HC Blog

First of all, thank you *so* much for all of your feedback via the survey. I am extremely grateful for your thoughtful replies and I think I’ll be able to make some meaningful changes to the site soon.

In the meantime, one issue I saw that came up in both the vendor and customer surveys was the wish for HC Standard stores to have multiple item check-out and the resistance against HC Multi stores because of their “look” and the multiple clicks needed to navigate them. To be honest, I don’t see adding a cart to HC Standard in the near future. It’s a fairly major undertaking and I still feel that vendors who tend to sell multiple items at a time should consider switching to HC Multi. To that end, I’ve just added an option to the HC Multi stores that gives them the HC Standard look and feel.

To do this, go to your Shop Config page, scroll down to the “Landing” option and choose “Table View.” Your store will then show all items in table format like HC Standard stores. See the sample store, for example: http://hyenacart.com/HCmulti/

I hope this change addresses some of the issues you brought up. Of course, there are a ton more, but this was something I was able to tackle in an evening

Thanks again!

Hi everyone

I have just coded up a survey for you to take next time you’re logged into your vendor pages. I don’t think you’ll miss it. The link is in an ugly green box that will come up on your welcome page I would really appreciate it if you would take the time to respond. I’m trying to prioritize my mile-long to-do list and would love your input. Your survey answers will be kept completely confidential, although I may share some of the statistics with you all when more people have responded. As an added incentive, your response will add you to a drawing for $10 (Paypal, HC$ or paid time on your cart — whichever you prefer).

Also, I tweaked the Spots code yesterday to filter out items with the words “free” or “ffs” in the list of Most Spotted and Recently Spotted items. I really want these lists to reflect the most amazing and breathtaking items being offered at HC, not the free-est. I’m also filtering on the word “sneak” to keep sneak peeks off of the lists, reserving them for actual items for sale. There’s nothing wrong with offering free items or creating fake listings for sneak peeks. I would just ask that you continue to use those words in the titles so they are correctly filtered out of the Spots lists.

Finally, I will be adding a customer survey as well (hopefully sometime tomorrow), so you can expect to see that too, when you’re logged in to shop Thanks for your help!

When you go to upload images now, you’ll see two links. The preferred way to upload is using the new tool, but the old link is still available in case the new one doesn’t work for you. I’d like everyone to start using the new tool — it should be faster and it’s also a much lighter load on the server. Please post comments and questions to this thread

http://hyenacart.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=16092

I’d like to phase out the old uploading method in the next few months. When you first click the new link, you’ll get a pop-up window asking if you trust content from RadInks.com. That’s the company I purchased this code from. Please click “Always” (or “Yes”, but if you click “Yes” the pop-up window will appear next time you access the page). This tool requires the latest version of Java, which should already be installed on your browser. If not, it will prompt you to download the latest version.

After we get the bugs worked out for HC Standard users, I’ll migrate this to HC Multi and gallery uploading as well.

Finally — I have been pondering how to manage all the images that are uploaded to HC, and I think I’m going to go back to the 3-month policy. I.e., uploaded images will be purged after three months. If you have images for ongoing items (like patterns, etc.), I suggest you upload them to your gallery, then use the paths from the gallery in your product listing. I can help you with this if you don’t know what I mean. That way, your images won’t be deleted since gallery images will stay around as long as you keep your store active.

If you’ve had trouble with image uploading (especially if you fall in the ‘often have trouble’ or ‘always have trouble’ categories), please email me at karen2 at hyenacart.com. I’d like you to test out the new uploading tool and see how it works for you. I’d especially be interested in those of you that use ‘unusual’ systems like Safari, Macs, etc., but anyone who’s had trouble in the past is welcome to test. Thanks!

Hi everyone!

Just a few quick notes:

1) I added a Bath & Body store category, so all you soap mamas can have your own space

2) The picture uploading seems pretty spotty lately. My thought is that it’s traffic related, especially when a bunch of congo members are all uploading at the same time. If you’re having trouble with uploading, please give it another try at a lower traffic time of day (early in the morning or late at night). I know that’s not ideal, but I have an alternate plan in the works that will hopefully be implemented in the next few weeks. In the meantime, could you please respond to this poll so I can gauge how much of a problem this has been for everyone: http://hyenacart.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=15389

3) Missing orders: I know of one stocking recently where orders were placed via the cart but no orders were entered into the orders list and no notifications were sent. If this has happened to you recently, please respond to this email and let me know the details (when the order was placed plus links to the items).

Thanks everyone!