In December we focussed on stability and speed, avoiding making any changes that did not directly improve this. The stability of the server over Christmas was as a result of this, so we have decided to devote a developer to this full time.
The second novel in Jessica Townsend’s Nevermoor series ‘Wundersmith: The Calling of Morrigan Crow’ is November’s best seller, with 1566 copies sold. Best selling author Jane Harper returns with ‘The Lost Man’, which sold 1460 copies last month. She is closely followed by Jeff Kinney’s latest instalment of Diary of a Wimpy Kid, ‘The Meltdown (#13)’, with 1449 sales.
Work in November has been focused on server performance and stability. We have completed a gift card integration with vii, as well as the Hachette price and availability integration. There are some new things on beta that we would like you to try, but with Christmas on the horizon we won’t be pushing any large, non-urgent changes in December.
At this end of the year we spend time improving performance and the issue alert and recovery systems. We have also taken the time to get some smaller things done that don’t make the top of the priority list, but are nonetheless annoyances and easy to do. The big things we have been working on are a system to merge duplicated customers (in progress) and the box scan tool.
Liane Moriarty’s ‘Nine Perfect Strangers’ has retained the Best Seller position, selling 1671 copies in October. ‘Any Ordinary Day: Blindsides, Resilience and What Happens after the Worst Day of Your Life’ by Leigh Sales has come in second, selling 1387 copies. Following in a close third is Markus Zusak’s ‘Bridge of Clay’, which sold 1218 copies this month.
September has been spent pushing Accounts and Inwards Goods improvements to beta. As always, we would like you to test these changes for us to smooth out any problems and to properly prepare your staff. We have also added a green star to the Movers and PO Cart to help you make the most of Leading Edge deals.
Australian author Liane Mortiary’s latest novel ‘Nine Perfect Strangers’ sold 2256 copies and is the September best seller. Yotam Ottolenghi’s new cookbook ‘Ottolenghi: Simple’ sold 1560 copies, and ‘Lord of the Fleas (The Adventures of Dog Man #5)’ by Dav Pilkey is our third best seller, with 907 copies sold.
This August we have focussed on improving the speed of the system and management of the load on our servers. We are developing a range of features that benefit secondhand booksellers; the first of these is a local image and we would appreciate shops testing it on beta for us. If you would like to suggest software changes that would assist secondhand sellers you are more than welcome to add to our work in progress document.
Andy Griffiths and Terry Denton’s ‘104-Storey Treehouse’ is the Circle Best Seller this August with 1321 copies sold. ‘Scrublands’ by Chris Hammer has taken second place with 888 sales, and Scott Pape’s ‘Barefoot Investor’ remains in the top three, selling 854 copies.
July has been focused on improvements and getting ready for some major system infrastructure upgrades. Implementing a Content Delivery Network (CDN) Google managed mysql and a load balancer. We are hoping to implement Google managed Mysql this weekend.