it all working, and that’s not really a job I want to have.

I sunk many hours into troubleshooting this problem unsuccessfully. The logs didn’t reveal any errors or obvious failures. Dreamhost couldn’t help, beyond suggesting that I update everything to the latest versions. This is a double-edged sword in the land of WordPress, because updates are often needed to fix security issues or other problems, but they’re also the most common source of problems. When you’re relying on a dozen different components, and you update one of them, the others might not be happy.

After a frantic late night, I finally managed to fix the problem temporarily on Thanksgiving morning, by eliminating the order review step entirely. But it was now glaringly clear how much risk I was facing by depending on this fragile technology stack with nobody to maintain it but me.

 
Problems With The Old Store

Even if the old store had continued working OK, it just wasn’t great for customers or for me and Lea. On the customer side, it was very slow and sluggish. Submitting an order would sometimes lead to a 500 internal server error, or a payment made but no order recorded, or two orders for a single payment. Something about shipping options didn’t work correctly, so I was forced to limit customers to a single shipping method instead of offering a choice. The order confirmation and shipping confirmation emails sometimes didn’t work.

And then there was PayPal. The old store only offered a single payment processor, PayPal, which some customers simply hate and refuse to use. PayPal used to offer an option for credit card payments without creating a PayPal account if you didn’t want to, but that seems to have disappeared and now a PayPal account is required for making any kind of payment. Another drawback was the lack of payment integration – customers needed to leave the BMOW site in order to enter payment info at the PayPal site, before returning to the BMOW site for final order review.

PayPal also made it strangely difficult to edit the shipping address. If the customer already had a PayPal account, it would auto-populate the shipping address with their saved address, with no option to change it except by cancelling the order in progress and visiting PayPal preferences. Moved recently, or shipping to an alternate address? Too bad. PayPal’s address validation was also weirdly broken. I’ve had countless orders where people omitted required parts of their shipping address like the building number, city name, or state/territory name.

On the back end, searching for and updating customers’ order records was slow and awkward. Some apparently basic features were not included, like embedded the tracking number into the shipment confirmation email. I had to implement that myself with some custom coding. And while this may not be a fair criticism, the old store simply took orders but offered nothing towards managing shipping. I used a separate third-party shipping solution (Shippo), with a custom-made C# tool to gather the Woocommerce data, process it as needed, generate packing slips and invoices, and purchase and print the postage labels from Shippo.

 
Hello Shopify!

Shopify is a very popular solution for running e-commerce stores, and I’d already made up my mind long ago to try Shopify when I was ready to update the store. Shopify replaces the entire technology stack of the old store: Dreamhost, WordPress, Woocommerce, plugins, PayPal, and Shippo. It’s a cloud-based solution, so Shopify actually runs your store on their servers, using DNS magic to make it appear under your domain name as part of your regular web site.

Unfortunately Shopify isn’t exactly cheap, at $79/month for the plan I would probably need. But after all the pains experienced with the old store, I decided the money was well worth it. And now that I’ve dug into Shopify’s details further, I think the net cost may be much less than $79/month, thanks to lower fees for credit card processing and shipping than I was paying before. In fact, I may actually see a net savings from switching. Wow!

I was able to create and configure the new Shopify store in one very long day. So far I’m extremely pleased and impressed with what I’ve seen. Everywhere I look, from the theme designs to the order processing and back-end reporting, I find great new features that are a huge step up from what the old store provided. I should have made this switch long ago.

 
What’s New

The new store looks completely different from the old one, but the customer-facing changes are more than just a facelift. Here’s a tour of what’s new:

New Payment Options – The store uses Shopify Payments, which seems to be a rebranded Stripe. It allows for a dozen different payment methods, including credit cards and others like Apple Pay. It’s all directly integrated into the store, with no separate account needed. Basically it just works. GOODBYE PAYPAL! I will not miss you at all. But PayPal is still an option for anyone who wants it.

New USA Shipping Methods – For customers in the USA, instead of one-size-fits-all shipping, you now have a choice of Standard (3-4 day) or Economy (5-8) day shipping. For the moment these correspond to USPS Priority and USPS First Class Mail, but that may change in the future. If you want to save a few bucks on shipping and are willing to wait slightly longer, now you have that choice.

Free USA Shipping – Orders over $150 to destinations in the USA will now ship free. Hooray!

New International Shipping Methods – Worldwide DHL and UPS shipping is here! This is a big change, and I’m excited and slightly nervous. These new shipping methods aren’t cheap, at around $50 for most destination countries, but they should be faster and much more reliable. Higher tiers of USPS international service are now available too, including Priority Mail International and Priority Mail Express International. USPS First Class Package International Service remains an option too, and is the lowest cost international shipping method. FCPIS is sometimes great, and you can typically get a package delivered in a week to destinations like Canada, France, or UK. But sometimes FCPIS experiences wild delays with months passing in shipping purgatory without any updates to the tracking info. This is very frustrating for both customers and for me.

I hesitate to call any of these new international shipping methods “express shipping”, because there’s still a few days of order processing time before BMOW can fulfill your order, no matter how fast the actual shipping may be. Our fabulous office specialist Lea normally works three days per week, so the processing time is 1-2 business days in most situations.

The shipping fee for international orders is also now calculated based on the actual carrier cost, plus a small handling fee for the extra work that these orders involve. This is an improvement over the old pseudo-flat-rate pricing scheme for international shipping, which lumped everything into a few broad categories based on weight tiers and geographic region.

Australia and New Zealand Shipping – US postal service FCPIS shipments to Australia and New Zealand have been suspended for the past two months, due to some unspecified “carrier disruptions” related to COVID-19 and global supply chain problems. The introduction of new shipping methods means that BMOW can once again serve customers in those countries. Woo-hoo! Australia Post’s ShopMate USA service also remains an option for customers looking for the cheapest Australian shipping, although the service will reportedly be phased out next year. We hope that FCPIS service to these countries will become available again soon, but until then, these are good alternatives.

Better Tracking – Improved package tracking and notifications are one of the many other improvements made possible by the new store. For international shipments, DHL and UPS will provide much more timely and detailed tracking information than FCPIS. And for customers everywhere, you’ll get email notifications not just when your package is shipped, but also when it’s out for delivery. There’s even an option to get notifications on your phone by text message.

 
Tour The New Store Today!

The new BMOW store is live and taking orders now at shop.bigmessowires.com. Give it a try! For the moment, both the old store and new store are running and accepting orders, so I can monitor what’s happening at the new store and ensure everything goes smoothly. All the store links are still pointing to the old store, so you’ll need to enter the URL directly (or click the link in this paragraph) to visit the new store. Eventually I’ll retire the old store and set up redirection links for each of the product pages to the new store. If you try the new store, please let me know how the experience goes. What are your thoughts on the visual design and page layout? Any issues with order processing or payments? Thanks for your feedback!

When I first began selling hardware to other vintage computer collectors, I never gave tech support much thought. I imagined I could design something, build it, sell it to somebody, and they’d happily go use it. End of story. Reality has proven different. Today I spend more time answering tech support questions from customers and potential customers than on any other aspect of the business. I get large amounts of mail, often with questions that are long and complex and need considerable time to answer properly. It’s a challenge for which I’ve yet to find any good solution.

A portion of the tech support is really sales support – questions about ordering and shipping. If you’ve been through the BMOW store in the past six months, you may have seen there’s a new person helping with these kinds of inquiries, which has been a huge help. But even after these are filtered out, the tech support load remains high.

 
RTFM?

Can I solve the tech support problem with more documentation? I’ve put a lot of time into the BMOW product documentation, particularly for the Floppy Emu. Every customer receives a printed one-page quickstart guide covering the basics, with a link to the full instruction manual on the web. Whenever the same question gets asked two or three times, I add the answer to the instructions or the quickstart. At least in theory, everything anyone would ever want to know should be covered in the documentation.

Yet I can’t escape the basic fact that there’s a lot of inherent complexity with these old computer systems and the products designed for them. In the case of the Floppy Emu, there’s a ton of ground to cover in the instructions between three different computer families, a dozen different drive emulation modes, different types of disk images, different operating systems, different ways of connecting to the computer, interactions with other drives, and much more.

The wall of documentation can be daunting. Even with the one-page quickstart that’s bundled in the box, it can be too much for some people. They throw up their hands and reach out to tech support (me) for assistance. In many cases I’m able to gently point people back to the relevant section of the manual: “It sounds like you may need to select a different disk emulation mode. Please see section 3.2 of the instruction manual for details.” But sometimes people get upset or offended if I refer them to the manual. I had one angry customer send me a video message in which he outright refused to read the instructions, insisting the he didn’t want to learn Computer Nerd 101 or get a history lesson in Apple computer models.

 
Whose Problem Is It?

A second challenge is simply identifying who or what is responsible when something doesn’t work as expected. The line between questions about BMOW hardware and questions about general usage of the Apple II or Macintosh is often blurry. For many customers, they’ve hauled an old computer out of their dusty attic, purchased a bit of BMOW hardware to run with it, and are using the machine for the first time in thirty years. If a questions arises, it will often come to me first, regardless of the source or the issue. I’ll get general questions about the Apple IIc, or about Macintosh System 7, or StuffIt. Some requests ask how to use particular software programs, or how to eject a disk, or reboot the computer. Much of this is now covered in the Floppy Emu instruction manual, since they’re common questions even if they’re not features of BMOW hardware.

What’s more puzzling are the questions about unrelated third-party products. If someone contacted me once with a BMOW tech support question and found my answer helpful, sometimes they’ll contact me again later even when their question has nothing to do with BMOW. I get a surprising number of tech support requests about the SCSI2SD. I’ve also had support requests asking about RAM upgrades, joysticks, and other peripherals. Sometimes I know the answer, sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I’ll decline to answer even if I know it, which makes me feel like a jerk, but I need to politely discourage this kind of tech support usage. Usually I’ll point people to another suggested information source instead.

This challenge isn’t limited to the Floppy Emu. The original Mac ROM-inator kit for the Mac 128K, Mac 512K, and Mac Plus was also a big source of general questions about classic Macintosh usage and problems. As a low-cost kit generating a high level of tech support, it just didn’t make sense, and this was one of the primary reasons the original ROM-inator kit was eventually discontinued.

 
Solutions?

I’m unsure how other small businesses solve this problem. Some of them may sell products that are so simple, they don’t need much tech support. Or their tech support is just weak, and they willingly suffer the reputational hit, choosing it as the least bad option compared to hours and hours of support time.

Documentation can always be improved, so that’s another area I can work on. I’m discovering that technical writing is a critical skill, and it’s not enough to simply have the necessary information in there somewhere – it needs to be presented clearly, and in a logical order. And even if the documentation is perfect, some people simply don’t want to read it.

Many companies now have support forums where customers answer questions from other customers, and the business itself is mostly or entirely absent from the conversation. This is certainly one way of reducing a company’s tech support requirements, but from my personal experience the customer experience is almost universally poor. Discussions often devolve into angry denouncements of the business, like “why isn’t (company) saying anything about this???” At worst, it can create the impression that customers have been cast out into the wilderness to fend for themselves. That’s not good.

I’ll keep searching for better solutions. Until then, I’m off to visit the tech support queue…

The world of international shipping continues to grow more difficult. As of October 1, the US Postal Service has halted acceptance of international package shipments to New Zeleand, due to COVID-19-related service disruptions at the destination. The same suspension was applied to Australia on September 3, so BMOW is now unable to make direct shipments to customers in either country. I had hoped this would be only a brief disruption while the countries’ post offices worked on mitigating COVID-19 impacts. But with Australia’s suspension already stretching to more than a month, my hopes for a quick resolution are dimming.

One bit of good news is that Australia Post’s ShopMate service is still working. It’s a package-forwarding service for Australian residents who are buying products from vendors in the USA. ShopMate provides you with a USA address, so BMOW and other vendors in the USA can make a regular domestic shipment and you pay them the domestic shipping rate. Then ShopMate repackages the shipment and dispatches it to your home in Australia, in return for an additional fee. A few BMOW customers have already tried buying through ShopMate during the past month, and reported that it worked. I’m not aware of a similar forwarding service for New Zealand, but if I find one, I’ll report it here.

With apologies to BMOW readers Down Under, international deliveries to Australia from the BMOW Store have been temporarily suspended. A few weeks ago, Australia Post paused its processing of inbound international mail shipments due to COVID-19-related service impacts, and on September 3 the US Postal Service halted acceptance of Australia-bound international mail. I had hoped this would be only a brief interruption, but after sixteen days there have been no further updates, and there’s no current timeline for when normal operations will resume.

At the moment there are 21 international destinations for which USPS has halted mail delivery “due to impacts related to the COVID-19 pandemic and other unrelated service disruptions.” Australia is the only large country on that list, and the only one where BMOW has customers. The other countries are Afghanistan, Bhutan, Brunei, Cuba, French Guiana, Guadalupe, Laos, Libya, Martinique, Mayotte, Mongolia, Reunion, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, Samoa, South Sudan, Syria, Tajikistan, Timor-Leste, Turkmenistan, and Yemen.

International shipping is hot mess across much of the world right now, and this is just the latest incident. Thank you for your patience through all of this, and I hope to see Australia deliveries resuming soon.

The Wombat ADB-USB input converter is now back in stock at the BMOW Store. Thanks for everybody’s patience while we waited out multiple delays on delivery from my manufacturing partner. There’s now plenty of Wombat stock at BMOW HQ, so they won’t be selling out again any time soon.

What’s a Wombat? The Wombat is a bidirectional ADB-to-USB and USB-to-ADB converter for keyboards and mice, and was developed by Steve Chamberlin here at Big Mess o’ Wires. It can connect modern USB keyboards and mice to a classic ADB-based Macintosh, Apple IIgs, or NeXT, or connect legacy ADB input hardware to a USB-based computer running Windows, OSX, or Linux. For more details, please see the product description page.

 
Global Shipping is Back!

After ten days of confusion at the hands of US Customs and Export Control, BMOW global shipping is back! They’ll be celebrating from Calgary to Cardiff, Melbourne to Madrid. I never did get a clear explanation of exactly what went wrong, but some post office processing facility at the San Francisco International Distribution Center screwed up in a big way, resulting in thousands of international packages being incorrectly returned to sender from shippers all over the US West Coast. What a mess.

I’ve taken this opportunity to adjust the international shipping rates to reflect the latest USPS First Class Package International service rates. Pop quiz: what do France, Germany, the Czech Republic, Gibraltar, Hungary, Iceland, Lithuania, Poland, and Portugal all have in common? They’re nine countries whose USPS rate group offers cheaper shipping than most other international destinations outside North America. Why those nine countries? I really have no idea.

Can you guess what distinction is shared by Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Japan? Shipping to those six countries is more expensive than most of the rest of the world. I can sort of understand Australia and New Zealand due to their relative geographic isolation, but why single out Brazil or Japan? The lesson I’ve learned from these past ten days is never question the post office.

I’m looking forward to shipping lots more BMOW hardware to enthusiasts everywhere.

Good news: the International Shipping Fiasco of May 2021 appears to be resolved, although the underlying causes are still unclear. Early indications are it was some kind of USPS screw-up with electronic collection of customs data at the San Francisco International Distribution Center. Shippers all over the US West Coast have been affected. There is blood in the water. Stay tuned for more details.

BMOW’s most recent Canadian test shipments have passed through customs successfully, so I’ve re-enabled Canadian shipping for the BMOW Store. Assuming there are no further surprises, I expect to re-enable international shipping for the rest of the world within the next few days.