AC7 Job Scheduler screenshot

[AbleMods]

Thought I'd be mean and drop a little teaser on my latest project...screenshot at the end.

It's a job scheduler that operates within AC7. Even in shared hosting environments. No access to the server console is required.

Here is the current feature list, subject to change of course:

- Product Now-In-Stock notification. Registered users add out-of-stock items to their wishlist. When the item comes back in stock, AC7 automatically sends an email to the user using your own email template to encourage the sale. Hands-off to you as the site admin and encourages visitors to leverage the AC7 Wishlist feature more often.

- Order follow ups. Automatically send an email to customers a specific number of days after the order has shipped. Say something like "Thanks again for your business, we just wanted to make sure you received everything as expected." This makes for a great marketing opportunity for your site. Again uses your own custom email template and is completely hands-off.

- Completely automate AC7 feed generation and upload for all standard AC7 feed formats. Eventually I'll tie this into my Feed Builder module as well. Google will never know what hit them

- Automatic sitemap.xml file generation.

- Support for 1-time and recurring scheduled jobs.

- Ability to pause/unpause the processing queue. Also easily cancel unwanted jobs at any time.

- Admin-defined polling interval lets you control how often jobs are scanned and processed.

- Unlimited jobs. There is no physical limit to the number of jobs you can schedule. Your server and hosting speeds will still dictate a sensible limit.

- Fantastic customization possibilities. Wrote your own distributor feed but have to manually run it every day? Need an automatic export to an FTP location? No problem, I can add it as a custom job to the module and you can schedule it to run as often as you like.

- Best of all, ALL of these features are possible by changing only 1 AbleCommerce 7 file in your storefront. Just load up my DLL's, copy the management ASPX pages into the ~/Admin/ folder and you're ready to automate your store. Installation will be super easy.

I should have a beta ready by the end of the month, if not sooner. Live testing on Solunar.com will begin tomorrow.

By the end of Jan 2009, I'll have about 90% of my daily storefront tasks fully automated. No more feed uploads. No more distributor data pushes and pulls. Joy and bliss will be mine

Pricing hasn't been set. But don't worry- it'll be reasonable like my other module prices.

scheduler.jpg

[Robbie@FireFold]

Marry me?

[calvis]

Great job Joe, I am sure this will be a welcomed addition for many Able users. Now we can mark the Job Schedule request in the features request section as - IN PROGRESS!

[keats76]

Ironic that I just stopped by the forums to figure out how to tie into the existing scheduler ...

Now to convince the powers that be that they should lift the spending freeze

Thanks!

[AbleMods]

Yeah it's something I've needed badly for a very long time with my sites.

I have a copy of ActiveReports.Net on my site. I'm thinking about adding a few automated sales/affiliate reports as well. Would be nice to have yesterdays sales/affiliate figures in pretty color charts sitting in my Inbox each morning.

So many doors open up, especially if you are a developer. I should be able to create some "hooks" into an empty class file included with the final product. If it works, other developers could add their own functionality for specific triggers.

[Robbie@FireFold]

I like the reports idea. Oh wait I love every idea.

[afm]

I like the reports idea.

You also have access to a very good report writer in Shipper (XtraReports by DevExpress). And all of the sales (order) information is in Shipper, so you can write sales reports, etc. As of 3.1, there is also a built-in "pivot grid" so you can analyze the data in a more ad-hoc manner.

[AbleMods]

Well this weekend has proved very productive. The job scheduler is working extremely well. My fears of runaway-spamming a customer thanking them for their order may have been unwarranted

Order shipments auto-trigger a 7-day one-time email to the appropriate customer for follow-up courtesy and marketing purposes. I made it so the admin can configure the number of days to their preference. I also added an On/Off for people who don't want this particular functionality.

Stock notifications work extremely well. Visitors simply need to be told to register with the site and add the out-of-stock items to their wishlist. Once the system detects a product (or variant!) going from 0 to positive stock level, it fires the scan against the wishlist items for that item. Any matches auto-generate a one-time email notifying the customer with the admin's choice of email template. I even made the email template create a link directly to the product referenced - turned out nice.
I've also added an On/Off so this particular feature can be disabled if necessary.

All 3 feed files were easy. All the parameters are saved when you run them normally through the Able menus. So as long as you've run them manually at least once, you can now schedule them to generate AND upload. Tough to test on my site though, takes a while to run and upload but appears to be working thus far.

General functionality has taken shape nicely. Queue management now allows job deletion and "run now" for any specific job. Also finished debugging the queue pause feature - now you can pause the entire queue processing if necessary. Some debugging features were added so job tracing can be done. It spams the AC7 error log, but very useful in tracking down why something did/didn't fire like it should have. This too can be turned on/off.

The last feature to add will be my most ambitious - "review solicitation with coupon reward". What I'm wanting is a way to automatically encourage customer reviews on the products they have purchased. So the trick will be figuring a way to "land" them to a convenient site page for the given product and ready for review entry. Once the review is received, the customer is assigned a group and given a coupon code for their next order. I'll be exploring this Monday.

So far, I've managed to still keep all of this functionality so that only a single Able file is changed. Everything else is new and separate. That makes implementation super easy especially for modified sites.

[afm]

This is the kind of feature I would expect from very, very high end platforms. Way to go!

[AbleMods]

Well the job scheduler testing this week has gone well so far.

Order follow-ups are scheduling up nicely.

In-stock notifications are working well too. I've attached a screenshot of the email template I've created. Since this works with any email template, you'll be free to design whatever you want to send to your site visitors.

How to make the visitors aware of this new feature is simple - just modify the Out-of-stock store message. Something like "Item is out-of-stock, register with our site and add this item to your Wishlist to be notified when more units arrive." Kinda long, but clear

But the bigger question is how to let people "opt-out" after-the-fact without forcing them back to the store wishlist. I don't really like the idea of not having an opt-out capability.

My first thought is to create a special AC7 mailing list. Then I could just test for membership in the list before sending any emails. Or I could create a landing page that automatically removes the ProductId from their wishlist and link it to a "remove" link in the email template. So far, I'm leaning towards the landing page idea.

Auto-generation of the Sitemap.xml file has stalled. There are some sections in the Able code that don't function without an HTTP context. Technically it's a .Net issue and not Able's - their just using what .Net provides. So for now, I can't auto-generate the sitemap.xml - minor but still a bummer.

I've added a few of my own personal automations that are working nicely as well. One product I sell is a computer-generated calendar of the best time to go fishing or hunting. Since it's a generated email product, there's no reason I couldn't fully automate it. So I did!
Now any Solunar Times orders are automatically captured, filled and marked as shipped by the server - completely hands off. Yeah me

Still thinking through how review solicitation will work, no coding is done yet but should start soon.

I also want to consider adding a way to auto-notify subscription customers about a pending subscription expiration.

scheduler-02.jpg

[Robbie@FireFold]

Looking good!

[AbleMods]

Ok, time for a little fun!

Check out this product page. Notice the new "Notify Me!" button. It only appears if the item is out-of-stock.

http://www.solunar.com/Garmin-GPSMAP-420-P1849.aspx

I like how it works - popup window is even draggable. AJAX is pretty slick when it's not blowing up the browser

Now for some styling - although I kinda like the black....

[Robbie@FireFold]

I like the black too. You can understand why. It matches FireFold out of the box!

Is it possible to get the 'Add to Wishlist' button in the Ajax popup?

[AbleMods]

Is it possible to get the 'Add to Wishlist' button in the Ajax popup?

Try it now....

[Robbie@FireFold]

Very nice. We went ahead and created email templates for ideas we have on the scheduler.

A side thought: It would be cool to have a forum/discussion on 'ways we use Joe's scheduler' when it goes live. I'm sure there's so many things out there that this could be used for to help everyone grow.

[AbleMods]

Let's call it "The Jedi Council" <insert light-saber swoosh>

Oh yeah

[AbleMods]

Well I think I'm going to add a separate log table to keep track of all the activity. My concern is there are some automated functions that fire and conclude pretty quickly - within a minute or so.

If you aren't watching the queue, you don't really know for sure that it even fired. Of course, maybe if I weren't in such a "test" mode right now it wouldn't be that big of deal. But I think it would be nice to go back through and say "Ok, this wishlist item got notified at 5:43pm" etc.

I'm going to try automating sitemap.xml again tonight - having the cold/flu bug this week hasn't helped my programming focus

[WylieE]

You absolutely, completely and totally rock!!!!!!!!!! We'll be looking at this in the future for certain.

[compunerdy]

very cool Joe..

[AbleMods]

Well so far, so good. Got a customer response to one of the automated follow up emails today.

I think I've decided not to add a second table for logging the job activity. The majority of my concern was knowing outbound emails were actually going out. It'll be far more simple to incorporate a BCC for the emails so a site admin gets a copy of each one. That way you'll know it's working as intended and can easily turn the BCC on/off as needed.
The rest of the job activity is logged fairly well to the AC7 error log. Overall this will keep complexity down and make installation that much less effort.

My friend the cold/flu bug has discouraged significant progress over the last week. Fortunately that's over, so I should still be in good shape for a beta release by the end of the month.

Here's a screenshot of my first follow-up customer response....

scheduler-2.jpg

[AbleMods]

Live testing is complete. With the exception of SiteMap generation, everything seems to be working very well.

Integrating my feed builder has proven far more challenging than I expected. I didn't write the feed builder for that level of automation, so it's going to need to be completely redesigned

Otherwise, I'm pleased with the result. A BCC feature is going in this morning so you can see exactly what's getting emailed to the site visitors and when. Once I've finished testing that (shouldn't take very long), I'll start preparing documentation and final DLL files.

On the plus side, all that complaining I did to myself about how Able designed their feed builders just bit me in the nose. If I had done mine like theirs, it'd be a snap to integrate

Now the bigger question is: Do I merge Feed Builder into Job Scheduler as a single product or keep them separate products on AbleMods.com?
Making them separate seems useful for those who don't want the added complexity. But designing both to work either in stand-alone or combined mode will mean some serious programming.

[Robbie@FireFold]

I was hoping for an update from you!

Looking forward to trying this beast out.

One feature I would require if I used automated feed builders would be the ability to assign a number to inventory level. Right now if I generate Google Base I have to edit the feed and 'trick' it into thinking we have stock. We actually do have stock, but don't inventory in the website.

That would make my life nice!

[AbleMods]

ok quick update...

The Good news:
I've decided to include Feed Builder into the Job Scheduler. The pros just outweigh the cons. The result will be fully automated feed generation and upload for all supported formats. Might even sneak in a NexTag format while I'm at it.
I'll also be including full support for saved campaigns. You'll be able to save and load all the settings for a particular feed setup. This allows you to define specific campaigns to always be created a certain way. Handy and required if we're going to be able to schedule them.

The Bad news:
Feed builder has to be completely redesigned. It was never designed for this level of automation. That's what I'm working on now.

Proposed additions:
1. Ability to schedule notification reminders when subscriptions are X days away from expiring. Any suggestions on parameters you'd want would be helpful.

2. Ability to schedule abandoned basket reminders for registered users. I'm thinking one template sent X times every X days and a 2nd template sent as final reminder. Also final reminder would auto-add registered user to a security group so a discount coupon code can be included and limited to just that abandoned basket user.

Obviously this all adds time to the project, but I think it's worth it. Should be a pretty neat module when it's complete.

I'll probably have to look at some sort of opt-out functionality given all the additional messaging going on.

[AbleMods]

Made huge progress during the past few days...

I've finished rewriting feed builder. Google feeds now can be scheduled (one time or recurring) to build AND upload using all the same filters available in my first version. The remaining feeds will be modified and integrated this evening.

I've implemented full campaign support for Feed Builder. Now all settings for a particular feed can be saved to a "campaign". This makes it super-easy to re-run the same feed setup over and over again. It also was necessary so that feed generation could be automated. Automatic upload of the generated feed file is optional, so you can still just build a file and do whatever you want with it after the fact.

Feed builder has been modified to support forcing a quantity for out-of-stock items included in the feed. This will allow those who want to include out-of-stock items in their feed files to do so without fear of zero-quantity products being kicked out by the marketing engine. Especially useful when your site sells customized products and does not track inventory.

I'll be adding automated notification for expiring subscriptions next. This will be difficult to test though since I don't do subscriptions in a live environment.

After that, abandoned basket reminders. Then I'm done and start documentation because I'm wayyy behind schedule on this project.

I got an idea today that might be pretty slick. I *might* be able to write another feature that can send customer notifications whenever their order status changes. Currently you can do this in Able, however you cannot dictate which template to send for which status changes. You can only send the same template for ANY change in status.
What I'm envisioning is a way to be specific - Send Email Template X when Order Status goes from Y to Z. Since it would support multiple logics, you could configure a complete communication cycle for all your order statuses. This would help me a great deal when I begin processing an order and have to put it on backorder. Also would be nice when an order goes from Unpaid to credit review, waiting for response etc. Customer gets notified automatically and I don't get the classic "Why didn't you notify me?" phone calls.
The problem stems with existing AC7 notifications - can't step on those and don't want to duplicate effort. So this idea may not be possible, will have to dig and see.

[AbleMods]

Finally, some REAL progress and functionality for this project. And best of all, new screenshots detailing final settings and management pages for the module.

First, the features:
1. Sitemap generation is off the plate. Too much work right now - the technicals are confusing and I'm just not wrapping my head around it well enough to feel comfortable it will work right. Not that big a deal, but I was kind of hoping it would work out

2. New feature: Subscription reminders. Site admin can now specify up to 4 reminder email templates to be sent at designated intervals prior to subscription expiration. This'll need some more love I'm sure, but the base code seems solid. I'm not all the familiar with selling subscription-based products so some customer input will be necessary to make it better.

3. New feature: Abandoned Basket Reminders. Site admin can specify up to 3 reminder email templates to be sent at designated intervals after a basket is abandoned. On the 3rd reminder, the site admin has the ability to automatically add the registered user to an AC7 group so a coupon code can be offered in the final email template. Obviously this feature requires the abandoned basket to be associated with a registered user or there is no email address to send the reminder(s). If the site visitor returns to the site at any time during the course of the reminder cycle, the reminder cycle automatically discontinues and starts over with the 1st reminder.

4. Page redesigns: All configuration pages have been redesigned and broken up into more manageable pages. All the new configuration choices were making the original page bloated. So now there's one page just for queue and server-side config. A second page handles marketing campaign feed settings. The third page handles all template settings, triggers etc. This breaks things down more logically and makes it easier to manage.

5. Class redesigns: Nobody else will see it to appreciate it but I redesigned all of the data and code classes behind the scenes. The project was getting too large and badly needed reorganized. This will make future modifications and customizations far easier to implement than the previous class design would have permitted.

Pricing has been decided and will be published when the product page goes live on AbleMods.com. I have decided to give my existing Feed Builder customers a discount since this module will completely replace Feed Builder as a product.

That's all for now. I'll be doing heavy testing and then writing documentation. This project is by no means done, but progress sure feels good

The screenshots. First up, the Queue Management page:

scheduler-image1.jpg

Second is the Campaign management page:

scheduler-image2.jpg

And finally, the main configuration page:

scheduler-image3.jpg