Marco News

Saved Shopping Carts are Back!

by Marco

When we brought up our new system, it was quickly brought to our attention that our new system did not save shopping carts for very long.  This was fixed in Monday night’s update. When you are logged in, your cart is now automatically saved to your profile indefinitely until you clear it or place an order.  We know many of you like to build up carts over time, so the return of this feature should help you on your projects. We have great ideas on enhancing the saved cart functionality in the future, so stay tuned!

 

Where’s My Data?

by Paul

We’ve received an overwhelmingly positive response on the new site. We’re glad to see that our last few years of hard work are beginning to pay of for us and the pinball community.  A few customers have  commented on the lack of some data available on the new system, namely order history and shopping cart data.

We had to make a very difficult call when it came to migrating the order data over to the new system.  We did some extensive analysis and found that rate of usage of order history and shopping cart data wasn’t high enough to justify delaying our system launch by another few months. We hope you feel the same way.

As a mitigation, we are indefinitely keeping our old system online internally.  You may contact us at any time (sales@marcospec.com, or use the contact form) and ask for your records.   We will happily fetch what you need and email it to you.

New Site Features

by Paul

We have been putting in some late nights to bring you tons of new features to make it easier to find and order the parts you need:

Flat Rate Shipping

One of the biggest changes is our move to flat-rate domestic ground shipping.  We are happy to offer $7.99 shipping for Ground orders.  For orders under 3 lbs, we use Priority Mail, FedEx Ground for heavier orders.   We still have our great FedEx Air premium rates and are passing those along to you at a rounded-down rate structure.

Improved Search

We got lots of feedback that our search could use work, so we spent time on optimizing our new search engine to be more useful than ever.  It takes into account game compatibility for searching parts, so now searches like “Addams Family Brackets” or “World Cup Soccer Screws” will yield useful results of parts that fit in your game.

Knowledgebase and Blog

You’re reading this article on our new content platform where we will continue to provide you with news, technical articles, and troubleshooting guides for commonly asked questions.

Paypal Authorization and Capture

Thanks to our extensive integration, we are now able to treat Paypal payments like credit cards – your payment is authorized when you place an order, and funds are not transferred from your account until the order ships.   This makes things much easier if you need to change your order prior to shipping.

International Shipping with iGlobal

We are expanding our great relationship with iGlobal Stores. We have received great feedback on the speed and low cost that iGlobal has provided over traditional international shipping methods.  Our new platform will now allow you to see the order history from your account, but be sure to continue checking out with the iGlobal button once you log in.

My Games

The brand new My Games feature lets you store a list of your most frequently accessed games, so you can bookmark these games for faster access to your parts.

Faster Page Loads

Our new servers are located in a highly secure hosted server facility with over 20 times the bandwidth of our previous site.  For those of you on broadband, you should notice substantial improvements in page load times.

Improved Events Calendar

Since we are involved with so many events around the country, it only makes sense for us to help you keep track of them! We also post holidays when our staff is taking a short rest from processing orders.

Welcome to the New Marco

by Marco

Welcome to the new face of Marco Specialties!  We have been working hard to completely redesign marcospec.com to better serve the needs of the rapidly growing pinball parts industry.  You will notice many new features ranging from our streamlined checkout process to our vastly improved search engine.

Underneath the pretty skin is a brand new, completely integrated enterprise-grade e-Commerce platform, giving you real-time order and stock status on all 30,000+ of our parts.  Our new platform has been customized for the pinball parts business, and our computer system architecture allows the system to grow for years to come.