New Features: Bookstore and Credit Card Processing!

We're pleased to announce the release of a whole new section of Populi: the Bookstore. And hand-in-hand with Bookstore: Credit Card Processing!

Bookstore gives you all the tools to run your college bookstore, online and at the counter. Anyone can shop at your online storefront;
students can also link to it from their course reading lists. Promote your featured items and generate Buy Now links that you can integrate with your other websites. On the back-end side of things, you can customize  your categories, manage inventory, process orders, and check sales reports. The incredibly simple Point of Sale interface can run off a USB barcode scanner and credit card reader. All your sales get plugged right in to Populi Financial, with the ability to split out sales, shipping, and tax among your different accounts. And students can charge their Bookstore purchases to their regular Populi Financial accounts.

Before you can use your Bookstore, you'll need to take care of the settings (we walk you through those in the help desk). To get started on that, go to https://yourcollegename.
populiweb.com/bookstore
and click on Admin. Once it's all set up, all of your users will be able to navigate to it directly just by clicking the Bookstore link.

Meanwhile, you can get a feel for the working product with the Demo Bookstore. This shows you what the customer sees; if you have a login to the Demo site, you can poke around the Admin features and Point of Sale.

Of course, Bookstore wouldn't go very far without credit card processing. Populi directly integrates with Chase Paymentech merchant accounts, so your students can pay tuition and fees online and your Bookstore customers can pay by plastic. The revenue gets directly plugged in to your chart of accounts. Set up a merchant account, give us the info, and you're good to go. We've got a pretty great deal set up with Chase Paymentech: it skirts the setup fees and other junk you hate (we sure hate that kind of stuff) and qualifies your college for much better pricing than you could get on your own. Contact Brendan O'Donnell for more details.

If you already have a merchant account with another provider, we also integrate with Authorize.net payment gateway accounts. Authorize.net can link up with just about any merchant account out there, and it can bridge between your merchant account and Populi.

Additionally, we've released the usual round of minor tweaks, interface polish, security enhancements, bugfixes, and so on. Our users can read all about it in the Release Notes in the help desk.