New Shopify Store!

[adm]

I believe that SJGames has done this change over in good faith due to the need for the HTTPS upgrade, and similar needs.
I feel it has gone rather badly, however; I in no way think this was SJGames intent.

I am curious to know how much of the problems here are from Shopify over promising, SJGames under estimating the process, and unexpected complications.

Hopefully, once mostly done, we can get a "stake holders" update on this going over what went well, and why, as well as what went poorly, and why.

May SJGames get this completed soon.

[Michael Thayne]

Originally Posted by adm

I believe that SJGames has done this change over in good faith due to the need for the HTTPS upgrade, and similar needs.
I feel it has gone rather badly, however; I in no way think this was SJGames intent.

I am curious to know how much of the problems here are from Shopify over promising, SJGames under estimating the process, and unexpected complications.

Hopefully, once mostly done, we can get a "stake holders" update on this going over what went well, and why, as well as what went poorly, and why.

May SJGames get this completed soon.

I'm not suggesting ill intent insofar as I cannot imagine what the upside to SJGames was for mismanaging this transition so badly. Still, there's a huge failure of leadership here—when it became clear that the new site was badly bugged, somebody needed to step in to (1) insist that it be fixed ASAP (2) or revise the launch schedule if for some reason that was found to be totally impossible. And unfortunately, incompetence can be just as damaging to customer trust as malice.

[Steve Plambeck]

So not having any prior knowledge of Shopify itself I started a little research. Wish I hadn't. It doesn't look anything at all like a good fit for what SJG needs. Surely it would have been cheaper and easier to move Warehouse23 (the website) to an https hosting service. The baby seems to be getting tossed out with the bath water.

https://newstyledigital.com/5-reason...olutely-sucks/

[RogerBW]

If it were purely a matter of an SSL wrapper, that would indeed have been relatively easy (as has happened with these forums). I suspect the core problem is that old Warehouse23, like e23 before it, is a custom codebase that takes active maintenance, and there aren't a lot of people who know it well enough to work on it. If a Shopify store breaks, you can find lots of people who've worked on Shopify and can help out.

[Refplace]

Originally Posted by RogerBW

If it were purely a matter of an SSL wrapper, that would indeed have been relatively easy (as has happened with these forums). I suspect the core problem is that old Warehouse23, like e23 before it, is a custom codebase that takes active maintenance, and there aren't a lot of people who know it well enough to work on it. If a Shopify store breaks, you can find lots of people who've worked on Shopify and can help out.

This.
W23 has been around a very long time, I would be surprised if the infrastructure was close to any kind of modern standard.
As a former DB Admin I understand just how complicated data migrations can wind up being and how often something goes wrong.

[Extrarius]

I really hate the new w23. I can't set my password to what I want because I reset it when it was that before (probably because I typod it on mobile and can't tell because there is no "show password") and apparently it remembers several old passwords. Finally pick a new password, and by pasting the download links into a text editor (because the new site doesn't list a count) I can see I have 164 out of 270 on the old site. Only reason I'm looking is to download a few files listed as missing on the archived w23. Luckily most of the files that are missing are present on the new site and I think I have the few that aren't on either already downloaded, but for some reason the download name is based on the SJG item number or something - sone also include part of the title, but some don't. Also, having to load the download page, search, click the item, search again, and click again is terrible. Grabbing all my files like I just did from the archive site would have taken me all day even with there being 100 missing.

And all this is ignoring all the missing features and worse UI. Do Not Like

[Steve Plambeck]

Speaking of login issues with the new W23.... I was on an older device when I registered my account at the new site following the instructions that were e-mailed to us. I used the exact same e-mail address and password, as instructed, and got logged into the new site. There was my previous account info, order history, etc, all well and good.

Later, back on my (up-to-date newer Win 10) computer I go to log into the new site, it just won't let me. Won't recognize the password, won't let me reset the password, and attempts to re-do the registration procedure won't work either. Maybe I could start a new account, but that's not what I want to do. With my old account already registered at the new W23 site, and having logged in previously, I simply cannot get into the new site from my newer computer. But I can get in on the old computer without any problem. I can also still get into the old W23 site on either computer, but the new site is inaccessible unless using my older machine. Waited days and tried again, same problem. This makes no sense.

[Celti]

Just made my first purchase on the new store (Dungeon Fantasy Denizens: Thieves, hooray!) and it's... not good. I wrote a really long, angry, ranty post about it, and then deleted it; my apologies if any of that tone has crept back into this post.

My problems today boil down to one fundamental issue: This store does not tell me where to download my new purchase, and that is unacceptable.

When checking out, i am told i will receive a confirmation email, and that's it. Every prior iteration of this store, every other site i purchase books from, and most sites i purchase other download content from will offer a download link on the confirmation page after hitting checkout. The vanishingly few sites that insist i use email will at least tell me that there will be download links in my inbox. This does neither.

Compounding that pain point, the download links are in a separate email from the confirmation, and the two emails have different From: fields (the download email having no name there), which makes it very easy to spot one and miss the other when skimming a crowded inbox.

Further problems come from the big, obvious product links on one's account page linking to the item's store page, not to any kind of download page; and from the links on one's downloads page linking to the order page, and not to any kind of download page.

As a final aggravation, when one finally finds the download button on the order page, it can only open the purchased document in the browser, and completely defeats any attempt to right-click and “Save As,” — when some of the files for sale are over 100MB, and definitely not something one wants to open in a browser over a slow connection!

There are numerous other technical flaws i could harp on here. The worst part is, i'm not sure how much of this is even fixable. Shopify is a predatory operation whose target audience is mostly startups who don't care about the longevity of their business — just getting it off the ground — and small businesses who don't know any better. Their goal is to offer a minimum viable product while sucking as much money out of you as they can, until you wise up and switch to a sustainable platform. Steve Jackson Games deserves better than that.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Celti

Just made my first purchase on the new store (Dungeon Fantasy Denizens: Thieves, hooray!) and it's... not good. I wrote a really long, angry, ranty post about it, and then deleted it; my apologies if any of that tone has crept back into this post.

My problems today boil down to one fundamental issue: This store does not tell me where to download my new purchase, and that is unacceptable.

Same purchase, also my first, same problem. After a while I found my way to my account page - the one that's organised by order number, not book title - and figured out where the download link was.

But before purchasing, I nearly did not make it through the captcha verification. This is because it asked me to select pictures with "crosswalks." That's a US-specific term, and I'm British, with sight too poor to allow me to drive or watch TV. I didn't immediately guess what "crosswalk" meant, selected a picture of a cross-hatched no-parking area, and was sent into a maze of additional captchas. I was on the point of giving up when it finally allowed me in.

The store doesn't seem to have transferred billing and delivery addresses correctly. I've used several delivery addresses over the years, but only one billing address. It has filled in a "billing address" that has only ever been a delivery address, never a billing address. When I found the page for managing addresses, it had a couple of instances of this one:

John Dallman
123 Fake Street
Austin 12345
United Kingdom

That's obviously placeholder information from experiments in the transition, but that should have been cleaned out before customers were allowed onto the site. I've left one of them in my account in case it's useful for debugging the problem, and deleted the other.

[Michael Thayne]

This is a sad day for me, because I was really excited about Dungeon Fantasy Denizens: Thieves. In fact I was a playtester on it, and from the table of contents it looks like some boxed text I wrote (or at least wrote the first draft of) made it into the final product. But I knew in advance there was no way I was buying it without the issues with Warehouse 23 getting fixed first. Maybe I'll buy it if/when it hits DriveThruRPG?

I don't believe there's any malice behind this mess (except maybe on the part of Shopify, if other posters' criticisms of the company are to be believed), but I'm not sure if I can continue being a loyal SJGames customer unless the company can demonstrate a baseline level of competence that is not currently on display.