It’s been a week now since I pre-launched SmartDD LITE with resale rights, and it’s been a bit of a nightmare.
Don’t get me wrong, the nickel script was fine and actually did more than I expected it to considering it was a first prototype. There were a couple of tiddly bugs in it, but they were fixed almost immediately by David.
The nightmare was because of all the support issues.
(BTW – if you have a problem, raise a ticket at:-
http://www.Vendiva.com/support/)
The support tickets pretty much broke down into two groups.
#1 – I haven’t had my download email.
#2 – The zip file I’ve downloaded is password protected.
NEITHER of these were caused by the nickel script.
#1 Was because of email providers routinely blocking business email, I’ve mentioned this before.
http://www.frankhaywood.com/internet-business-taken-seriously/
http://www.frankhaywood.com/does-your-email-work/
#2 Was a doozy.
To make things easier (hah!) my SmartDD developer, Paul, wrote a bit of code to zip up the SmartDD Lite package on the server and automatically insert your affiliate ID into it.
He used standard code to do this, nothing out of the ordinary. We tested and tested it with and without an affiliate ID, and it worked perfectly for us.
But for some people, they couldn’t read the file because according to Windows it was password protected. This completely puzzled us, as it most definitely isn’t.
In the end one of our customers said they’d been trying the built in Windows utility, and when he installed an unzip program instead, it all started working as it should.
Aha!
It turns out Windows was the culprit. It can’t read all zip types.
So we had a fix. Except…
Some people still had the same problem but finally got it to work by reading all the files out of the zip and then re-creating it themselves again. Even so, one person just couldn’t get it to read and opted for a refund.
This has been really frustrating for both sides, and I’m now looking at an alternative (but messy) method of allowing you to embed your affiliate ID.
Anyway…
Back to the nickel script.
I gave David some feedback and said it could do with this, and a bit of that, and some method of doing this other thing.
So I got an email this morning saying he’d not only implemented my suggestions, but also added in some other stuff too.
I already know how good this script is, it’s amazingly easy to use.
It uses flat text files to gather all the order data, has a web page templating system with placeholders, and is a complete doddle to set up. Just create your web page, add your placeholders, stick it in a secret templates directory, edit the config file, and you’re done.
It really is that easy.
What David has now done is add a whole pile of functionality into the back end for handling orders and customers.
Incredible. I can’t wait to see it, because yes, he hasn’t sent me a copy yet because he’s still working on it.
I’m just really excited at the prospect of seeing it all in action.
See, I know how good the admin panel on our new Ticket Desk Pro (TDP) software is, and if David has applied the same attention to detail to the Nickel Script, I’m talking about a VERY high quality piece of software, a really useful tool in anyone’s arsenal.
Speaking of TDP, I’ll have an announcement to make in the next couple of days, so watch this space.
One last thing. The sales page for SmartDD Lite has come back from the designer, so I’ll be putting the sales copy in there ASAP, and updating everyone who bought a copy.
Watch out for that too.
-Frank Haywood
