What's going on at E-junkie

[E-junkie_Chef]

There's been a lot of changes going on at E-junkie since past three weeks. A quite significant one being that we moved to an office which can hold 5 people rather than 3 (we'll post the address soon That was done as we need a bigger team to handle our growth. Although I won't be as actively be involved with E-junkie's operations as I've been in the past (that way I'll have more time to "build" E-junkie), we will have other people and a new system to handle support. We also plan to add phone support during regular business hours.



As some of you have already noticed, the transition phase has been rough but we do intend to get everything under control within the next day or two. We are planning to offer a paid setup option where we will setup your products the way you require for a one time fee.



Meanwhile, if you have a bug report or an account issue to which nobody from our team has responded back to yet, please feel free to directly call me at 520.248.0364. If you have a "how do i" or a "how to" question, just post it on the forum and we will get those answered the same day as we already have our new team member (Tyson) on it.



Sincerely,

Robin K

Lead Developer, E-junkie

[E-junkie_Guru]

Hello, everyone!



This is Tyson N, your new E-junkie support guru. :^) I just wanted to follow up Robin's announcement of my having joined the team with an introduction of my own.



Although I am fairly new to E-junkie in particular and will be getting fully up-to-speed as I go along (so bear with me :^), I have an extensive background in HTML/CSS coding, in troubleshooting a wide variety of sites in my former role as Webmaster/WebTech for a regional indie ISP, and as a freelance Web designer myself in recent years.



I have always been a "quick study", strong on translating abstract concepts into "layman's terms", and am primarily needs-motivated -- i.e., your support needs will push me to learn whatever may be necessary to address your concerns and explain things in a clear, complete and concise way. Best of all, the more that I can handle your support needs and take them off of Robin's hands, the more time he can spend making E-junkie itself even better for everybody!



I am pretty excited about joining the E-Junkie team, and I will relish this opportunity to make my living at doing what I love, in a way that helps you all make a living at doing what you love as well. ;^)



Best regards,

--

Tyson N

Support Technician

E-junkie Support Group

[healthytek]

While your service on the surface and in concept is excellent, even well executed, your service failure during my decision making period leaves me wondering how stable your are. Can I trust a service providor that crashes and leaves my besite hanging at the view cart button! Disturbing.



Do you respond to such issues?



Bill

www.healthyyounaturally.com

[naia]

Who do we email with issues?

[ylbob]

I am in the same boat as Bill (decision week) and would love to pull the trigger with e-junkie but am very nervous based on the outages this week. I guess specific information regarding the redundancy server would be nice (i.e. will you have redundancy up in the next 2 weeks?).



Any specifics appreciated.

Bob

[E-junkie_Guru]

We did indeed have a service outage this afternoon; please see our latest Service Status notice here for details and reassurance:

http://www.e-junkie.com/bb/topic/2493



If you have general questions about E-junkie or "how to" requests, feel free to post in this forum where everyone can benefit from our response, or use the contact form/info here if you have a specific glitch or would prefer a private response:

https://www.e-junkie.com/ej/contact.php



Of course, if the service appears to be down, sending an email/contact form will only come thru to us after the fact once things are working again. I will post notice forthwith in our Service Status & Updates forum category after any outages are over, but we intend that our current datacenter migration and server upgrades will prevent any outages I'd need to notify you about. :^)

[healthytek]

Thanks for that Tyson_N but the fact remains, as an ecommerce hosting service, down time really should be .00 something and if I extrapolate my experience in the past 5 days the impacts are exceptionally high.



If your excellent solution is to survive, I hope specifics like redundancy are integrated into your strategic plan.



Bill

[healthytek]

By the way, I don't need to be notified on failures that do not occur and want to have faith you have overcome this current situation. I'm certain that customer satisfaction is what keeps the revenues and lost services = lost revenue.

[ldsmusic]

I'm curious if I'm the only one, but I feel like since Robin has stepped away from handling customer service that customer service has gone downhill. I've got over 3000 products in our account in e-junkie and have been asking for 3 weeks to get our affiliate settings adjusted. It was finally done, but done incorrectly. Despite repeated attempts to contact e-junkie via e-mail, I'm not received a response. Is anyone else having similar experiences?

[mixedinkey]

---------------------------

There is a new problem that's happening after the data center switch. All Hotmail.com, Hotmail.co.uk and AOL.com customers do not receive their E-Junkie download links after purchasing the product. We've been answering phonecalls most of the day today as a result.



I think it may have something to do with E-Junkie's Sender Policy Framework or e-mail authentication records. The website IP changed, so maybe AOL and Hotmail are flagging all new e-mails as "invalid/spam"?



Please e-mail me back to help.

[credit_aid_software]

Hi you guys. We are having the same trouble for the last 2 days. Emails not received by customers at AOL, HOTMAIL, YAHOO and MSN. It was happening so much, and so many people confused wondering where there downloads were, that I finally tested it myself today by sending a free link to myself at a working AOL address that has no SPAM controls at all. I received my duplicate copy that I always get at our business address, but I did not receive at the AOL address that it was addressed to. I had entered that AOL address into the "send free link" in e-Junkie Admin. Again, to be clear; I receive my AOL mail normally in my Outlook (to avoid the AOL interface). There are no SPAM controls and my spam folder is empty. AOL must be filtering it, right? Is there something we can do to fix this email trouble or will that resolve over time? Thanks! We love e-junkie!

[credit_aid_software]

Hey, here's an update to my last message. The free link letters I sent as a test (to myself at an AOL address through e-junkie admin) were sent at 5:36 PM. I received our normal notification copies instantly at our business address...and like I said, they didn't show up at AOL.....but just now, 3 1/2 hours later (at 9:08 PM) they just appeared at AOL. Is this an AOL problem? Or just a strange coincidence on the same weekend that HOTMAIL, YAHOO and MSN users are telling us they aren't receiving their emails? We always ask customers to look into their SPAM and BULK email folders. They are writing back that they aren't there, but then when I go ahead and send them manually (from our business email) they get them instantly. Thanks for any help you guys can give. We love e-junkie and hope the rest of your move goes smoothly.

[mixedinkey]

It's not just an AOL problem. I am willing to bet that E-Junkie's email settings did not get updated when they migrated to the new server. Because of that, Hotmail and AOL are rejecting all E-Junkie messages because the IP address has changed.

[simplifun]

I have 4 suggests.

1) I should receive an email after an outage such as Friday and not have to go looking for information.

2)This forum and support need to be hosted on an issolated site from the shopping cart system, this isolated forum should alert us that you are working on the problem. Don't assume it's obvious to us. It could be a problem on our sites and we spend valuable time trying to debug it before contacing you. I don't think you want us to assume it's e-junkie first.

3)Change your price structuring to receive some or all of your revenue based on our sales. I didn't think I'd ever suggest this idea because I like fixed costs, but you need to feel the finacial burden when we do. A day without sales is very serious.

4)The customer log should also be issolated from the shopping cart or redundant making it easier for us to create a group message with alternative downloads for sales within a certain time frame.

[E-junkie_Guru]

Thanks for your patience during our transitional phase; we promise your loyalty will pay off in the near-term long run.



We are aware of the AOL/Hotmail/MSN email issue, which is simply a matter of waiting for them to get a Round Tuit about adding our new IP to their known-non-spammer whitelist. This was one of the reasons we had originally scheduled migration to the new datacenter for a bit later, so this detail could be attended to and finalized in advance, but with circumstances being what they were on Friday, this email glitch was preferable to a continued system outage!



As I have confirmed elsewhere, the plans we are now currently implementing do include improved redundancy schema which were simply not possible with the old setup. It is true that Robin is lately devoting most of his time to the datacenter migration/improvements and to refining and extending the E-junkie system to eliminate bugs and add features, but I only joined the staff last week to take on most of the support burden. The facts are, well before I signed on here, customer service/support had indeed been slipping because the demands for such were more than Robin and Natasha could handle on their own, nevermind also admin'ing the servers and maintaining the E-junkie software, all at the same time.



Essentially, it was a problem of "too much success, too suddenly", and we're doing our best to rise to the occasion and stay on track. That is why Robin hired me and another programmer (and likely another support person soon) to divide the workload. Remember that TV ad from a few years ago where a company launches its online store and as the orders start to tally up, elation turns to anxiety as they realize they're suddenly getting far more business than their current resources could handle? It had been kinda like that around here, up until last week. I am devoting my full attention to get up to speed with everything E-junkie and catch up with support requests, so Robin and Development can eliminate any known sources of outages and prevent outages from occurring in the future.



We thank you for your support!

[mixedinkey]

Fair enough. I'm glad that Robin is getting some help -- it's obvious that he could benefit from it.

[healthytek]

I'm certain we all want to see you succeed!



The fact remains that there have been some good suggestions e.g. seperating systems, redundancy and response to service inquires that will make us all not only feel more comfortable with our choice in e-junkie, but will allow us (as your business partners) to get on with growing our businesses.

[testguide4u]

How long will it take for AOL/hotmail/MSN to add your new IP to the known-non-spammer list? Thanks.

[E-junkie_Guru]

The email whitelist ball is in their court; we've done the submissions but haven't received confirmation back yet, gonna call and light a fire under someone there if we don't have word back by tomorrow morning. ;^)

[ldsmusic]

That's good to know. I realize things can be difficult in times like this, but as a customer who has waited nearly a month to have a certain item addressed, Tyson, is it at all possible to get some help with our affiliate settings we'd like changed?