Hi all,
So we've got 2 major issues going on with the store right now that we are working hard to fix, but we also don't know how long that will take :(.
The first and biggest is that our search engine is currently very very broken. If you do just about any partial search, or any search for a card with a fairly generic name, you will be met with a page of results that is most commonly 4 Spider-Man cards, followed by pages of Pokémon cards. We've tried: Ulamog, Kozilek, Sensei, Sensei's, top, divining, basic, gate, return, and more and every single search gives the same result. We've confirmed it's a Binderpos issue; we have reached out to them and will be following up frequently until it is solved.
What can you do in the meantime?
Well, firstly, searching for complete names seems to mostly work ~OK. Searching Ulamog, the Infinite Gyre will get you what you want, though with a small pile of irrelevant cards as well; those should be lower down in the search results. These irrelevant cards are also part of the broken search engine issue.
Secondly, take advantage of our Collections. https://magicatwillis.co.nz/collections Our great collection feature is still working without issue, and especially if you are browsing, you can open up one of the collections and then use the filters. For example, if I want to build a monogreen commander but I'm not sure what creatures I want, I could open up the Magic the Gathering Singles collection and then filter by Colour - Green and Type - Creature.
If you know what card you want but the search engine refuses to give you any results, I would suggest searching on either mtgsingles.co.nz or mtgbasket.co.nz . These websites will dig through our database (as well as the databases of the other major stores in New Zealand), and then the link they provide will direct you straight to the card on the website. Basically, use them as a 3rd party search engine.
I know none of these solutions is ideal, but hopefully they help until we can fix our very broken search engine. I'll change the announcement bar at the top of the website to let you know the moment it is fixed.
So now let's get to the other issue. Less significant, but also still very annoying.
The app we use for sorting some of our more complex collections, most notably Latest Restocks, has been experiencing some 502 Bad Gateway errors. This is a problem on their end that they are aware of and are working on. If you are unaware, a 502 Bad Gateway basically means that the app is down and nothing gets updated until it is up again.
At a basic level, this just means that collections won't be updated until the error has passed, usually no more than 12 hours. No worries, we can work with that.
The bigger issue is that if the app is down when we add cards to the website, it will not realize those cards are new and won't be added to the Latest Restocks collection even after the app is back online. The only time we've run into this issue so far is with the 500ish Pauper Cards we added to the store last week. Basically, when we are about to dump a new lot of cards on the store, we must make sure the app is up when we do so. If we do it correctly, you shouldn't notice anything except a delay sometimes in a collection updating.
On the topic of Pauper, we have more Pauper staples in boxes waiting to be added to the store, but searching our bulk for Pauper cards, grading them, sorting them, adding them to the store and putting them away is about the highest Effort Value - Profit margin of anything we have. It takes a long time to do so, and most cards only sell for 60-80cents.
We are happy to do this for the Pauper community if the cards are selling both in frequency and in the number of cards sold at a high enough rate, but if that isn't happening, then our time, sadly, is better spent elsewhere.
That's all for today,
- Rose Willis
