Monday, July 23, 2007

Checkout payment tips

Our eCommerce web sites including www.yarnandfiber.com have three payment methods available, credit card (Amex, discover, Visa and Mastercard), PayPal (you can use your credit card here too) and "Purchase Order or Check".

Credit card processing is performed by CyberSource and cleared through Bank of America, we do not record any of your credit card details on the eCommerce site for security reasons. Occasionaly CyberSource experiences technical problems and is not available. When this happen you can either call the store (during normal business hours), use PayPal (they will take credit card payments) or simply use the Check/Purchase order option and write a note for us to call for payment or that you will call us and when (please do not leave your credit card info in the note). Any order using this method will be held until payment is received, or a purchase order from a business or institution has been received and authorized.

Before calling please go through this simple check list:

1) Did you enter the correct card type? You must select Visa, Mastercard, American Express or Discover correctly.

2) Did you enter the correct expiry date and credit card number?

3) Did you remember to enter the CVV number (on the back of most cards, or the front of an AMEX card)?

It is very unlikely your card be declined due to a change in address, if in any doubt be sure to put the billing address as that on the card and use the shipping address fields for where you want your order delivered to.

In the event that you cannot check out your order is not lost. Just remember to create an account and the cart will be saved until you are able to checkout at a later time.

Final note: Always use a valid e-mail address. This is where we will send you your order status and any other information regarding your order. You may also check the status of your order by visiting your account profile on our website.

Friday, July 20, 2007

Maintaining our Service Levels

It is very important to us to maintain our generally high levels of service at www.yarnandfiber.com as we begin the move into the busy season. With many new products and increased order levels we have made a few changes to our process to improve our efficiency and allow us to maintain great customer service. Free shipping remains available to all, as does our standard web site discount on just about every product we carry.

Our normal "free shipping" service is next business day to the post office for first class or parcel post delivery. Priority mail is available for an additional charge, although we occasionally use Priority for free shipping at our discretion.

During the comming holiday season please place your orders early enough to avoid the usual postal delays in December. If your order is urgent we recommend using Priority Mail during this period.

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Web Site Browser and OS Compatibility

Always striving to provide our customers with the highest levels of service we have again looked to make sure our web sites run on all popular browsers. However we can't possibly test all of them! (especially older versions)

Most of our visitors use a Windows PC and Internet Explorer (about 67%), we have tested with the newer versions of IE (6 and 7) extensively and believe there to be no problems. Windows and Firefox is the next most popular and again this is regularly tested and there are no known issues. We also test on a Mac with Safari and I.E 5.5 and again experience no issues. This covers about 97% of our users.

We have yet to test Netscape although we do have customers using this. Are there any issues with this browser? We also do not have access to a Linus system, again we would like to hear from you.

We also have an older Mac (OS8.6 and I.E. 5.0) which has a problem decoding the web sites security certificate. I am uncertain of the reason for this but is also happens on any other eCommerce site I visit and it cannot even display the apple.com website properly. I have also been unable to run NetScape on this system. The machine runs Mac OS8.6 and as yet I cannot find a browser that works properly on this computer.

You should not experience any web site warning or error messages when using our web site, and the site is designed for a 1024x768 monitor but to be usable on a 800x600. If you experience any issues please contact us.

Recommended tested browser/OS combinations are Windows (98/2000/XP/Vista) & IE 6 or IE 7, Mac OSX and Safari. Firefox on any platform (we test it on Windows Vista). For general web browsing problems try to get your browser updated to the latest version supported by your operating system, earlier browsers were plagued with security issues.

If anyone has experiences on other platforms or browsers they would like to share with us please feel free to contact us at support@cydjdesigns.com, thank you.

Tuesday, July 3, 2007

Website update

We can't really say "The long awaited update" because I don't think anyone was waiting, anyway the http://www.yarnandfiber.com website got a minor facelift this week, with the aim to provide easier navigation to important features.

We also removed a couple of minor features. Please let us know if your experience any difficulties with the changes as we can't test every browser and screen configuration.

We would also like to apologiese to anyone who tried to use our credit card payment method and has a two-letter last name. For some reason the default on the credit card module was a minimum of three letters, but for an account was two letters. We have fixed this so two letters is the minimum for both.

Again please contact us if you experience any technical difficulties with the site you may contact us at either support@yarnandfiber.com or support@cydjdesigns.com