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The Holiday Season is Here

12/13/2009 By Brandon 2 Comments

Happy HolidaysI know it’s the holiday season because the parking lots are full of shoppers and the coffee shop is full from people trying to escape the cold. As much as I dislike shopping this time of year, I really love the holiday season.

A lot of people slow down or take vacation, but this is actually my busiest time of year. It may not be normal for interactive agencies, but Kelsey is always slammed with work this time of year. We have so many projects we’re having to prioritize which we are going to be able to work on.

On top of that, this is the busiest time of year for 2BigFeet.com. We’re overwhelmed with orders and are constantly sending out email newsletters and adding new products to the website. We’re so fortunate that we’ve still grown a good 30% over last year despite the economy.

As if I wasn’t busy enough, I just recently signed on to be the co-editor of the weekly SitePoint Tribune email newsletter, and we’re remodeling a bit at the Eley household. Busy times!

Though it’s hectic and busy, I’m loving every minute of it!

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

Filed Under: Personal Tagged With: ,

Authorize.net Outage Adds Excitement to Holiday Weekend

7/4/2009 By Brandon Leave a Comment

Authorize.netAuthorize.net, one of the largest payment gateways in the world, was down for 15 hours after a fire at Fisher Plaza, the Seattle, WA based datacenter where they were hosted.

I was at Starbucks working on an email newsletter with an Independence Day promotion for 2BigFeet.com, and was just about to send it to our entire subscriber list when I noticed J’s tweet. I started researching the outage and opened a Twitter Search for the hashtag #authorize and the phrases “authorize.net” and “auth.net” to keep up with the situation as it progressed.

Soon after I noticed the problem, I started getting calls from customers at 2BigFeet who were trying to place orders online but were getting errors. Not long after that, I got several calls from clients who also noticed their websites were not accepting payments.

As a temporary fix, I switched our e-commerce software to manual processing. All online orders were accepted, we would have to run the credit cards later using our order management software offline. I went ahead and sent the Independence Day email to our subscribers and orders started flowing in again.

I kept following the issue throughout the day and wrote a blog post about it this morning on The E-Commerce Blog. I think Authorize.net really messed up on this one. I, for one, am looking for a new or additional gateway provider.

Filed Under: E-Commerce Tagged With: , , , , ,

My Thoughts on 2008, 2009 and Resolutions

1/7/2009 By Brandon 5 Comments

Some of my friends and family think I’m weird. I don’t believe in luck or superstition. At all. I’m one of those crazy people who thinks we make our own destiny with the choices we make every day. So when, once a year, everyone goes around making “resolutions” for the new year I just kind of chuckle a little and once again look strange. I don’t make resolutions either.

New Year’s Resolutions are made in good faith, really. Most people think they’re doing something positive by making a goal to get something done (or stop doing something, or start) in a new year. The problem is simply that life moves at you so fast, things change and you may be in a completely different place in another 365 days.

Ever year I do revisit my goals… I revisit the same short and long-term goals that I had in the previous year and re-evaluate whether they’re still appropriate moving forward. Maybe I don’t really want to keep learning the guitar, or maybe I want to start kickboxing instead of running a marathon. So what? You shouldn’t feel bad about breaking a “resolution” you made with yourself just because you changed your mind, or because life threw a curveball at you.

So around the beginning of each year I like to look back at the previous year, review my successes and failures, goals and accomplishments. And I look forward to the next year to see what might be in store. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Growth & Leadership, Personal Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,