Some users complained they could not get through to PayPal to pay for orders.

The problem appears to be with PayPal taking ever to respond. It comes and goes and is geo-specific. Complaints came from NZ, AU and EU. Haven’t heard anything from US customers.

Please, check how it performs and keep an eye on the problem.

You may be loosing business simply because customers can’t pay!

Do you know a good alternative to PayPal?

Would you like to accept credit cards directly being a registered merchant with your bank?

Email admin@zetaprints.com with suggestions.

It turned out we had a few extra Lucida fonts installed as system fonts and it caused a conflict with user fonts that were Lucida as well, but slightly different one.

Do you use Lucida in any of your web-to-print templates?

If yes, you need to upload your Lucida fonts, please or let us know this font removal caused you grief.

Sorry about it. We probably did a bad thing that will affect a few templates. We want to know if it did.

Fresh off the web2print development mill - changes to the printer interface.

New menu format

The main menu moved into a horizontal line at the top of the screen.

The side bar on the left shows catalogs and templates only.

Web-to-print order list

You need to click on Orders link in the menu to see order folders with order counts.

Web-to-print orders report

Orders report now includes most of payment information, if there was a payment made.

It has only the last transaction details. E.g. if you refunded the order it will have the refund transaction, not the original payment.

PDF settings for Web-to-print

PDF settings are now managed from a separate page.

Empty Deleted folder

Every catalog has a setting for order retention. The default is 6 months. You can reduce it down to 1 month per catalog.

Clicking on Empty next to Deleted on Orders page will permanently delete any order that are older than the set retention period in the catalog as well as all deleted test orders.

Orders can be deleted only after you paid for them.

Demo

Watch a quick demo of the new interface

Just a reminder for users trying out our service that we are not after your wallet - send us an email that you are still on a trial and we’ll wave the bill. Really, we have no problem with that whatsoever.

By the way …

An interesting post about printing quality at one of the largest US online printer offering novelty products - Zazzle.com. Those guys are doing great in terms of traffic and popularity. They have lots of interesting social features, but it turns out the quality of the print lets them down. At least it did on this occasion.

Coming changes

The sidebar with the main menu, lists of orders, catalogs, etc. will be very much simplified and possibly removed. Don’t be shocked when you see the entire width of the screen used by the page content.

This change will be enabled for printers only. Your customers will still see the current layout. We will need your feedback before applying to your customer screens.

You might have noticed by now that the User List page has changed with an addition of a new text area for your personal message to the user.

The message comes at the top of the email followed by the link they need to click on.

The screen capture below shows an email without a message.

The personal message would appear immediately before  the text you see in this example.

User Profile page changes

Order List and Order Details now link to the User Profile page via user email or the ID for unregistered users.

You can use it to manage user details, including entering their email addresses.  It can be done only if there is no password set for the user. Once the password is set it is up to the user to make changes.

Order List Page

Orders are titled by user reference, if such exists and the product name appearing in brackets. Otherwise the product name shows as before.

it may be a good idea to send an email to your active users and tell them about this feature. Make sure you have “Hide Reference” checked off in template details. Reference text box shows by default, unless you checked it off.

2 new web-to-print features were released last week, but stayed in the stealth mode until now.

Bulleted text can now be mixed and matched with other fields within the same frame like in this example. Note that all the text is in one paragraph frame aligned to vertical-center.

Read more here.

Paragraph style matching

Different paragraphs within the same paragraph frame are now matched to user input and retain the original styling, including color, font, alignment, spacing, etc. The following example is a single input field.

Read more here.

Our web-to-print Image Library page got a small re-vamp.

1. There is no difference in web-to-print Image Library page for printers or for end users any more.

2. Users can upload images directly into the web-to-print image library.

3. Images can be deleted asynchronously one by one or all in one go.

4. Long file names are truncated to the last 50 letters, which should be enough to the file name and a bit of a path. This is likely to be noticed by IE6 users only because all good browsers do not include the file path.

Watch out:

• Go to your homepages and click REFRESH to get the latest style sheet. Frequent users have them cashed.
• Tell us if the layout breaks (long file names, different height of boxes, etc) with your images.

Released only minutes ago, some long awaited user management features to make life of web-to-print printer accounts easier.

Add user and User profile page

You can add a user to the web-to-print database and then assign the user to multiple web-to-print catalogs using a new user profile page. You can still do it per-catalog.

Full user profiles can be viewed on the new user profile page. Profiles accessible through Add user or clicking on user name in lists of users per catalog.

You can edit profiles of your customers, but only for those without a password. Once the password is set up the profile can be edited by the user only.  More …

Anonymous orders can be assigned to users

An order placed by an unregistered user can be assigned to an existing user or a new one. Click on Assign to user link on order details page and follow the instruction.  More …

In case you haven’t noticed, there are 2 new features to make your web-to-print site a bit better.

Catalog icons and web-to-print homepage layout

Web-to-print catalogs used to be lists of text links. Now they can be replaced with icons or images like in this example:

Images can be made in Photoshop in any size or format.  Read more in Catalog icons post on web-to-print help website.

The web-to-print homepage layout can be changed showing one or more of the following blocks:

• Popular templates
• Catalogs (as images or text)
• Latest templates

Read more on web-to-print homepage customization.

We are glad to announce that the web-to-print pricing has changed with the addition of one more digit (zero) effective from 1 Apr 2008, which is pretty much now.

The new web-to-print pricing per order is as follows:

• Australia - $2.200
• EU - €1.300
• New Zealand - $2.500
• UK - £0.850
• USA - $1.700
• Other countries - US$1.700

The old prices can be found here.

We are all off to Bahamas due to the windfall of money after the price increase.

Signed:
ZetaPrints,
1 April 2008