We've had two recent issues:

We've fixed these issues. Now we have zero downtime deployments again. We migrated to a new server about a year ago, which came with the loss of zero downtime deployments. We've worked around it for this long, but it became a big enough problem for Bookhead users and ourselves that we've solved this problem.

We also released a fix that addressed the second issue with slow requests, which was unrelated to the deployments. This was an engineering optimization we needed to make.

We have a website that monitors our systems and alerts us whenever there is an outage. It also gives a general status of our services. If you are ever experiencing an issue where you can't access Bookhead, then the best place to check for updates is our status page:

If you see all the red in the recent days, those were the problem days! It's kind of like your bookstore's internet going down like 1-2 times a day while your store is open. It looks like the service is down those entire days, but a day will become red even if it's down for 5 minutes. Our reliability stats are better than some of the software companies that are large corporations. We feel like we are doing a good job at it! But can always do better.

This is exciting!!! I'm so excited that all I can write about is the excitement. We will soon list all the things you can do with this in our documentation, but TLDR: manage your bookstore events in Bookhead, and publish the event information everywhere: on your website, use the RSS feed to connect with your choice of marketing email software or Canva designs, etc.

Related to this issue: https://bookhead.canny.io/feature-requests/p/events-management

This feature is finally ready for general use! It's been on our todo list for almost 4 years now and it's satisfying to publicize.

There are two parts:

Bookhead syncs your local inventory to your website, but what happens when you don't have the title on hand? With Bookhead, a customer can search your Shopify inventory, and if the title isn't on hand, the search will fallback to Ingram's catalog, allowing you to sell their 13+ million titles available from the distribution centers. We don't create all 13 million titles on your website because that doesn't help your SEO (in our opinion) and also nobody is buying all those titles anyway -- it's a waste to have all that on your website.

Bookhead can use Ingram's bibliographic metadata to create rich product listings. In Shopify, we create author pages if an author in your inventory has more than two titles on hand to help your SEO. The metadata is also structured in a way on your Shopify store so you can create richer content.

With Bookhead's new special order widget, this is no longer a problem. Note that this only works for Shopify now, but we are working on a widget for Squarespace and Wix, as well.

This is a Bookhead Connect-tier feature. Contact support@bookhead.net if you want to upgrade your account.

Not a Bookhead user but want to try it out? Sign up here.

We are making our data platform API available for use to paying Bookhead customers. This feature is in beta. If your store is interested in being the first to try this out, email sam@bookhead.net.

This has long been the dream, and today is a big day in getting there!

We use these APIs for our own software, and now we are sharing these APIs so that booksellers can hire developers to build apps on top of their data. For now, the APIs are read-only, but in the future, the APIs will be writeable.

What does this mean? See our blog about this at a high level.

We will share more in our docs, but for now, here is what these APIs can do.

You get read access to your store's own data as clean data:

With this, you get an API key you control. You can scope the key to exactly what you choose to share. Hand your developer a key that reads your catalog and lists but not your orders, or grant everything. Revoke it anytime. A key can only ever see your store's data.

The APIs are read-only, for now. Writing data back, like adding listings or syncing orders, is on the roadmap.

These are the same APIs we build on. This is what our own software uses, too, including the Bookhead app for Canva. Now you can build on it too.

There are a lot of ways you could use this data. You can connect your inventory and then use Bookhead to connect to other platforms that we aren't integrated with. Or maybe you don't like how we integrate with the platforms, so you can use these APIs to do it your own way.

It's now possible to setup a Bookhead account and start syncing from your point of sale onto your website, immediately: https://signup.bookhead.net

This experimental feature automates the category management for Squarespace categories. Keeping categories up to date across Bookhead and Squarespace has been an ongoing pain point due to Squarespace's API limitations. This feature is an attempt to automate this (and closes out this feature request)

We want to test it out with a couple of stores, so if you are willing to beta test this, then email us at support@bookhead.net.

We built an automated process that regularly checks your live storefront against your inventory in Bookhead and flags discrepancies. When it finds something off, it reports back to us so we can fix it.

Squarespace "book lists" are built from product tags. Now, when a book goes out of stock, Bookhead removes the title from those lists so your curated lists (staff picks, new arrivals, etc.) only show what's actually on hand, then adds it back when you restock. (Technically, Bookhead removes the tag from the product -- taking it out of the book list on your website -- and sets the product as unlisted so it's not viewable in the storefront. It will still exist as a product in Squarespace and in the Bookhead book list).

FYI: any lists you've built directly in Squarespace aren't managed by Bookhead, so those we leave alone.

Related to this feature request.

When a book sells out, Bookhead can now hide it from your Squarespace store instead of leaving it up as "sold out." The product isn't deleted so when you restock, it comes back on its own. This is a per-store setting right now, so let us know if you'd like it turned on for your shop.

This is a temporary solution related to this feature request.

Bookhead can sync non-book items (like merch and sidelines -- any product without an ISBN) to Squarespace or Shopify.

This works with Booklog and IBID. It's untested with iMRCHNT.

We currently don't support image upload for non-book items, so you'll need to continue uploading the product images to the sales channel platform. If you are interested in a Bookhead-based image management interface, then let us know in this feature request: https://bookhead.canny.io/feature-requests/p/manage-non-book-product-images-in-bookhead-staff-interface

This feature includes some logic that links your existing products with these items, so please let us know if you encounter unlinked products!