All we can say on this is that we can’t confirm Whether Branca is one of our customers. From the article:
Early on, Jackson called him and said, “John, we have to talk about something very serious.” Branca grabbed a pen and pad to take notes. Jackson told him, “My pinball machine isn’t working.’
We’re going to speculate that this was the same pinball machine that surfaced on eBay a few years ago. The game itself was a customized Pepsi game based on a Data East Lazer War. At the time, it was one of the early games with speech in it, so they customized it with Michael’s voice. It also had custom side art and a custom backglass as well. This was all done during the MJ/Pepsi era.
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.
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 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.
