[cgutzmer]

Hello all - long time no talk. Maybe its time I get off my lazy butt and get back into things. As many of you have noticed ecardmodels is down. Paypal did a TLS 1.2 update. my site passed all their requirements and tests and looked good to go. However cutover time and payments failed to process. Turns out I need a lot of updates to my base operating system, cart software and other things. Really this never happened in the first place because I am a huge chicken and dont really know how to do a lot of that stuff. I used to hire a guy to help me with some of that but he has long since disappeared... so. Please remember this is a hobby for myself and my staff (mostly) I personally generate very little income from the site, almost all of it goes back to the designers. I basically make enough to cover all the expenses and have a little left over to carry forward. I see two ways of going forward.

1. try to update every darn thing myself and hope I dont break it all so horribly it cant be fixed.
- pro, everything stays the same but with updates
- con, likely a bunch of my post installed plugins will be broken beyond repair, including reporting
- con, I will probably miss updating something that will bite me in the rear at some point
- con, I will still be stuck with a rather inflexible environment
- con, there is no direct upgrade path for almost every piece - I would likely need to upgrade every component at least 3 times
- con, the site will be down for quite some time

2. Throw it all away and start over.
- pro, I can rebuild from the ground up with features we want
- pro, I will have a much better idea of how things work as I will do it myself rather than have someone else do it for me
- pro, every single part will be the latest and greatest
- pro, modernization - when I built this it was to fill a niche. I never expected it to be this big
- con, the site will be down for quite some time while this happens (likely longer than option 1 unless option 1 breaks)
- con, lots of research
- con lots of new design effort
- con cost - likely this effort wont be free
- MAJOR CON - all items in the shop would need to be entered again unless I can salvage from my current legacy DB in some way.


So here is where you all come in.... I am heavily leaning towards option number two.

I want to know what YOU (customers, designers) would like to see in a shop dedicated to your needs. Think of what is out there and what is not. Think about other places you shop and what you love and what you hate.

Here are some ideas that relate to the customer, designers and yes - the staff

designer reports
newsletter built in (could drop mailchimp)
bulk uploads
designer uploads (possibly new section of site)
better comments area
prep for shipping items from ground up
gift cards
improved captcha
auto bundle with price adjustment

I look forward to hearing from you!
Thanks
Chris