Hello Bitcoiners!

We have to first off thank you for all the support you've given us and I doubt I'll ever be able to start off any announcements without mentioning how much we appreciate our customers. We spent a great weekend in San Jose last month meeting you guys face to face and I have to say that few companies have quite the loyal and generous customers that we do.

And I'm also coming to you with a bit of sad news, fixing our search function is harder than we expected. We knew it would be hard, but the tweaks we've been able to add have only made a bit of a difference.

But I had a thought about that... The Bitcoin community has never sat down and waited for something to happen. Most of the major institutions in Bitcoin were created by Bitcoiners. Nearly everyone in the community contributes in some way, whether it is a member of the Dev Team or a poster on this forum, everyone has contributed in some way.

So, the world presented us with a broken banking system and we made our own; what if I present you with an API to BitcoinStore's catalog, and request a better way to search?

Here's the end goal: provide some workaround that will allow our customers to better find what they're looking for, that will work for a couple of months until we can really fix our search on our site (to do so will probably require coding a custom search function.)

I have been presented already with a couple ideas to do this:

• A Firefox/Chrome plugin that shows up on NewEgg or Amazon when they have a BitcoinStore product.
• An offsite web-app that provides clearer/simpler search
• Or perhaps some other idea

Anyways, here's our API: https://www.bitcoinstore.com/api/rest/products
(add ?page=X to see page X)

I'm thinking people will be able to pull from there to create a database that they can use to do search functions on. Simply updating the catalog every couple of hours should allow the sites to see any changes in availability.

Please let me know if anyone needs additional features or information on the API. I don't think you can place orders through the API yet (probably due to security issues), but I'm sure we'll be able to clear some sites to do so in the future.

Furthermore, if someone provides a beautiful workaround using the API, I will be more than happy to toss a couple bitcoins your way. This is by no means a contest, but I'm happy to provide a financial reward.

Thank you so much for your support, and I look forward to the responses on this thread!

-Jon

We're looking into it internally.

At this point, don't get too hopeful, but personally (while I don't hold any litecoins!) I think that anything we can do to advance any crypto-currency is a good thing.

This is going to take a while to decide on, but I'll keep you guys updated. Even if we decide not to accept LTC, I can think of a couple ways we can help the Litecoin merchant economy grow.

Cheers,
-Jon

I haven't seen anything from you on those other accounts.

We have been busy at Bitcoin2013, so I apologize about the delay.

Anyways, we do not focus much on international shipping yet. It is too costly for our customers, we want to provide the best service for our customers, which means only-US so far. We are looking for more suppliers abroad though!

Update:

Hello,
Unfortunately we have received too many orders to process them all at the speed you guys are used to. We are currently experiencing a processing time of 48hrs at the moment.

We are scaling up our processing team to expedite all current and future orders.

Furthermore, we are receiving too many international orders to process them all. We do not want to provide a service you pay for, then fail to deliver. For this reason, we're turning off international shipping for the time being. It is a huge bottleneck for our order system. We have a lot of international customers and we do not want to shut them out, but at the same time we do no feel comfortable giving them anything less than stellar service.

Feel free to continue placing orders domestically, there only will be the slight delay of 24hrs or so on any additional orders. We are working tirelessly to fix the issues we're having.

So, in summary, international shipping is turned off until we can hire more staff and all orders are slightly delayed right now. Because of the actions we are taking, any further order delays are unlikely and we should get back to same day processing soon. Keeping our reputation clean and our service smooth is important to us, please let us know if there is anything else we can do. (I promise you we're working on the search function).

-Jon Holmquist
https://bitcoinstore.com

We'll be adding a couple decimal places in soon!

Was the item backordered?

We're working on better communicating that when customers shopping.

I have 720x90 / 728 x 90 / 125x125 / 468x60 / and other sizes upon request.

Looking to place banner ads, I can also do text ads as well.

Please respond if you're interested. I pay well... and in BTC!

I take PMs as well

Cheers,
-Jon

3@3

We're working on adding more images and better descriptions. I don't know if we can start sending our traffic to Amazon, but it's a nice idea!

I'm looking for Bitcoin-related sites with mainly US-Based traffic.

Please send me a PM and we can decide on rates.

I'll be using the Bitcoin ad networks as well. But for any people who prefer to do manual deals, please send me a PM!

Cheers,
-Jon

You can't put a price on security

Everything is at a wholesale price for any level of order.

Cheers,
-Jon

Yessir, you'll also be able to measure it by how frantic our posts become!

We've made a decent number of sales prior to this month, but we'll need to really push it to hit our quota.

I'll check. It should be indexing the brand very high on the search.

We're using BitPay's rate last I checked. They pull it from multiple exchanges, which causes the deviation from Mt. Gox's. It also might be slightly lagging behind.

We're still tweaking the search algorithm. Can you tell me the search term you used and what the results were?

Thanks,
-Jon

http://BitcoinStore.com

---

Hello!

We've officially launched out of beta. Take a look at our site, try out the new search, and check out the new prices. They're even lower than the beta period. We've launched for this first month with 0% margins because we need your help. We need to make $800,000 worth of orders in order to continue to qualify for our supplier contract.

BitcoinStore was created in order to apply pressure to big online retail store like Amazon and NewEgg. We need your help in order to do this. Please order something (I assure you that you can find something you need in our massive catalog) and help us show Amazon and NewEgg that Bitcoin can save consumers a bucketload of money. If we can get big enough and start pulling consumers away from them, they'll have no other option than to accept Bitcoin.

Here's an article below with more info, thank you for all the community support so far, we'll be announcing a couple more things this week!

http://bitcoinmagazine.com/bitcoinstore-formally-launching-today-0-markup/

Thanks,
-Jon

Hello,

Shipping is pretty fast. Packages are shipped from different warehouses around the U.S. Depending on the size of your order we might be able to provide something.  Delivery time should be around 2-3 days.

Thanks,
-Jon

We won't be sharing any more customer data. (Unless demanded by law enforcement).

After this whole debacle I don't think we'll be attempting to publicly shame anyone else.

It was a small amount, with mistakes on both sides.

At this point Blockchain.info is entirely removed from this situation.

We're doing our best to regain trust at Bitcoin Store, please do not discount us solely on this mishandling.

Thank you,
-Jon