Shopfront opens in beta
Shopfront is a public page on your own website where somebody says what they are bringing in and what is wrong with it. A card is waiting on your board when they walk through the door, so intake at the counter is a look and a nod rather than four fields.
Submissions arrive in a holding state rather than straight onto the board, and you accept them. That step is what stops anybody on the internet putting rows in your job list, and it is also the moment the customer gets their first text.
What beta means here, in the same words as the documentation: it works and shops are using it. It is free while the beta lasts and we will tell you before that changes. It is off until you switch it on. Behaviour may change with a week's notice, and if something breaks, email us with the word Shopfront in the subject and it reaches the two of us rather than the queue.
Improvements
- Shopfront submissions carry the customer's photograph straight onto the card, marked as theirs rather than yours.
- Accepting a submission sends the Booked in text immediately, so there is no gap where the customer has heard nothing.
- A per-number and per-address rate limit, which is dull and was the last thing holding the beta up.
Fixes
- The public page did not say which shop it belonged to if the shop had no logo set.
- Long descriptions were truncated at 200 characters without saying so.
- Submissions made while the shop was closed were timestamped at the next opening rather than when they were sent.
- The photograph upload failed silently on files over 8MB.
- Accepting two submissions in quick succession could create one job.