HC Blog

Whew! I have been working for what feels like months on the storetop menus and they are finally ready for beta testing. What I mean by that is that I have not rolled the change out across the site yet, but I’ve created links that allow users to turn them on and off and try them out.

What are storetop menus?

They are menu bars that will appear at the top of every store that allow the shopper to navigate through HC much more easily. In addition, in Firefox and Chrome, the menu bars stay fixed at the top of the window, so no matter where you’ve scrolled down to on the item listing, you can still see what time it is, and access all the features of the menu.

So what are these wonderful new features?

• There are drop-down menus so the shopper can navigate to his/her My HC and other utility pages
• There are drop-downs to navigate back to the HC calendar or search page
• There are store-level drop downs that can take the shopper to the store’s feedback page, main page, mark the store as a favorite or share the store via social networking sites like facebook, twitter, etc. There’s also a new store-level search page to search through the listings of a single store
• There are item-level drop downs which allow the shopper to spot the item, share it via social networks, or my favorite new feature: we’ve partnered with MyRegistry.com to allow the items to be added to a universal registry list (along with items from any other site on the web)

So, how do you access this amazing new menu?

Click on this link to turn the menu on site-wide: http://hyenacart.com/calendar.php?stmenu=1

After clicking on that link, all the stores will have the storetop menu.

If you’d like to revert back to non-storemenu view, you can click on http://hyenacart.com/calendar.php?stmenu=0

Please leave comments, questions, and bugs under this blog posting. I’m especially interested in having you test this on your own store, to confirm that the menu does not conflict with your store’s design. I’ve tested a lot of stores, but obviously, I can’t test them all. I know of two bugs that will need to be fixed via modifying a store’s design. If, in your style sheet, you define a body tag margin at the top of the page, it causes a horizontal white bar to appear. Zeroing out the margin fixes this. Also, any store with white or very light font will not work well with the menu since it has a white background, so we’ll need to put a quick fix in. I have an idea how to do this, but need a store to test it on, so please send me a link if this applies to you.

In addition to the store menu, there are a few other enhancements:

• Slight reformatting of product listing pages to make them more readable and user friendly (in HCS, price is now shown up by the title, and time left until stocking is listed at bottom of listing)
• Stores with paid time longer than two months in the past will show up as inactive. This is to prevent sales from stores where sellers have not listed in a while (we’ve had both annoyed sellers who assumed their listings would expire with their paid time, and annoyed shoppers who have purchased items from old stores)

I’ll add more if I can think of it, but that’s the main gist. Please let me know what you all think. I’ve had the menus turned on for a week or so now and find it much easier to navigate. Plus, I’ve had a ton of fun sharing links via facebook and twitter. Which reminds me, we’d love to have you join the HC facebook page, fan page, and follow us on twitter.

Thanks everyone!

*ETA* OK — known bug — the drop downs are not working in IE. Will get that fixed as soon as I can figure it out! Fixed that error. Please refresh a few times if the menus are looking funky

It’s just non-stop updates lately, huh?

OK — first of all, if you log into your vendor page and go to Product Listings >> View/Edit items, you will see that there is now a column called “Spots.” This column shows you the number of Spots that listing has received. So far, people don’t seem too opposed to having this number be public, so that may come with the new storetop menus, but we’ll see how it goes. In addition, I’ve updated the shoppers’ My HC pages to allow the capability of deleting Spots. I was hesitant about doing this at first, but have decided it makes the most sense to give the shoppers the ability to organize their lists as needed.

More updates to come soon. Thanks everyone!

Hi everyone,

Just a quick update for HCS sellers. You’ve probably noticed that the comments never come through on your order emails. That’s because the email gets sent out immediately, even before the buyer has had a chance to enter comments. I’ve just altered the order confirmation email to clarify this point. In addition, if the buyer does enter comments, an additional email will now be sent to the seller to alert him/her. Recall that you can always see the full details of the order (including comments) via the order history page.

Also, I’ve posted a poll on the forums regarding showing the number of Spots a listing has received — whether to keep it private or show it publicly. Please respond when you get a chance: poll

Thanks everyone!