President’s Message: Hurricane Irma

President, Daryl Wurzbacher, shares updates regarding Hurricane Irma.

 

Marketing Veteran Joins ByDesign Technologies Executive Team

Experienced marketing and high-tech executive to lead global marketing efforts

Tampa, Florida based ByDesign Technologies, the leading provider of complete software solutions for the direct sales industry today announced the appointment of Linda Loren Gulla as the Vice-President of Marketing.  Gulla brings more than 25 years of experience leading marketing efforts in emerging start-ups as well as global organizations.

She will be responsible for driving ByDesign’s global marketing strategy and will report directly to the Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Jeff Ayscue.

“Linda has led global marketing efforts for a broad range of organizations that have changed the way that customers interact with brands and technology.  Her deep understanding of platform and cloud products coupled with her ability to scale global revenue make her an ideal fit to lead our marketing efforts,” said Founder and Chief Executive Officer Jeff Ayscue. “We are excited to have Linda join our Executive Leadership Team.”

Before joining ByDesign, Linda was the VP of Marketing for Celsius Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ: CELH) a global fitness and lifestyle beverage company.  During her tenure, the company achieved record revenue growth and profitability.  Before Celsius, she was the VP of Marketing for GeniusCentral, a leading provider of SaaS enterprise solutions for retail and supplier order management, automation and promotional software platforms.  Linda has also held executive positions at Oragenics (probiotics), VÄXA International (homeopathy), and CyberWize, (MLM).  Gulla holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Consumer Science from Montclair State University and is a Certified Wellness and Nutritional Educator.

 

Tips to Troubleshooting Performance Issues

As companies grow and software progressively gets fancier, we expect more from our technology.  When it comes to performance issues, a number of different issues can mask themselves making it difficult to pinpoint what’s really going on.  Here are some tips to help you diagnose why things might be running less than optimal.

1. Are other users having the issue? All of them or some of them? If not, what is different? Are you using the same browser? Are you on the same network?  In the same geographical area or region?  Is there country-specific configuration differences?  Unique credit card processors or shipping locations at play?
2. Is there a problem with the internet between you and Freedom?  Are other sites slow?  This issue is difficult to get to the answer because it requires additional tools like “tracert” (verbally pronounced “traceroute”).  For novice users, Google “free traceroute,” and you will find tons of online tools that report the speed between each hop on the internet.  Some conduct the same tests from different areas around the globe which further helps isolate if a single region is the problem.  Advanced users favor a command prompt solution, “ping” and “tracert,” to capture the same details.
3. How big is the page you are viewing? You can typically check this by right-clicking on the page and go to properties in your browser. Larger pages can take more system resources on your computer to display. This can happen if you run a large report and attempt to view too much of the data at once.   Try reducing the date range first to see what the tolerance thresholds are.
4. Are there any large processes running?  Are multiple people running large processes? We offer a report that might be helpful:  Freedom Back Office:: Administration > Tools > Process Logs.  This may help identify if two people or scheduled jobs are trying to do two or more resource intensive jobs tasks.  For example, purging 100,000 reps while running commissions might not be the best choice.   Resource contention may occur.

If the above checks haven’t brought you to the cause of a performance issue, give us a call.  When you do, let us know what steps you took and the results of each. This information can go a long way to narrowing down what the cause might be. As with any performance issues, the exact time experienced is very important to us.  This will help us as we comb through logs trying to put the puzzle together.  If a performance issue self-resolves itself, without the exact time of the incident, our jobs get much more difficult.

Lastly, don’t forget at the end of the ticket to ask us “how could I have troubleshot better” or “what steps did you take that perhaps I could have taken”?    We are happy to share the last puzzle piece that solved the problem to aid in everyone’s faster future resolutions.

 

REST APIs

Before we dig into what a Rest API is, let’s go over some basics concerning to APIs. First off, API stands for “Application Programming Interface”. In simple terms, it’s code that allows two or more software programs to communicate with one another. It’s just like software calling, texting, or emailing one another. Just like there are different ways to communicate with one another, software has many different ways to communicate. An early common modern day method is something called SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol). SOAP essentially informs other programs of actions that it can take such as creating an order, processing or payment, or getting shipping methods. A newer and improved way for programs to communicate is via REST (Representational State Transfer). REST communicates by exposing items as resources so you’d create an order by giving another program your desired order or process a payment by giving it your desired payment. While they are both doing the same thing, one does it by exposing communication as actions all with different parameters (SOAP) and the other does it by having items exposed as resources that are used for requests and responses (REST). The difference to programmers can be massive.  An analogy would be like a student asking 15 simple math questions and a teacher answering them (SOAP) versus a teacher handing a student a calculator (REST).

Why are we moving towards REST?

From a technology standpoint, there are many large benefits to ByDesign as well as those that communicate with us via APIs. REST allows us to communicate using multiple formats easily (meaning other programmers can communicate easier). It’s easily cacheable meaning less work for all systems involved. While the list of benefits goes on, simply know that REST is optimized for the web and it’s the right move as far as how programs prefer to communicate to one another.

How do we use REST?

Our newest Shopping Cart and mobile apps are running on top of REST APIs. Every time you click a button, add an item to the cart, or view a product you’re using a REST API! This gives us the ability to cache information for faster loading of the main cart pages. It allows us to pass less information less frequently in order to get the user their cart total. It means many improvements! While we are only using REST APIs in our newest shopping cart and mobile apps, we’re going to be using them more and more throughout the system. This will bring the many benefits with it into those other systems. We look forward to using these to empower you and your users.

We are excited to announce that next week is Release Week! While you received over 80 feature improvements and new features, and we are excited to highlight a few! If you have any questions about your new features, please contact Client Support.

• Updated the “Closed Parties” report in the Back Office to contain the report criteria and results columns from all Closed Parties Reports. Relocated menu path: Departments > Reports > Party > Closed Parties.
• Enhanced the Price Range Filter on Cart 2.0 listing page to allow for removal or customizable price ranges.
• Enhanced the functionality for bonus types that are not Clawback aware to allow negative payouts as a configurable option.
• Implemented the Genealogy Upline Report pages in the Reps area in Freedom BackOffice in the new Service-oriented architecture.
• Created a new Representative Dashboard that allows Back Office Users to view pertinent representative information in a dashboard/grid style format. Created new widgets for the Representative Dashboard.
• Enhanced the volume rollup process to be executed during the inline cancellation process. This avoids manual rebuild of the volumes and increases the accuracy of volumes displayed.
• Optimized the Multiple Products and Single Products reports by condensing the secondary filtered reports into single reports.

 

Direct Selling Edge

October 2-3, 2017 in Franklin (Nashville), TN

Meet Jerry York and learn the most successful techniques for growing your business faster at the DS Edge.  Exclusive savings for ByDesign clients:   Save $50 with promo code BDTCEO

What is Direct Selling Edge?

The Direct Selling Edge Conference is a two-day school for new and established network marketing and party plan direct selling companies.

Hosted by top compensation plan expert Jay Leisner of Sylvina Consulting and leading MLM attorney Kevin Thompson of Thompson Burton, this conference has been held three times yearly since 2011.

Attendees attend Direct Selling Edge to learn:

•  how to design or improve their compensation plans
• what they need to know about current legal regulations
• what to teach their independent representations about how to use social media the right way
• what matters most in your relationship with a merchant account provider
• how to attract field leaders
• how to build a great company culture
• how to build an effective distributor compliance department
• what you should do before you obtain MLM software
• and so much more