By: James Koole on October 22nd, 2009
Posted in: OpenSRS Services
Tags: OpenSRS Storefront
Comments: 6

Last week we rolled an update to OpenSRS Storefront that allows Resellers to edit the text on the home page and also to create a page for displaying and marketing any sales or promotions that Resellers may be running. Documentation has been updated to reflect the changes, but I thought I’d put together a quick tutorial showing how to do it. I’m trying something a bit different this time so instead of a video screencast, I’ve provided step by step instructions with screenshots. Let me know which one you think works better for you in the comments, if you wish.

And on a related note, we’re continuing to work on OpenSRS Storefront and we’d love to hear your opinions on how we can make it better. Either drop us a comment right here in the blog, or drop by the forum and join in the discussion there.

Click through to view the tutorials, or download a PDF version for easy printing.

Read the rest of this entry »

By: OpenSRS Team on March 9th, 2009
Posted in: OpenSRS Services
Tags: OpenSRS Storefront
Comments: 0

Last week, we shared some screencasts to help you set up your Storefront site. Today, we’re going to share two more tutorials dealing with more advanced topics.

Using a Custom Hostname

Adding Search

By: James Koole on March 4th, 2009
Posted in: OpenSRS Services
Tags: OpenSRS Storefront
Comments: 1

A few days ago we told you about some improvements that were made to OpenSRS Storefront. Since the changes went live, I’ve had some time to go through the user experience on my own (I manage my own domains through Storefront on my own Reseller account) and I put together a short screencast showing off some of the improvements. I’m a big fan of Storefront because it makes not only buying domains easy, but it simplifies management of the domains I own.

Take a look:

By: OpenSRS Team on March 2nd, 2009
Posted in: OpenSRS Services
Tags: OpenSRS Storefront
Comments: 6

We’ve put together some nifty tutorials for those of you just starting out with Storefront. Each of these brief screencasts will help you accomplish a specific task in your hosted Storefront site, and we hope you’ll find them helpful. We’ll be sharing some more advanced tutorials soon.

If you’re not familiar with Storefront, we introduced this easy-to-use method of selling domains late last year.

Editing and Enabling the Contact Us and About Us Pages

Adding Promotional Bullets

Adding Yourself as the Tech Contact for Domains

Setting Custom Pricing

Additional Blog posts in our Storefront Screencast series:

Part 2
Part 3

By: James Koole on February 26th, 2009
Posted in: OpenSRS Services
Tags: OpenSRS Storefront
Comments: 2

This afternoon, we rolled out the latest version of OpenSRS Storefront. Since we introduced Storefront late last year, we’ve been working hard to make it better for both our Resellers and for your customers. Many of the improvements come as a result of feedback provided to us by our Resellers. This lastest update focused on usability for the end-user interface.

The changes come in three areas:

1. An improved search experience: Storefront searches across a few dozen gTLDs and ccTLDs every time a user does a search. The lookup times for those searches can vary depending on the response times for each Registry. In some cases, those searches were taking too long so we redeigned the way search works to make things feel faster. Now, when a user performs a search, we return results for gTLDs immediately, and then start filling in the ccTLDs as the search results return. That means searches feel much faster for the end users.
2. A better Domain Manager: For users with a bunch of domains in their profile, the Domain Manager was a bit unwieldy. We set out to reorganize the navigation for the Domain Manager and at the same time, we rolled out a bunch of improvements that make managing domains easier. End users can do things like bulk changes to WHOIS records, bulk renewals, and other changes across multiple domains at the same time.
3. An easy way to auto-renew: We’ve added the ability for end-users to set domains and services to auto-renew. They can choose to set domains to auto-renew at the time of purchase, and later they can toggle auto renewal on or off for single domains, or multiple domains thanks to the new bulk tools.

If you want to take the new search experience for a spin, you can do so at our Storefront demo site. Keep in mind that this site is live and if you follow the purchase process through to the end, you’ve bought the domain name for real.

Drop us a line in the comments to let us know what you think.