Kim Komando, America’s Digital Goddess, made ServiceBeacon her Cool Site of the Day today. Wow, we are thrilled! We had some heads up and have tried to make the system scale to support the traffic and so far so good from what we can tell. If you have any issues, definitely let us know. Also, if you have any support questions or any issues, definitely let us know by using the contact forms either on the public site if you have not yet signed up or within the application if you are already a registered user.

Thanks!

SB

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This is a pretty common question. We actually have another blog post that at least in part addresses this question but in case you missed it, here is the answer. We preloaded around 15,000 car dealerships into ServiceBeacon but that means we still missed quite a few of them. If you cant find your dealer, it is not a problem. You’ll notice that at the bottom of the car dealership selection form there is a checkbox titled “I can’t find my dealer”. Check that box and you will get a blank form. Enter you dealer’s information and you are all set. Note that the same feature exists if you ever need to change your dealer — you will find a button called “Change Dealer” at the bottom of “Manage my Cars” where you can change your dealership which includes changing it to a dealership we may not yet have in the system.

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This is probably the number one question we’ve gotten so far. Our plan is to add an extra feature so that if your car isn’t new (and most aren’t), you can take all your existing service invoices out of your glove compartment and enter them into ServiceBeacon. For now, if you want to enter all your service history items, the easiest way to do it is to setup your car with something like 100 miles/km and then start entering your old service as orders one at a time and immediately closing out each order before moving on to the next.

So as an example, if your car has 50,000 miles on it and you have taken your car in for service 10 times, set up your car with 100 miles. Then go to “Create Service Order” which can be found as an option under “My Service”. Update your mileage to the mileage of the first appointment you want to enter. Select the service items that were performed during your first appointment. In step 2, enter the information for the service provider who performed the service along with the date the service was performed. Add any extra non-maintenance items that were performed. Create the order. Once you create the order you’ll be taken to an order management screen where you can immediately close out the order. Close it out. Now start over with the second service appointment details. Rinse and repeat until you have completely caught up.

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We’ve had a lot of good questions from users over the last little while and we thought it would be useful to other users if we post them for everyone.  We are going to break them up into separate posts just to keep them all separate. If you have any questions about any of the posts feel free to submit a comment.

SB

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This coming Tuesday we are being featured as the Site of the Day on a very popular technology program. Okay, it’s a little bit more popular than just “very”. It’s actually enormously popular. We’ve been warned to expect massive traffic. We’re making preparations so hopefully all services will be available throughout the day but if you are an existing user and come to the site and find it is slow, at least you hopefully know why. We are trying to confirm if we are allowed to say in advance which program is giving us this honor and if we get the thumbs up, we’ll announce it.

If you are interested, check in on Tuesday to see how we are holding up. We are already stocking up on Jolt and donuts in anticipation of a long day and night supporting new users

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Hello Everyone,

Well, time for a little maintenance on the application.  In order to do what we need to do to keep the site humming, we are going to shut off  logins and sign-ups for a couple of hours.  The shutdown is scheduled to occur on Thursday, November 8th, between 4:30am and 6:30am EST.

On a lighter note (if you have made it this far down the post), we really have had amazing feedback and ideas from tons of users this week.  Please keep the ideas coming!

In addition, we’ve had some users help us debug some issues we had not previously encountered.  Thank you for helping make the system work better for everyone!

SB

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First off, thanks again to everyone who has signed up since yesterday. The one day (now into day 2) traffic on the site as well as the sign-ups have surpassed even our wildest expectations. In case anyone is wondering, a new car is being added, on average, every 45 seconds. Pretty incredible.

Second, thanks again to all the sites that are referring traffic to us - 53 sites are currently sending traffic our way. We can’t thank you enough!

Third, we have had a ton of emails and a few comments on the blog. We are working to respond to each and every one of you. If you are waiting for us to get back to you and cannot wait any longer, email again. That will get our attention for sure.

If you are waiting for an answer on a problem/issue: We are working through each and every one of them. In the mean time, here are some of the more common questions/issues:

1. I am using Safari and something is not working and I cant register/login! We know. We have an issue and need to fix it. Mostly every other browser works great but Safari is chewing up part of what gets sent to our servers for processing. This is a big priority and we are working on fixing it. The other issue (less serious) is Safari has a way of screwing around with some of the page layouts. This doesnt affect your ability to use ServiceBeacon but it does make it look a little wonky.

2. I am in Europe/AsiaPac: Do you have my car? The answer is “Maybe”. The schedules we get are North American centric. That doesnt mean we wont have your schedule but it does definitely reduce the likelihood. Overtime this may change but for now it is definitely the case.
3. Dealership maps: Google maps was sometimes bombing if a user picked/created a dealership very far from their home address (our fault, not Google’s) - we fixed this, we think. Again, nothing to do with Google.

Anyhow, those are the biggies for now on the user question side. We’ve gotten quite a few unique questions and suggestions as well and we are going to do a post to list them out and elicit some feedback and maybe get some new ones as well.

Thanks again,

SB

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We think we finally got most issues sorted out.  If you are experiencing an issue, it is likely an email issue as that seems to be the primary culprit right now.  MediaTemple, our hosting providers, are superstars and got our bandwidth issue resolved and we adjusted the server to accommodate most processes.  Signups work, logins are working, etc… So if you are having any issues, please let us know and we will work to resolve them ASAP.

SB

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As you probably see from some of the posts below, we have had lots and lots of visitors and signups today. We just want to say thanks to all the sites that were kind enough to say something nice about us and we really appreciate it!

Some of the sites that linked to us/wrote a post include:

• dumblittleman.com
  
• lifehacker.com
• digg
• killerstartups.com

At the same time, we want to thank you, our web-visitor, for checking out our site and hopefully trying out ServiceBeacon. If you have had any issues either signing up, logging in, getting an email you were expecting, or anything else that may be a problem, please let us know.
Thanks!

SB

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Well, if you made it to our blog today, congrats!  In fact, our whole site has been kinda slow.  Why?  We got some nice things said about us on two great websites (in addition to the ones from yesterday) and are currently getting absolutely bombarded by visits.  So if you are experiencing a super slow response time, we know and are REALLY sorry and are working on getting it resolved with our bandwidth provider ASAP.

SB

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