Errr …. Errr what can I say! CommerceTeam Linden must have been hitting me with psychic rays and realised I was blogging about the lack of information about Direct Delivery! Around the time I was proof reading my blog post, the mysterious figure of CommerceTeam Linden posted in the merchants forum that Direct Delivery is going beta! I’ve now decided that CommerceTeam Linden wears a cape, with a hood … and possibly has red eyes. I did contemplate editing my previous post, but I’ve decided that some of the points are still valid and it will stay!
Anyway, on with the information, thank goodness there’s information. First of all, check out the instructions page. Read this carefully, especially if you’re a merchant as you’ll need to download the special project viewer if you want to test listing items.
Merchants should also be aware that there’s a special beta version of the marketplace that you’ll need to login to, which you can find here. This was definitely closed earlier this evening, I swear!
Merchants should also read the Magic Box migration article, which you can read here. Now remember that this is a draft article and that Direct Delivery is only in beta, so no getting yourself into a panic thinking that you need to do this all now, things may even change before it’s fully rolled out, but it’s definitely worth keeping your eye on the information.
There are also release notes accompanying this, which you can read here. I’d advise merchants to read this to save themselves from frustrations, such as:
Listings with an updated date before Sept. 1, 2011 may behave unexpectedly–stick to updating listings with a date after that (which should be most, due to system updates).
Unassociated Marketplace Items has a limit of 100: hitting this limit will not report in the Import Failure Log.
Again, remember that this is currently Beta, although the arrival of full implementation may be in less than a month, so really, merchants need to test this out in both merchant and customer roles, but most important of all, do report any bugs you find.
I don’t think I’ll manage any testing this evening, indeed I have a feeling if I do try and do some testing the whole thing will be shutdown!