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Meetup #17 and Storefront Development Update

News

Written by LunarSpotlight
Monday, 24-Oct-22 21:55:39 UTC


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This week, we had an opportunity for the staff team to chat and invited the community to join us during Meetup #17 on Sunday. We also completed several steps ahead of our new storefront’s release. For more information, read on.

Meetup #17 focused on the idea of delegation where we took some time to look inward and see where each of our staff members are at. With our community, the idea was to see what people think each of us do at the station, what they think we should do, and of course what each staff member wants to do. Part of this was to see if there was any interest in shuffling around roles and doing other things, and part of it was to see what other tasks could be offloaded from Lunar.

If you missed it, the Meetup will be available as a podcast next weekend, but to summarize, we identified a small handful of things that others could do including social media contributions, project development, new content, and more responsibilities station-side.

For the new storefront, we worked through a handful of tasks this week that we were looking to complete ahead of its initial launch. These things include initial population of store items and associated inventory, item images and descriptions, conditional shipping calculation, conditional tax calculation (for VAT/GST), navigation options, and theming. We’ve also talked with a small handful of music circles and will have a starter set of music available for sale when the store launches. We’re already set to increase the number of albums available after launch as well.

On the topic of conditional calculations, the new system identifies items which are fulfilled by us and by our fulfillment partner as separate shipping calculations. This has the effect of representing real costs more accurately. For international users, the price of shipping will be reduced for items fulfilled and distributed by our partner, but a separate VAT/GST line item will be added to reflect the destination country’s rate. In most cases, this will have the net effect of reducing the price of getting most apparel items from our store.

For example, someone living in France who buys a shirt would currently be assessed about $15 for shipping (assuming international rates), but this is currently used as an estimate to cover both shipping and VAT. The new system uses regional shipping rates (say, around $5) and estimates VAT using a table rate of 20% for France, making the total cost of shipping+taxes $10, or $5 less than the current estimate. Items not fulfilled by our partner may still be subject to separate VAT. We hope our international listeners will benefit from this new system.

Finally, Live #121 will be available on podcast platforms shortly, so look for us on your podcast platform of choice (search for “Gensokyo Radio”), and let us know if there’s another platform you’d like to see us on. We’re excited to update our store as soon as we’re able, so stay tuned for more information, and thanks for listening!

[Knowledge #88]



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