Fri 12 Mar 2010

Update On Payments System

by mike

Hi all. I love the feedback here. You all are awesome. Whenever I get a chance to get lost in the products and ideas you’re dreaming up, I’m truly inspired. It’s like a volcano of creativity. Thanks for making this Quirky experiment such a success.

Now, payments. I’ve been mum about them for some time and wanted to give you an update. Much has happened in the past few weeks so I’ll stick with the major points.

1.) We upgraded our database infrastructure to increase site reliability and speed. With the amount of payments to be processed everyday, this system needs be finely tuned, purring like a kitten.

2.) We are recalculating presales influence for all products and will reward it only to those people who have completed their orders. There was a bug that rewarded influence to people who never completed their presale order. This will fix that.

3.) We are recalculating payments for all products. There was a number rounding error in the previous rewards algorithm that failed to reward people for fractions of cents. This is now patched up. most people should see an increase in their account balance, if only by a few cents.

4.) Payments will be processed daily. If your earnings per product are more than a penny, it will be added to your account balance.

5.) You’ll have a page to view your earnings by product as well as all of your other account transactions.

The code is done and nearly ready to go. I’m preparing our staging environment (literally) now for one final round of testing. When all goes well, the next step will be to bring it live. This will require bringing the site down for a few hours to migrate the data and bring the new system online. We’ll blog about it before we pull the trigger.

Any questions, concerns, conundrums, complaints or compliments… please, let us know. We’re listening.

Much love, 
-m