I hope!
Back on the 20th of June I wrote the following of our soon (hah) to be ecommerce site:
I can now look forward to its release which is still planned to be in the next few weeks
Unfortunately I didn’t know then what I know now. There have been a lot of reasons why the site hasn’t yet gone live but chief among them is our bank. We want to trade, obviously, but they seem intent on stopping us. Much to the amazement of our developer the bank is insisting on seeing the site live and working before releasing details for access to their API.
Well never having been involved in managing the development of an ecommerce site I have to take the developers word that this is unusual. After all, it isn’t as if we are a new client that has suddenly popped up out of nowhere, or that we have a miniscule turnover and balance on their books. We are, in UK terms and especially in UK Church terms a large business.
So with much reluctance we’ve had to force the pace (in some ways this has been good) and the site is now live’ish. To get to the point where we can send off the paperwork to the bank we’ve had to manually upload details and pictures of 20 products. The day after we did that, even though some of the links are dead or duplicate one another and even though all of our policy documents aren’t in place, we have amazingly taken our first order.
Anyway, I’m going to state that the site itself should be properly up and running by the end of September at the very latest. We still have any number of things to complete, but I am now seeing the end in view and to that end I am happy to publish its URL:
http://www.gatesofpraise.co.uk – do feel free to have a look and please do try and break it if you have a mind to do so. Should you find an issue, and I think I know most of them, then please let me know and we’ll get it seen too soonest.
Oh and one final thing – if any of you know the chap behind “gatesofpraise.com” then please try and persuade him to sell it back to us. We had once but due to a sorry saga I won’t reveal in public we let it go.
