OnYourMark, LLC Blog

Dear OnYourMark Ecommerce Client,

If you are a wholesale only or do not charge sales tax to your customers, you can disregard this post.

We received notice from the state of Wisconsin that beginning April 1, 2010, the 0.5% county sales tax will be in effect in Fond du Lac County.

This means that Wisconsin retailers must now charge an additional 0.5% sales tax on goods and services delivered to Fond du Lac County

Information about the increase can be found on the the Wisconsin Department of Revenue Sales and Use Tax Report Dated December 2009.
A link to the bulletin is below:

http://www.revenue.wi.gov/ise/sales/09-5.pdf

Because of this increase in sales tax we will need to adjust the programming for sales tax calculations made on your site. The adjustment will increase the amount charged to the zip codes in Fond du Lac county.
It will take 30 minutes to program the update on your store for the new sales tax rate and test. We will be making the updates early in the day on April 1. Please Note: Any sales to Fond du Lac county prior to when we make the change will not reflect the correct sales tax.

We will be sending an invoice with your April hosting invoice to reflect the time to update your store with the new sales tax rates.

If you have any questions, please give me a call.

Regards,

Ellen—

Ellen M. Rohr, Operations Manager
www.OnYourMark.com
22603 West Main Street
Sussex, WI 53089
Ph. 262-820-8201
Fax: 262-820-8202
Call Toll Free:800-747-3399

Dear Client,

Throughout the day today our clients have been experiencing brief intermittent service disruptions. We promptly investigated the issues and we could find no problems with our equipment.

We then reported the problem with our upstream provider. Within a short period they called back and reported that they are having problems with the core routers. What this means is the problem is due to something outside of our control. Our service providers are looking into the problem and hope to have a solution soon. They did not give an estimate time, because they are unsure what the exact problem is.

We apologize for any inconvenience.

Update: The routing issues have been resolved.

On Friday, January 22, 2010 we will be performing an upgrade of the client blogs system. Please refrain from posting content on your blog until the upgrade is complete. We will post an update here once the upgrades have been completed.

We’re adding all of our clients to http://www.Twitter.com

I called annd spoke with a half-dozen clients about the plan to add all of our clients to Twitter.  The reaction, “Great – as long as I don’t have to do anything!”

You don’t have to do anything.  We’ll post for you occasionally.  However, if you do want to post, we’ll give you access to your Twitter account anytime.

The chief reasons for adding a Twtter account for your business:

# 1 Google is indexing Twitter in near-real-time.  This gives you an additional back-link to your web presence, increasing your link popularity.  Content for your Twitter account should be relevant to your business, making this a relevant link to you.  Link popularity and link relevance help increase your ranking results for search.

# 2 Just like blogs (Twitter is, afer all, a micro-blog) new search technologies will emerge to capitalize on this market – and we want you to have market share.  Some complimentary technologies are already here and we’ll be telling you more about what we’re doing for you on those soon, too.

# 3 Defense.  We want you to have a name that makes sense for your business – before they’re all gone!

# 4 It’s the future.  If you don’t believe me, just ask me.

Your suggestions and questions are welcome.  We’ll update you individually on your Twitter “handle” – the address at which you’re located on Twitter.

Client examples include:

http://twitter.com/oldworldbuilder

http://twitter.com/dellstimberland

Thank you for the opportunity to be of service.  More to come.

Regards,
Keith Klein & the Associates at OnYourMark

We will be performing rolling updates tonight, December 11, 2009 at 7:45PM, for all servers to complete normal maintenance. The downtime is expected to be minimal (approximately one minute per server). If you have any questions, please contact us at support@onyourmark.com.

OnYourMark, LLC makes it easy for you to pay invoices.

Mailed, Faxed or Emailed Invoices

Receive your invoice in the method most convenient for you. Let us know what works best – regular mail, fax or email.

Pay with Cash, Check or Credit

We accept cash, check or credit card payments. We can schedule auto-payments on your credit card. Pay online at OnYourMark.com/payment.php.

Make Payment Arrangements

If you need to make special payment arrangements, please contact us as soon as possible. We will work with you to create a payment plan.

We’ve seen several crafty spam emails this week posing as “Tech Support” or “Systems Administrator” that ask the recipient to download files. One email claims that a server upgrade has taken place and the user needs to download a patch. Another states that email security settings were changed and provides a link to “upgrade settings.”

Emails asking you to download patches for server upgrades or new email settings are spam! These emails are not from OnYourMark, LLC. If you receive an email with a link asking you to download patches, do not click on the link! The file you are being asked to download is a virus!

How can you tell if these emails are spam?

• OnYourMark, LLC will never email links to download a patch when we upgrade our servers, or email links to download new settings if we update your emails.
• Any messages OnYourMark, LLC sends regarding servers or email accounts will include full contact information and staff names, not generic signatures like “Regards, Technical Support.”
• Check the URL of the link. It may contain “onyourmark.com” but link to a malicious website (i.e. http://patch.onyourmark.com.somethingelse.com).
• The “From” address may contain “onyourmark.com” but is not from OnYourMark, LLC at all. This is called spoofing – changing the header of an email so it appears to be from another sender, not the message originator.
• Your email program may tell you that the email is a scam. Spammers are trying to get around this by putting text in the email claiming it has been virus tested (i.e. No viruses detected. Zillya! Antivirus). Don’t rely on the text of a message to tell you if it is spam or not.

Similar messages with malicious links are being sent with Facebook or FDIC logos and emails.  These are also scams.

If you are still unsure about a message you have received, please call us at 262-820-8202 (or toll free, 800-747-3399). We are happy to help!

Dear Clients,

We apologize for the delay in receiving email this morning.

It was reported to us this morning that incoming email was not being received.  In doing investigation we found that our spam filtering service provider Postini apparently was having trouble with email delivery.  We checked the server connection rate and it was well within reasonable levels, but when we checked the connection rate reported to us by Postini, it was much higher. We have been working with Postini and the problem should now be resolved.

There is a backlog of mail on their end that needs to be delivered and it should arrive over the next hour.

For the clients that use OnYourMark SMTP servers, beginning on August 15, 2009 the outgoing email server address will change from mail.samplenamehere.com to smtp.samplenamehere.com (replacing samplenamehere.com with your domain name). Many clients have already made the change but for those that haven’t now’s the time! The reason for this change is growth; we want to prevent a situation where are email servers are overloaded! This also gives us further separation of services to mitigate any potential problems that could arise and make further growth easier.

When you change the settings, there should be no lapse in service. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.

Yesterday, at approximately 3:00pm CST it appears that our database cluster experienced a very heavy load from a Denial of Service (DoS) attack. This caused some services to become slow or unresponsive for a short period of time. We had the problem diagnosed and amended by 4:00pm CST.

Although we don’t know the exact cause yet, we believe it may have been a failed attempt to breech the  security of that server cluster.

We are going to be taking steps in the upcoming days and weeks to further tighten website security, as well as database resiliency to ensure this does not happen again. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.  We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.