We offer several partnership options to sellers, but the one I’ll talk about here is where we sell their home furnishings directly from furnish.co.uk, just like a marketplace. For example, a customer finds a coffee table on furnish.co.uk from a particular seller, adds it to their basket, checks out and pays, all without visiting the seller’s own website. The seller is notified of this and dispatches the coffee table to the customer. We take a commission on the sale.

A legal minefield
Technically, this is relatively simple. But it’s a legal minefield if done the wrong way. Any business that takes payment for goods becomes accountable under the Sale of Goods Act 1979, Distance Selling Regulations, etc. Several websites such as Not On the Highstreet appear to do precisely this with home furnishings; they take payment from the customer, pay the seller a proportion of this and keep the rest. They then attempt to contract out of their statutory obligations in their terms and conditions, insisting that it is in fact the seller who is liable in the event of problems. However, in my view and that of my solicitor, if this were ever legally challenged, it would fail. Legislation to protect consumers cannot be ousted by private agreement. It’s the equivalent of those shops who put a “No Refunds” sign in the window. The situation is that, like it or not, if a company accepts payment for goods, there’s a whole load of legal baggage that comes with that. In the eye of the law, they’re a retailer and there is nothing they can do to change this.

Paying the seller, not us
The only way to remove legal liability is for the customer not to pay us at all. They must pay the seller, who then quite rightly takes on the legal burden, and we charge the seller our commission afterwards. For this to work transparently, we need to perform some technical magic such that (1) the customer’s user experience of paying feels normal and natural, even though they’re paying the seller rather than us and (2) the whole process is automated, so we don’t need to get involved in manual invoicing and placing orders for home furnishings with sellers. In this way, it feels almost identical to if the customer paid us directly, except we avoid any legal liability. We do this as follows.

Paypal API
Every seller that comes on board must set up a dedicated Paypal account. If, say, a customer buys some modern furniture on furnish.co.uk and checks out, they’re taken to the seller’s Paypal page, not ours. The customer feels comfortable with this, as they just see a Paypal page. Nothing abnormal there. As far as the customer is concerned, their work is now done. But there’s more to the technical process.

The seller’s Paypal account is configured such that furnish.co.uk gets an automatic notification through the Paypal API when a purchase takes place. This information is then automatically processed, the commission due calculated and a tally kept of commission due for each seller. Because we can also automatically monitor payments made to our own Paypal account and by who, we also know when a seller has paid us our commission. So we can calculate the total a seller owes us by taking the commission owed from all sales and subtracting from it the total paid to us. The seller is automatically emailed regularly with the outstanding balance. The email to the seller contains a link that directly opens Paypal on a page ready to transfer the sum owed into the Paypal account of Furnish.co.uk. The seller simply needs to click a confirmation to make the transfer; it couldn’t be easier for them.

In the event the seller doesn’t pay within the allocated time, we have some powerful options available. We could remove the seller from Furnish, thus cutting off their income from any furniture sales on furnish.co.uk, or even contact the customer, so it’s simply not worth it for a seller to act dishonestly. An added beauty is that a seller is welcome to top up their payments to us at any time to avoid any risk of underpayment, just like topping up your mobile phone credit.

Ensuring automatic notifications happen
A flaw in the plan is that a seller *could* secretly switch off the automatic notifications from their Paypal account such that furnish.co.uk thinks that no sales are happening when they actually are. There’s an answer here too, which we’ll be implementing shortly. Every few days or weeks, we’ll automatically make a random payment of just a few pence to each seller’s Paypal account. If their notifications are set up correctly, we’ll be notified of the payment we made and we’ll just reduce the amount owed by that seller by the few pence we transferred. But in the event we don’t get notified of the payment we made, we’ll know that the seller has switched off the automatic notifications, and we can then deal with this accordingly.

I should mention that all of the above functionality is presently in development, but it’s looking good. I’ll let you know how it goes in a future post.

The beta version was launched back in December last year (2008) and since then the software has shed it’s beta label (July ’09) and evolved rapidly, boasting a number of great features and reasons to use Clear Books.

The aim of this revamp was to standardise the page styles throughout and help clarify to new users exactly what Clear Books is and the services that are available, as well as including help and information for existing users.

Although no new content has really been introduced in this version, a number of previously hidden features have been made easily accessible. This includes the Partners and Business Directories and the VAT Calculator.

The re-launch coincides with completing the 100 paying users achievement and use of the new company slogan, “Free Your Time”.

All of those involved are really pleased at reaching this milestone, but we’re not quite there yet. Next on the list is to carry out a similar procedure on the accounts system itself (internal pages).

Displayed below are a couple of the pages which have been dramatically transformed to give you an idea of what things were  like previously and how they are now.

There hasn’t been much on the feedback side so far, but if you like what you see and are interested in using an online accounting product then head over to Clear Books now to find out more.

FuTube is a free to use flv video player that simplifies the user interface of YouTube videos, removing the bulky default look and replacing it with something a little more elegant.

We are now pleased to announce that the first version is almost complete, allowing us to demonstrate and publish what we have done so far. Here is an example of how the player looks with no customisation:

There are a number of options that can be modified, including but not limited to the primary colour, introductory text, text position and the default image.

Here’s an example with some customisations added, including a replaced default image:

If you would like to use the FuTube player on your own site, take a look at our documentation describing the different methods of embedding the player.

We have also put together a WordPress Plugin to simplify things for all you WP users. This plugin also includes functionality that allows you to include videos with the standard look and feel of YouTube.

Flying is an increasingly popular method of transport and often the fastest and even cheapest way to get abroad. This inevitably involves visiting airports around the UK which can be pretty confusing places sometimes and even for frequent fliers there tend to be a lot of rules and regulations that must be adhered to, along with changes in flight times which it’s good to keep up to speed on before setting off for the airport!

We set up our Airport Guides years ago, but gave them a fresh new look last year, which has proven to be very popular so far. We have not stopped working on them since though, and have recently worked hard to get the transportation section up to date and give it a fresh new look to make sure everyone can find what they are looking for.

There are 23 UK Airport Guides which we run so getting the new layout and content live on all of them will take a while longer, but here’s a sneak preview of things to come with the rest of them from the now live Gatwick airport transport page.

Transport to and from Gatwick Airport

The transport pages now cover many different methods to help you get to and from the airports. Gatwick Airport for example, has links from trains, coaches, and buses as well as being easily accessible by car. The transport you choose is going to be based on many factors, so we have made sure we have thoroughly looked into each area of travel into and out of the airports and found the benefits and drawbacks applying across them all, to help you make the best decision to suit your needs. Take a look at the latest offers from our travel providers to make sure you are getting the best deal possible.

In addition to this page we will be creating dedicated pages for each transport provider telling you all about what you can expect from them, and the special deals available from that provider. These pages will also include things like routes offered and possibly booking engines to make booking easier.These are coming soon, so keep an eye out!

Special offers applying at the moment include no booking fee for all online bookings of a National Express coach. The opportunity to save up to 43% on train tickets and savings of up to 78% on your airport parking through us! We have also added a Google map to help you familiarise yourself with the location of the airports and plan your car journey.

Let us know what you think of the new design, and I will keep you updated on new additions to the Airport Guides as we go!

Part of this process involved creating a number of simple icons for the video controls (replay, play, pause etc) which we have decided to share with you in .psd format – download them now for free…

Download Icon Set (.psd)

The Flash YouFuTube interface is now nearing completion, so I’ll be posting more details on that and how you can integrate it into your own site very soon!

Now in partnership with Apex we are setting up a games illustration service. No job is too tough and for a fee we will draw anything you need or even redesign your site from scratch.

Many developers don’t have the time or the resources to create their own artwork and Apex has over 2,000 web games that could take advantage of this service.

At the moment we are charging clients on the basis of how much time it takes to create an image. Some graphics like the plot above may take up to a week to design, whilst smaller images such as the ones I’ve designed for our first client can take a couple of hours for a whole set.

Were hoping this will be a very useful service that will bring attention to both apex and Fubra in the future.

For more information or to get a quote click here for more information.

I felt the logo, which had become outdated, needed a good makeover to make it fresher and younger. I have attached a few quick sketches I produced while coming up with the new Fubra logo design. The sketch attached is the one I made my main breakthrough on. I branched off with many ideas, totally recreating the logo in many different shapes and colours. I eventually found our default colours to be most recognisable with Fubra.

After lots of experimenting I returned to the original logo and in the end came to like the painted sketched look that can be seen at the bottom right of the sketch. I tweaked this a little until I was happy with it and created a vector version finishing it off. I would love to know what you think.