HC Blog

Hi all,

Just a few little add-ins based on your blog comments. These apply to both HCM and HCS:

• When you view the order details page, you’ll see a link that says “Printable page.” This will take you to a page with no extraneous html on it — just the order details. Hopefully this prints out okay and serves as a good packing slip.
• When you have viewed an order, a little gray checkmark appears next to it, so you can keep track of what’s been viewed and what hasn’t

Hope that helps! Thanks all

I am very excited to announce that the vendor pages, both HCS and HCM, have been redesigned to fit with HC’s new look. I really hope you find this as much of an improvement as I do. The pages are more usable, more attractive, and much more professional-looking.

In addition to the new look, the following improvements / bug fixes were made:

HCS:

• Added batch editing for quantities, descriptions and shipping options (see Product Listings >> Batch edit
• Added Completed, Shipped, and Cancelled options to order status in addition to New and Paid
• Changed “Add item” listing page so all the other listings aren’t shown, just the form to add the item

HCM:

• Fixed bug that didn’t allow IE users to change order status
• Fixed bug that caused IE to hang if item was added without category being chosen

Both carts:

• Drop-down menu with logical grouping of vendor files
• Changed image uploading code so images can now be added directly while creating a new listing, rather than having to create the listing first and then modify it. This also fixes the bug where tags were being lost after uploading images
• Added RSS feed to HC Blog on vendor welcome page
• Moved payment to separate page rather than having it show at the footer of every page
• Added “Delete store” request on “Make changes” page

Hopefully you can still find your way around the pages ok. I know it will take some getting used to, but like I said, I’m hoping you will eventually view it as an improvement!

Remember, you can comment or ask questions directly here on the Blog.

Thanks everyone! Have a great Hyena evening!

and as I said back then in this post, it’s “out with the old, in with the new”!

This time, we’re going from this:

to this:

and again, we can thank the lovely Andrea, of Wanted Web Designs for her collaboration in bringing this new design to life!

This redesign is almost entirely visual — the overall layout and navigation of the site is basically identical. You do now have the advantage of a nice drop-down menu at the top. You may find pages of the site you never new existed before!

*NOTE* if you prefer to view the site 800 px wide rather than 1000, you can use the link at the bottom left of the page (under the copyright info) to do so. And if you preferred the old layout, click “Classic” to be taken back to it

The main difference you’ll notice is the Featured Shops listing area, which appears on all the main shopping pages (index, calendar, category, spots, search). Everything you’ll want to know about this new feature is explained here. In a nutshell, the cost is $5 per day to be one of at most 20 listings. So you’re guaranteed at least 25% exposure time, but more if the 20 listing slots are not filled.

You’ll also notice that the banner ads that used to be at the top of the calendar are now gone. I believe this is the right choice for this design. For those of you who had an active banner listing at the top of the calendar, you have several choices:

• If you paid using HC$. You can move your listing to a different slot (bottom of calendar, top or bottom of Spots’ Corner, top or bottom of the forums)
• If you paid using Paypal, you can either move your listing as mentioned above, or forward your PP receipt to hyenacart at gmail.com and I will refund a prorated amount to you (e.g, if you had 15 days left on your banner as of 8/31/08, I’ll refund $5).

To request a move to a different slot, please log in to Banner Manage, click on your ad, and make note of the number at the end of the url link. It ends with Banners:Settings:xxxx where the xxxx is a 4 digit number. Email me the 4 digit number, and which slot you would like your banner moved to at hyenacart at gmail.com. If I don’t hear from you by Thursday 9/4, 9 pm, I will automatically move your banner to the bottom calendar spot.

I’d love to hear your feedback on the new design. Remember, you can leave comments on this blog

Oh, and one other thing: now that we have info pages for both HCS and HCM, could you please delete all listings that contain policy, shipping, about me information and move it to informational pages? It is confusing for shoppers to see informational listings mixed in with product listings when they do searches or view the daily calendar. Thanks! If you see a seller with informational listings, feel free to use the ‘contact seller’ link and let them know to make this switch. You can link them to this blog entry

Thanks everyone! I hope you enjoy the new design. If you notice any pages that don’t look right, or are acting strange, please leave a comment here or send an email to support at hyenacart.com. Oh, and just so you know, I’ll be changing the colors on this blog as well as the forums to match our new site

Have a great Labor Day!!

OK — I found some great articles this weekend on optimizing servers and code, so I’ve been doing some fiddling.

The main thing you’ll notice is that if there are over 100 shopper in a store, the number of shoppers simply reads “100+” now. I think the server was spending too much brain power counting shoppers, so I’ve changed it so that if there are more than 100 people in a store, the server stops counting people and starts concentrating on the stocking. I am really hopeful that this will help resolve some of our crashing issues. In fact, I’d like to put it to a test. If one of you uber-hyenas would like to help test this out, please email me at hyenacart at gmail.com. We’ll pick a fairly obscure time to test, where, if we do crash, not as many people will be inconvenienced. Let me know if you want to help out!

I made a few other changes, so I’m hoping you find that HC is loading faster and acting zippier than it has been. I’ve turned the comments feature on this blog back on, so feel free to respond via comments and let me know if you notice any differences. Also, if anything is acting funky, please email support at hyenacart.com to open a helpdesk ticket.

Thanks everyone!

I’ve been doing HC stuff too, I swear! I’m just really passionate about this handmade site and want to make it a success I’ve added two things that will be of interest to you:

1. Handmade pledge: I’ve added a page where you can sign a simple pledge to consider handmade alternatives for all of your purchases, whether they are for yourself or others, everyday items or gifts. Please consider signing the pledge and really making a handmade lifestyle choice: http://inspirehandmade.org/pledge.php
2. HC store promos: I’ve added a form you can use to promote your HC store in random rotation in the inspireHandmade sidebar. Just upload a little image and enter the last part of your HC store link on this form: http://inspirehandmade.org/linkpost.php

And now I’ll get back to HC upgrades and stuff. Pinky promise!

I hope you’ll agree that it’s important for HC. I spent this weekend coding a new site: http://inspirehandmade.org/ that I’m very excited about. I’m hoping you will all help out and post about what inspires you to buy handmade items, how they’ve affected your life, what’s so great about them. I want to get the whole world infected with the handmade virus. Care to join me?

Work is still going on behind the scenes to upgrade HC to it’s new look and I hope to have more news about that soon.

Thanks everyone!

Hi all,

Just a quick note to let you know I’ve added info pages for HCS users too. Just use the “Info Pages” link in your vendor footer to create up to 5 informational pages. In addition, if you use the image uploading option, I’ve made it easier on your “Edit Gallery” page to include a link to your gallery in your shop. As with HC Multi, for any of the informational pages, you can click the “Show” checkbox to have a link automatically included on your store page, or you can hard code the links with html.

Hope this gives you a warm fuzzy — I love you HCS users too!

Hi all,

Two nights ago, I made a small change to the HCS code. It *should* enable you to stock in quantities greater than 1 and still not oversell. It should also make the Buy Now listings faster, and hopefully able to withstand higher traffic loads. As you test it out, please post to this thread and let me know how it’s working for you: http://hyenacart.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=84930 .

As for HCM users, thanks for all your input on how to handle BiN’s, auctions and lotteries. I am going to put more thought into how to execute the order combinations and let you know when I’m done. I’ll also update the HCM code with the same small change I just made to HCS sometime in the next few weeks.

I also wanted to take this opportunity to thank you again for the wonderful input you gave on the HC surveys. I just chose the two winners (one for the customer survey — trish.mom2five and one for the vendor survey — supershourds). As I mentioned, the vendor survey has already been used to initiate the changes from the last major HCM update. The customer surveys have helped me to prioritize the next few projects:

• Update / modernize / freshen the look of the main HC site
• Improve the search function to include three-letter words, seller names, quantities, dates, etc.

I’ll also be adding some new ways for sellers to promote their stores.

Once our new look is in place, we’ll start advertising and pull in more traffic Thanks to everyone for shopping and selling at HC!

Hi everyone,

I’d like to have a discussion regarding how to handle BiNs, auctions and lotteries on HCM. Currently, the way it’s set up, when a customer wins a BiN, auction or lottery, their information is recorded in the ‘buyer’ field on the product listing, but an order is not created until the customer goes through the entire checkout process with the item. I designed it this way so that, in the spirit of HC Multi, the customer could place additional items in her cart and then check out with everything all at once.

This setup has some disadvantages though: 1) it is a bit confusing for the buyers and sellers, who don’t understand why the BiN / auction / lottery has ended but no order is showing up in the order history; 2) the seller is not able to flag buyers if they don’t go through the checkout process and create the order.

That leaves a couple of choices:

1. Leave the setup as-is, but add the capability for the seller to flag the buyer from the product listing page (i.e. in the column where it says ‘buyer’, you would be able to click on the buyer’s email address and flag from there).
2. Change the setup so that the order is created as soon as the BiN button is clicked or the auction / lottery ends. This means that if the buyer did want to purchase other things from your store, she would need to fill up a separate cart and check out in a separate order.
3. Change the setup as above, but also include the capability of combining orders. This would be the most complicated option, of course, and would a) take longer to code, b) still be potentially confusing for customers.

If we went with option 2 or 3, I could probably also add the capability of allowing qty’s greater than 1 on the BiN listings.

Or, if anyone has any other ideas, please feel free to chime in.

I’m taking a poll and encouraging discussion on this thread.

Thanks!

Hi everyone,

I just uploaded a fairly significant upgrade for HC Multi. These changes are based on your feedback as well as your responses to the HC survey (which reminds me, I need to end that survey and draw the $10 winners! We’ll save that for the next email).

OK — so let’s see if I can remember all of the upgrades this includes:

• Customizable shipping options: You can now set the names of your five shipping options to whatever you like. Five is the max, however, so hopefully that will cover your needs. You can set those on your Shop Config page (towards the bottom). I’ve also made the entering of shipping amounts on your product details page more intuitive. There’s a checkbox that grays out the option if you’re not offering it, and the whole 999 thing is not something you need to worry about anymore.
• Insurance: You can now offer insurance on the first two shipping options you offer. The insurance rates will be calculated based on the total dollar amount in the cart, and is based on USPS rates. Whether or not to offer insurance is a store-wide option — you either offer insurance on any purchase, or you don’t. That is also set in your Shop Config page.
• Subcategories: This is a big one, especially for newbies… you no longer have to create subcategories — you can stock items directly in categories! It’s your choice whether you feel you need subcategories or not. And you can have both — categories and subcategories, and stock items in either place.
• Informational pages: There is now a menu option on your vendor pages called “Info pages”. You can use that link to create up to 5 informational pages (Policies, About Me, Order Status, etc.). There is also a toggle which will trigger these pages to be automatically shown in the left navigation bar in your stores. I’ve also gone back and added that same option for those of you who have galleries (i.e., you check the box and a link to your gallery will be automatically shown in the left nav menu). If you’re not using the left nav option, you can hard code the informational page links in your web design — but you will need to be reasonably familiar with html in order to do that.
• Product stock page organization: I’ve organized your main product stocking page and all of the batch editing pages in terms of future items, current items, items ended within the past month, and older past items (note, the past items are determined by whether the end date on the item has passed or not. Some of you may have items in your shop that are showing up just fine, even with the end date in the past. You can change those or not, at your discretion. If you do want to change them, don’t forget you can set them all at once on the ‘Batch edit dates’ page). Hopefully this will make it easier for you to find and edit listings. If you have templates you use over and over again, you may want to give them a future stocking date, make sure the “Show” box isn’t checked (so the templates don’t show in your store) and then your templates will always be at the top of your stocking page, ready to be copied and edited.
• Past items: I’ve finally added a link for your past items. If you would like the link to show, you can set that on your Shop Config page (near the bottom). You can also add an image if you’d prefer to use that rather than the text link.
• Shop organization: For those of you who use the category and subcategory views (rather than the table view), I’ve added some small text underneath the name of the category which lists how many listings there are in that category. That should make it easier for your customers to shop your store.

OK — so, if you have questions or there are bugs, please post here: http://hyenacart.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=83931

I realize that as this cart keeps getting upgraded with new features, it gets a bit more complicated to use. I’ll be adding a tutorial sometime in the future that walks users through how to get things set up. In the meantime, if you’ve had any problems at all with uploading images to Photobucket and having them show in the store, please check out this tutorial.

There’s more exciting stuff coming down the pipeline so stay tuned

Thanks everyone!