• Log into PayPal
• Click the ‘Profile’ link in the menu bar under ‘My Account’
• Click the ‘Button Language Encoding’ link (at the very bottom of the page)
• Click ‘More Options’
• Set ‘Encoding’ to ‘UTF-8’ (most importantly the IPN dropdown). Should look something like this;
• Click ‘Save’

If addresses aren’t being shown properly in Scrobbld, please let me know and I will try and rectify the problem. Thanks to TentacleSoftware for the heads up.

The concept is a bit similar to our email notifiers where you insert placeholders into your document, and then connect up to a CSV file, which you can get from your Scrobbld data export.

I would like to extend my thanks to Andres from the Green Day Authority for very kindly allowing me to add his packing slip to this post, as a template which anyone else can alter and use. If you do decide to use Andres’ template, please share any results with other members by either writing to me or adding a comment here.

To use the attached template, I will quote directly from Andres’ usage instructions below, then add a few additional comments;

We just take the csv export from Scrobbld, set it as the Data Source in Word, and everything else plugs right in appropriately.

The only short-coming of this exact invoice is that I don’t have if-statements in there appropriately surrounding each item to check if that item exists. So if the export only has at most 5 items in a single order, I have to delete rows 6 and 7 from the invoice before creating the mail merge or it’ll throw an error. But, hasn’t caused too many issues for us.

Now, regarding connecting the data source in Word (2010 – I imagine 2007 as well) to the Scrobbld CSV file, you can refer to this link http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word-help/about-mail-merge-data-sources-HP003082024.aspx.

Andres also mentions about adding if, then & else blocks. For the non-programmers among our users, this just means that if a particular text field, for example, address_country_code matches ‘UK’, then you display a different shipping time to if it matches ‘US’ (for example). This is easily achievable in mail merge documents; just refer to http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/office_2010-word/mail-merge-rules-using-if-then-else-for-a-date/abb0fb23-4cea-4990-9de6-6e34cbb7a6bf. Looping through multiple items I believe is a slightly more difficult proposition, but I think the solution here is a good and simple one, as items 1 through 7 are listed, just in case your customer decided to buy 7 different items from you. If they didn’t buy that many, it doesn’t matter, the fields will just be blank (especially if you nest them in the if-then-else blocks).

Please enjoy the Greendayauthority.com invoice!

As a result, we’ve decided to stop the eBook side of things as it doesn’t sit very cleanly with everything else that we’ve added to the site since, which has more of a focus on the sale of tangible goods.

If you are still selling or dispatching eBooks through Scrobbld a very easy and reliable workaround is to host the file on your own site, and then put a link into the payment received notifier which addresses your file. This also allows you to have any size of eBook / file sent to your customers (and track the number of downloads if you so wish).

The eBook tab will be disappearing in the next week or so, along with any uploaded files which will also be deleted.

Keep a look out for HTML emails which will be appearing shortly!

Why am I required to ship to the buyer’s address shown on the PayPal transaction details page?
This requirement is for your safety. The address on the PayPal transaction details page is registered with and checked by PayPal. When the buyer asks you to send merchandise to a different address, it may indicate fraud.

(PayPal quote)

On the other hand, it’s your data, and there might be a very good reason for wanting to ship to another address, or perhaps a different name at the same address.

There’s now a link underneath the customer address in the new transaction list – ‘Change Address’. If you make any changes to this, you can still revert to the old address (the one in their PayPal details) by clicking on the ‘Delete changes’ button which will appear as soon as you make any edits.

To access this new information in the email or the export, scroll down to the list of ‘Alternative Shipping …’ (State, City, Zip) on either editor.

Super special notifier syntax

If you want to check whether you’ve specified an alternative shipping address in the outgoing email, you can use the following syntax:

[isset alternative_name]

—-
IMPORTANT

We will ship to this address as requested, not the PayPal address listed below.

[alternative_name]
[alternative_street]
[alternative_city]
[alternative_state]
[alternative_country]
[alternative_zip]
—-
[/isset]

We don’t have ‘not’ or ‘else’ yet, but these will be coming shortly.

This is perhaps a post for our more programming oriented users as we’ve introduced some ‘programming’ functionality into our ‘order received’ emails, preempting the redesign of the notifiers page to support HTML emails, as well as a greater number of email types.

The new syntax comes in the form of commands, enumerators and modifiers; where the enumerators are a way of accessing the list of items, modifiers are a bunch of functions that are available to edit the text, and commands are a way of showing (or hiding) text dependent upon the things that are present in the data.

I’ll start with an example. If I want to see whether the first item ordered matched a certain item name, and then I could display some specific shipping information based upon that, e.g.;

Hello [first_name],

Thanks very much for buying things from our widget shop!

[shiny widget equals item_name:0]
The shiny widget will not ship until the 19th September, so please don’t contact us wondering where it is quite yet.
[/equals]

Kind regards

The Widget Shop.

So if the shiny widget was ordered then they will know not to email you about it too soon. You’ll also notice the [item_name:0] which references the first item name in the list of items (where the index is zero based). If they ordered more than one item, you could see the second item name by using the tag [item_name:1].

Commands

I’ve already introduced one command, ‘equals’. There are two others, ‘isset’ and ‘for’.

Isset looks like the following:

[isset option_name1:0]
Display this text
[/isset]

If option_name1 isn’t set, e.g. if the string value stored inside option_name1 has a length of 0, then ‘Display this text’ will be hidden.

The ‘for’ loop is a common concept with programmers, and makes it possible to look at each item in a list of items, because we’re not aware in advance how many items the customer has purchased. For example;

[for currentItem:items]
[quantity:currentItem] of ‘[item_name:currentItem]‘
[/for]

Where the string ‘currentItem’ is our index (e.g. 0, 1, 2, 3) which could be anything (e.g. i, j or currentItem will all work the same). This will print out the entire list of items that have been ordered, with the quantity for each item as well as the item name. We can expand this example to show you how easy it is to really do some nice customisation of the order list:

[for i:items]

[quantity:i] of ‘[item_name:i]‘
[isset option_name1:i] — [option_name1:i] – [option_selection1:i] [/isset]
[isset option_name2:i] — [option_name2:i] – [option_selection2:i] [/isset]

[shiny widget equals item_name:i]
The shiny widget will not be shipping quite yet… please be patient!
[/equals]

[0 equals stock:i]
(Unfortunately we don’t have any stock in for the ‘[item_name:i]‘ at the moment, but it will be arriving shortly!)
[/equals]

[/for]

This would look something like the following, assuming an order of three items:

1 of ‘My Shiny widget’
– Colour – Silver

(Unfortunately we don’t have any stock in for the ‘My Shiny Widget’ at the moment, but it will be arriving shortly!)

2 of ‘My Grey Widget’
– Size – Small

So with the small number of commands here we can give the customer quite a lot of information regarding their product purchase, which means less manual communication is required between yourself and your customer, because your customer is now aware of any shipping or stock issues.

Modifiers

Modifiers can be added to a tag to change the appearance of that tag. There are currently three modifiers; uppercase, lowercase and ucwords. Ucwords is perhaps the only one that isn’t obvious, and is used for capitalising the first letter from every word, and can be used like so;

(where first_name = ‘john’)

[first_name:ucwords]

(would output ‘John’).

You might also use this to make the equals more accurate, for example [john equals first_name:lowercase], because john is not the same as JOHN (e.g. the match is case sensitive).

Enumerators

We’ve already covered these as part of ‘Commands’, however, just to reiterate, enumerators are a way of accessing elements in a list, e.g. an item in a list of items, where the indexes start from 0 (the first item in the list).

You can also combine enumerators and modifiers, for example [first_name:0:ucwords] or [item_name:i:uppercase] and so forth.

If you’ve never done programming before this could be a bit of a stretch, but we will be adding a ‘preview’ function shortly to make it easier to mess around!

Infinite Scrolling

You can now see all transactions on one page, no more skipping through page numbers, with transactions in a day spanning more than one page. We now load up whole days, so you can be sure that you are seeing everything from the one day and not missing anything out. Instead of having a ‘select all’ button, we now provide a select by day so you can select all transactions during the day (for example, if you like to process orders in the evening, or the following morning).

Improved summaries

Increased item size summary, where previously we had export date, full name, payment date and payment status, we now manage to fit in all those plus item names, item quantities, and payment gross in your selected default currency for an improved quick glance summary.

Increased SKU information

You can now add more information to an SKU such as item stock price and dimensions.

Notes

A long outstanding feature, we have now added the ability to add notes to your transactions.

Selection Filter

Lets you select by date, and then deselect particular transactions based upon different information, such as payment status, country, item name, SKU name and a few more. Really quite handy.

Here for example, I’ve selected two transactions (you can click anywhere on the transaction to select it), and it’s then given me a breakdown of information in those transactions, such as payment status, item name, SKU name and country. You can then click on the checkbox to deselect those transactions with the corresponding information. Useful if you want to say, post just those items which are in your local country, or only export the information of transactions with a completed payment status. We will be adding more filter options shortly.

We still obviously have the same easy search box to search all your transactions, which now returns all results in the same format as above so you have all the same useful functions at your fingertips!

We’re really hoping to get some feedback so we can start building upon this to help make everyone’s PayPal and eBay experiences just that little bit better!

First off you have to add the relevant eBay accounts that you are selling through. To the right of these, click on ‘settings’ to customise your requirements for each eBay account you’ve added.

Once you’ve done this quick step, enable the ‘Complete sale in eBay from Scrobbld’ action on the same page.

Now, whenever you mark transactions as ‘Complete’ in the Transactions page, you’ll get a popup like the one below offering the opportunity for you to mark the particular items directly in eBay! Super!

Any questions, just drop me a line.

Anytime you receive a new completed transaction through eBay, Scrobbld will query eBay for the SKU name which will then be created if it’s not already in Scrobbld. This is ‘account agnostic’, so you don’t actually have to add your own eBay account for this feature to be enabled; you just enable it for all your transactions in the eBay tab on the Accounts page.

We are adding more eBay functions over the coming weeks; if you have a function that would really help you out, just let us know!

Ian.

Once you add your eBay account you will be *immediately* notified when we add any new eBay functionality, to make your eBay and Scrobbld lives that little bit more harmonious.