Dear Mephheads,
As a lot of you are aware, the website over the past year has been a horror show. Your complaints haven’t fallen on deaf ears, it’s been a ginormous point of stress for all of us.
In early 2019, after almost a year without card processing, another huge point of stress, we found a solution, and this required a new site. With average daily orders at the time numbering between 30-50 the site, although not as pretty as we’d have liked, essentially did the job. However, with the onset of the pandemic and growth of autoflowers popularity in general, traffic and orders were in the region of 10-fold what we were used to, and what the site was capable of.
When we had our openings Cloudflare thought we were under DDoS attack (and on more than one occasion we actually were), so we switched to a dedicated server, upgraded that server several times, changed to another one, all to no avail. The inventory extension couldn’t keep up with the rate items that were being sold, the checkout system was breaking. Basically, over this period, every type of patch and solution available to us was implemented to bolster the site. In the end, the site had evolved into a Frankenstein’s monster of band-aids and workarounds, well beyond our and our developer’s capabilities to solve. Equally or more than you, we were at our wit’s end. One of us lost their hair naturally some time ago, the other has got significantly balder over the 18 months.
Operating Mephisto the way we do, to offer our own direct distribution within different territories isn’t an easy feat, there’s a reason most seed companies use distributors, there’s a whole lot more than what it may appear at face value to get seeds from the farm to your door.
So a few months ago we decided to stop the hamster wheel and start again completely from scratch, bearing in mind those tough lessons learnt along the way. We’ve been working on the new site for several months now, looking to address all the above issues, and provide a nicer browsing and smoother shopping experience.
In brief, what we’ve been up to:
We’ve switched platforms and hosting.
New design and updated branding throughout.
New newsletter platform.
New search function.
Added other custom functions.
Added new payment options.
Added more content for old and new customers to get a better sense of what we’re about.
And also training staff to use the new backend.
We’ve been testing internally for a while now. We think we’ve got all the i’s dotted, and t’s crossed and are at the point where we’d like to invite all the Mephheads to do a dry run to help us over the line. We’ll be doing a soft opening on Monday, so that everyone can hop on and test the site out, and we’ll release more details of that tomorrow. We hope you all can come and be a part of the next chapter in the Mephisto story.
Much love
Mitch, Tim and the rest of the MG Team
As a lot of you are aware, the website over the past year has been a horror show. Your complaints haven’t fallen on deaf ears, it’s been a ginormous point of stress for all of us.
In early 2019, after almost a year without card processing, another huge point of stress, we found a solution, and this required a new site. With average daily orders at the time numbering between 30-50 the site, although not as pretty as we’d have liked, essentially did the job. However, with the onset of the pandemic and growth of autoflowers popularity in general, traffic and orders were in the region of 10-fold what we were used to, and what the site was capable of.
When we had our openings Cloudflare thought we were under DDoS attack (and on more than one occasion we actually were), so we switched to a dedicated server, upgraded that server several times, changed to another one, all to no avail. The inventory extension couldn’t keep up with the rate items that were being sold, the checkout system was breaking. Basically, over this period, every type of patch and solution available to us was implemented to bolster the site. In the end, the site had evolved into a Frankenstein’s monster of band-aids and workarounds, well beyond our and our developer’s capabilities to solve. Equally or more than you, we were at our wit’s end. One of us lost their hair naturally some time ago, the other has got significantly balder over the 18 months.
Operating Mephisto the way we do, to offer our own direct distribution within different territories isn’t an easy feat, there’s a reason most seed companies use distributors, there’s a whole lot more than what it may appear at face value to get seeds from the farm to your door.
So a few months ago we decided to stop the hamster wheel and start again completely from scratch, bearing in mind those tough lessons learnt along the way. We’ve been working on the new site for several months now, looking to address all the above issues, and provide a nicer browsing and smoother shopping experience.
In brief, what we’ve been up to:
We’ve switched platforms and hosting.
New design and updated branding throughout.
New newsletter platform.
New search function.
Added other custom functions.
Added new payment options.
Added more content for old and new customers to get a better sense of what we’re about.
And also training staff to use the new backend.
We’ve been testing internally for a while now. We think we’ve got all the i’s dotted, and t’s crossed and are at the point where we’d like to invite all the Mephheads to do a dry run to help us over the line. We’ll be doing a soft opening on Monday, so that everyone can hop on and test the site out, and we’ll release more details of that tomorrow. We hope you all can come and be a part of the next chapter in the Mephisto story.
Much love
Mitch, Tim and the rest of the MG Team
