Big Changes to Checkout

A number of checkout-related improvements and fixes went online this evening, if you're curious, you can try to parse through the details on the "What's New?" link on the bottom. But there is one particularly important change that I'd like to quickly highlight: when using "Buy now" with an offer, items are no longer marked as "Sold" until Paypal or Google Checkout tells us that the buyer has paid. For buyers, the difference should be relatively indistinguishable, unless you're the sort that enjoyed committing to buy items and then not paying (nobody on this site, of course!). You still add items to your cart, click "Buy Now," and go through the checkout process. After you've paid, the items in your offer are marked as sold and the seller ships them to you. For sellers, it's a bigger difference, with some good news and some bad news. The good news is obviously that for "Buy Now" offers (plan to soon give the option for standard offers as well), you don't have to worry about buyers that say they want items but then never pay. If the buyer doesn't pay, your item is still for sale, and the Earth continues circling the Sun. The bad news is that for those who setup Google Checkout, if you setup the callback URL incorrectly, then even after a buyer pays, your items will not be automatically marked as "sold" because we'll never hear back from Google. If another buyer came along and bought your items again before you noticed, you'd be in some hot water. So, if you accept Google Checkout as payment, and you're not sure whether you setup the callback URL correctly, you might want to double check that your settings exactly match our instructions for setting up GC. How will you know if you did it wrong? If you get an email from Google Checkout that you have received payment, and you don't also get an email from Bonanzle that somebody bought your items, that's a sign that something is awry in your configuration. From what I've casually observed so far, it looks like at least 90% of our sellers have managed to get it right, but we still sometimes see mysterious or misformatted messages from Google Checkout that make us think that not everybody might have GC setup right. I'm planning in the next couple weeks to try to work with Google to give people a way to verify they have their callback URL setup correctly *before* transactions start happening, but for now, the best/only way to get it right is double check your settings, and watch for the phenomenon described above. If you have received payment via GC before, and the offer that was purchased through GC has the GC transaction number on it, then you know you set it up right. Lots of other exciting things getting online lately (USPS, anyone?) that I haven't the will to talk about now. Keep on Bonanzling and you never know what new goodies you'll find!