Zoom View – we have introduced a new zoom view for most of the items available on the site making it easier to get an accurate idea of what the physical print or poster will look like when you receive it.

Advanced Search upgrade – the advanced search has gotten an update to make it easier to locate items.

Check order status – when you log in to your Lieberman’s account you can now check the status of your order as well as view invoices and see your account history.

Additional site design upgrades along with updates to the collections and subject pages of the site to make it easier to browse and locate art prints and posters.

In addition to the updates to Liebermans.net, we have also updated our Lieberman’s Customer Survey.  We added new questions and would really appreciate you taking a few minutes (it really won’t take any longer than that) to fill it out as your feedback from it helps us to make continual improvements to Lieberman’s.  As a thank you for completing the survey we will be giving out a promo for 10% off all canvas transfer orders until Friday March 11th.  You’ll get the promo upon the completion of the survey.

Click here to take the survey

Thanks All!

PS – Take a look around the new liebermans.net site if you haven’t seen it arleady.  Click around and let us know what you think.  You can give us feedback on the liebermans.net site by emailing: feedback@liebermans.net and don’t forget to take the customer survey.  It applies to all facets of Lieberman’s not just the website.

Thanks!

You can download the latest version of the data feed client at:

http://developer.liebermans.net/datafeed.aspx

Please note: if you have already downloaded these images using the old version of the Data Feed Client and would like to regenerate your thumbnail images once you upgrade to the new version, you can use the -regenallthumbs command (dfclient.exe -regenallthumbs -imagespath:<path>).

Second, we have updated our handling of the IsAvailable field in the Artwork dataset.  The IsAvailable field now takes into account whether or not we have a print in stock when that print is from a publisher that we do not order from on a regular basis.  Previously, many of these prints would have been marked as IsAvailable = 1, even though we did not have any on hand and could not guarantee a quick turnaround time.  To determine if a print was indeed available, you would have had to check the StockReplenishmentOnly field for the publisher of the print, and then if the publisher was stock only you would have had to check to see if the print was in the GetInventoryLevels dataset.  With this change, any item that is from a Stock Only publisher that we do not have at our warehouse will be marked as IsAvailable = 0.  This change should lead to fewer out of stock issues when placing orders.  The IsAvailable field is updated on a daily basis using our latest stock levels, so if you are currently implementing a solution using the GetInventoryLevels dataset, you can keep that solution in place.

At this point, it is recommended that you download the new Data Feed baseline that contains the updates to the IsAvailable field.

In particular, as of Friday 10/23/09, we will no longer be carrying Bruce Teleky or Image Conscious.  We will continue to accept orders for these publishers through the end of the day on 10/23 but will not be able to fulfill any orders from these vendors that may come in past that time.  Online customers should remove these items from your databases as soon as possible.

As these are fairly significant changes, I thought I’d provide some background and insight into our reasoning for going this path.  Traditionally, Lieberman’s has operated as a wholesale consolidator, combining about 100 different art publishers together into a one-stop solution to buy art prints at wholesale from all 100 of these vendors while paying a single freight cost.  As many of you know, this is accomplished by Lieberman’s placing “just in time” orders with all 100 of these vendors every day or every other day (depending on the vendor) to consolidate these orders in our warehouse and then ship them out to customers.  However the industry has changed over the past few years making the consolidation model very challenging to be able to fulfill these orders in a way that is satisfactory to our customers.

As you have undoubtedly noticed, the percentage of items ordered which have been found to be out of stock, either temporarily or permanently, has increased to an unacceptable level.  We rely on the publishers to tell us when items are not available.  While we do get and promptly process discontinued updates from many publishers, they simply aren’t comprehensive or timely enough to keep on top of the growing number of temporary out of stock conditions that exist with many publishers.  Further, the turnaround time from our vendors has in many cases significantly increased as many have reduced staff, making our orders take longer to fulfill.

All of this makes our job nearly impossible to carry out in a way which our customers are happy with.  This level of out of stock conditions and the turnaround time simply doesn’t work for retailers (our customers), especially online retailers.  Many of you have told us how unacceptable these problems are, and we agree.  The only real solution is to stock a considerable amount of inventory in house, and make some tough decisions with our vendors.  The changes we’re making will result in dramatically improved turnaround time, and dramatically reduced number of items found to be out of stock.  While there may be some prints that we won’t carry going forward, for the vast majority that we will continue to carry we’ll be able to do a much better job servicing our customers.

Some of you who have been ordering from Liebermans for decades may wonder how to view Lieberman’s in the industry given these operational changes.  I think the simplest way to look at Lieberman’s is as the single largest wholesale supplier of art prints.  I believe the “One Stop, No Minimum” value proposition Lieberman’s has built a business on still rings true.  No other vendor in the industry offers a selection anywhere near as deep as what we carry, which all ships together with one freight charge, and offers no minimum order requirements.  In part what we’re doing is adapting and responding to changes that have already happened in the industry.  Printed catalogs are far less common from publishers than they used to be, and many in circulation are quite old.  Considering the rate of turnover in what product is available, and the ubiquity of the Internet, we encourage our customers to use our website, www.liebermans.net, as an online and always up-to-date catalog of our offering.

While we feel these changes are necessary in order to run this business effectively, we are sensitive to your concerns and will value any feedback we receive.  Also, realize that this is a work in progress.  We can’t conquer these issues overnight but will be stocking heavily over the next couple months and you should gradually see the turnaround time and out of stock situation improve.  If you are an online customer, we strongly encourage you to process the data feed daily to capture all of these changes in your database.  For traditional customers, the www.liebermans.net website will always be updated with the most recent changes.

Doug Kerwin

President

Metaverse Corporation, DBA Lieberman’s

If you are on our private label platform, your online frame shop already has museum glass as an option on the glazings tab.  If you are on our datafeed and API platform, this is a new glazing type which you can access and add to your frame shop.  Museum glass is available on items 20″ x 24″ and smaller.

For brick and mortar customers, Tru Vue is also offering a free in store display to help you promote this in your store.  For more information, see:

http://www.liebermans.net/museumglass2.aspx

Information on the Framing API is available on our developer site at:

http://developer.liebermans.net/FramingAPI.aspx

This includes a demo of a simple frameshop built on this API as well as example source code to that demo.  Currently this source code is provided in VB/ASP form.  An ASP.NET/C# version will be available soon.  You’ll see that the source code to the front end of the frameshop is fairly light as the hard work is done on our servers in the web methods called in the Framing API.  The API requires that you have a valid web service credential, which is necessary to call any functions in the Lieberman’s API.

If you are currently offering framing services on your website and outsourcing that to a third party to do the framing we’d ask that you consider evaluating Lieberman’s to fill this need.  There are several advantages we can provide:

1. The quality of the framing is very high
2. We believe we can offer more competitive rates on the cost of the framing
3. Save on shipping your prints out to a third party for framing
4. Get orders to your customers quicker as they can be framed on site
5. Offer your customers a better user interface and experience in your online frameshop.

In particular, we can help improve your online frameshop in the area of preview images.  The API outputs high quality images, which display high resolution scans of the mouldings on the artwork in the preview images, and an image with the correct aspect ratio of the size of the print and the size of the moulding and matting.  Additionally, the image preview takes care of cropping the borders off images when cropping is selected.

A couple clients have been using the version 1 of the Framing API for some time now however before we announced its availability to everyone, we wanted to refine the API, provide documentation and sample source code, which has now all been done.  If you’d like to start using the Framing API and allow Lieberman’s to process your framed orders, please contact Katie Ferron at 800-221-1032 for pricing information.  For information on upgrading from V1 to V2 of the Framing API, please contact developersupport@liebermans.net.

Thank you in advance for your prompt attention to this matter.

]]> http://blog.liebermans.net/2009/02/02/important-notice-regarding-moviegoodscom/feed/ 0 katieferron http://blog.liebermans.net/2008/11/12/now-shipping-with-fedex/ http://blog.liebermans.net/2008/11/12/now-shipping-with-fedex/#comments Wed, 12 Nov 2008 16:25:57 +0000 Doug Kerwin http://liebermans.wordpress.com/?p=55 ]]> As of Wednesday November 5th, we are now using FedEx for all shipments instead of DHL.  The wheels have been in motion on this switch for some time now and the decision was driven both by our customers feedback on DHL’s service as well as the changes DHL is making in the US market.  Additionally, FedEx ground service delivers on Saturday’s to resedential addresses which is an improvement for our online customers.

• Artist last name and first name are no longer reversed
• Image download fix in MD5 hash
• Image download fix for new images created within the last 24 hours
• Image thumbnails file size fix (was generating PNG instead of JPG)

You will need to re-download the baseline to get the artist first name / last name fix.

You will need to download a new version of the DFClient executable and/or source code in order to access the data feed.  We apologize for this inconvenience.  If any further issues are found, we will resolve them as soon as possible and post a fix.

You can download an updated version of the data feed client at:

http://developer.liebermans.net/datafeed.aspx

If you have started downloading images, you can resume that process by running the command again.  It will only download images that are new or changed from the last time you ran it.  Also the first version of the DFClient was generating thumbnails that were a large filesize.  This has been fixed for future downloads.  So that you do not have to re-download any images that you’ve already retrieved, you can delete the contents of your thumbs sub-directories and use this command parameter to regenerate the thumbnails:
dfclient.exe –regenallthumbs –imagespath:<root path>

New Data Feed:
http://developer.liebermans.net/datafeed.aspx

New Web Services API:
https://services.liebermans.net/api/v2/LiebermansService.asmx

New Developer Site:
http://developer.liebermans.net

The new data feed includes many enhancements including access to our inventory levels, enabling you to highlight items on your website which are available for same day shipping.  The developer site will be a work in progress.  Currently there is only documentation for the API in general and the data feed, more to come.

Why have we done this?  It is unfortunate that we have to reduce the number of pieces of art we carry, however in order for us to provide a high level of service, we must enforce a certain level of minimum requirements for publishers.  This includes providing accurate product and image data, timely discontinued items lists, and quick turnaround time.  In some cases, there just wasn’t enough volume to justify the daily inbound shipping, or for us to make the investment to fix their data for them.  We don’t believe this reduction will materially affect our clients ability to compete.  Additionally, we are working with new sources to add to our collection, which will be coming soon.

The below list of publishers are now removed from the Lieberman’s collection:

Amazing Art Images
Ariel Press USA
Artique (Bon Art)
Door Center Publishing
Global Prints
Jadei Graphics
Mercurius Art Publishing
Motion Imaging Inc
Mystic Seaport Wholesale
Re Society (S2 Art Group)
Schiftan Inc.
The Time Factory
Things Graphics Fine Art
Wild Art Group
Aquarius NMR
Axelle Fine arts
Tom Sierak Fine Art
Somerset House Publishing
Campus Images/Landmark P
SAI/Sports Art Inc.
Pure Country Weavers
Museum Editions West
Mitchell Beja
New Era Fine Art Publishing
Marco Fine Arts
Hot Stuff Enterprise LLC
H and H Art Gallery
Grand Image, LTD.
Fazzino Art/Museum Edition
EAW Group
Digital Vista
Creative Art Editions
Cheyne Walk Limted
Aura Editions