The main changes have now been implemented for around 12 weeks and we would like to take this opportunity to provide you with some updates around where we’re at, and what we’re working on.
Implementation of Stripe
As we mentioned in our last communication, we have moved to a new payment system. Stripe is a widely used payment service and, as we understand, is familiar to some of our authors who use it on their own platforms. The implementation of the new payment service has allowed us to provide additional security for transactions and increased protection against fraudulent activity.
The move to Stripe has been successful and was implemented without any interruption to our users purchasing resources.
As a reminder, author royalty payments are not made through Stripe and will continue as usual.
Resource display page (RDP) redesign
The new RDP page has now been implemented and we have seen a positive response to the changes made. The page has been designed to load faster and direct users more efficiently to purchase and download.
The new layout benefits from static file previews to protect your work from Intellectual Property infringement and a roaming ‘Buy Now’ button to encourage your potential customers to proceed to purchase/download.
Early indications are that users viewing your resources are more likely to proceed to purchase and download. This is fantastic news for authors and should indicate a positive uplift in sales and downloads for many of you.
Resource reviews
The implementation of the new RDP meant that users were temporarily unable to leave reviews directly on the page, authors were unable to respond to reviews directly on the page and responses to reviews were not displayed. This has now been resolved and functionality has resumed.
This was anticipated as part of the work being completed and we were confident that your customers would still be able to leave a review via their downloads page. The Customer Services team were fully equipped to deal with any technical issues and, where needed, liaise with authors for any customer queries.
Author dashboard
There were a number of planned changes to the author dashboard, all of which have now been successfully implemented.
The ‘Your balances’ section has seen the most notable change, with a withdrawal history now being made available to you. This currently shows your last ten withdrawal attempts and we are investigating the possibilities of extending this. These figures are being updated every two hours and a timestamp lets you know when this was last completed.
Further important changes were made to the Sales page; this now updates daily at approximately 23:59 GMT.
We appreciate that a number of features on the dashboard have been unavailable for some time now and can understand how frustrating this is. Unfortunately, we are not able to give a timeline for when the features will be back up and running. All information is still being recorded and please be assured that all of your sales are being attributed correctly and your tiers will alter monthly as is normal practice. Our engineers are working hard to find resolutions to the maintenance issues and as soon as we have a further update we will, of course, share this.
As a business, we understand that our authors all have different views on what information is important to them and their goals. Our aim is to ensure that we are providing you with useful and relevant information, in a format most suited to you. With this in mind, we would love to hear from you about what you want to see. We hope you can appreciate that with over 70,000 authors currently using Tes, we cannot guarantee that all suggestions can be implemented but we are always looking at how we can improve the platform for all of our users.
Please click the button below if you would like to participate; this should take no longer than 5 minutes.
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Behind the scenes
Some of the other changes that have been made have been less visible to our full author audience. We hope that sharing these will enable you to see what work is going on in the background to support your success on the platform.
We are currently completing analysis work on the platform and the performance of resources. In doing so, we have removed a number of resources that are no longer supported (for example, Flashplayer) or have been found to be faulty. We are still quite early in this analysis work and we will be continuing to work through this, and work with relevant authors. In doing so, we anticipate that the remaining content on the website should be more accessible and relevant to your audience.
We would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your ongoing support and patience during these changes and we hope to provide further updates in the coming weeks. As always, if you have any questions, please contact our Customer Services team on authors@tes.com who will be happy to assist.