Future

Some improvements planned for VBZ.NET in the foreseeable future:

Catalog Browsing / Shopping

I wrote the shopping cart sytem currently in use here in 1998-9, and it has changed relatively little since then. More features are badly needed (e.g. the ability to search by item type, so I can add large selections of items besides t-shirts; also a much better, more interactive order management system), and there are also bugs which have resisted my best efforts.

I am currently looking at OSCommerce -- it seems very promising and richly-featured, but probably will need some modifications in order to be usable for vbz. Just as a quick example, OSCommerce is set to use thumbnails (smaller than the ones I use) running down the sides of the page -- which means they must all be the same width; ours are all the same height. Nonetheless I'm planning to do a mock-up in the near future of how it might work with vbz's selection.

Customer Service

I'm thinking seriously about setting up OTRS, a web-based trouble-ticket system. "Why would we need a trouble-ticket system?" was my immediate first thought. "We don't do tech support." Ah yes, but we do have issues that come up, and we do have an email program that tends to let customer emails slide off the top of the screen if too many other messages come in. And then I started to think of all the other ways it could be useful. And then I hear it took less than a day to get set up... So. I'm seriously thinking about it.