Short Story – If you’re using Internet Explorer 6 to browse our website you will experience problems completing your order. If this is the case, please email us at support@smartpen.com.au or call us on (1300) 305 514 so we can process your order.

We don’t care whether you can or can’t upgrade to a better browser, we’re sorry you experienced issues purchasing from us. We will have support for IE6 in place by 11/4 EST and will continue to support the browser until the end of 2009.  

The Long Story - As with some (or most) things in IT, the smart people (i.e. the geeks) often make development decisions that (in their opinion) at that point in time seem “optimal” given the project constraints.

A really good example of this is a project decision to build the site without support for IE6, despite the fact that Google Analytics is clearly showing this browser (like it or hate it) is used in 27% of visits to our site.

What does this mean?

We screwed up.

We should have built the site with IE 6 in mind but we didn’t and we have probably paid the ultimate price in that we encouraged customers to seek an alternative supplier.

We still have a couple of minor quirks to iron out – namely getting the software to display the sales price consistently and updating some of the images to be better quality – but overall, we’re live and taking Livescribe orders in a more automated fashion.

The team put in some long days to get us to this point and we were really pleased to get some early positive feedback from visitors and customers – specifically the feedback from Rob Vos and Anita Swift.

As we’ve communicated to everyone who’s found us, we’re capturing every single piece of feedback and using this to fine tune how we engage with our customers and also how we ultimately engage with BigAnt and Livescribe as to where the Livescribe Smartpen is going.

What changes are we working on?

1.       On the site, we’re working hard to iron out a really annoying glitch as to how the RRP is displayed. For reasons unknown, the software “might” show a price that is ex-GST, or it “might” show a price that is inc-GST – we’ll have this resolved by the 3^rd November.

2.       Some of the product images are a bit ordinary. We’ll spend some time over the weekend toying with these so that we can display really nice, clear images.

3.       How we account for delivery is still clunky. The software allows us to create a complex formula that “might” generate a more balanced delivery fee charge. This clearly needs more work and more data as to our actual freight charges. We’re probably going to move away from Australia Post due to the limitations as to what we can package and send.

a.       Just so you understand – we treat delivery as cost recovery. But this gets hard  to determine as we have items that are cubically large but light, items that are smaller but much heavier, and some small items that are also light.

I suspect we’ll default to a delivery fee that is blended for the larger and smaller items.

What else will we put on the site?

1.       We’re working to expand the product descriptions so that we can give a better indication of what each product set comprises

2.       We will be updating the FAQ to include some specific content to help Mac users understand how to use the product.

3.       PayPal as a payment option – I was convinced we wouldn’t be asked to accept PayPal but go figure day 2 and someone enquires as to whether they can pay via PayPal…

Your feedback is important. If you have any comments or suggestions please drop us a line or add a comment to this post.

As you’re all no doubt aware, the Australian dollar has been in decline since around April of this year. The following graph gives a good indication of this:

This graph shows the decline of the AUD over the past 90 days - Thanks Uncle Sam

The cost of importing the Livescribe product range has subsequently increased quite dramatically. We’ve worked really hard with BigAnt to get as much stock into the country as possible. However, from 1 November, prices will increase. Check back on the Smartpen website for updated price details.

We still have stocks available of the 2GB pens, A4 notebook packs, ink refills, and A5 journals.