Initial HC email

I hope you don’t mind my writing you. I’ve been noticing a real
problem with wahmshoppes lately as far as stalking/stocking with
several hundred hyenas milling about (especially the *18 page* Kiwi
Pie thread yesterday!) I just recently learned a bit of PHP/MySQL to
program my own cart (you can see it here:
http://www.koolsheepsoakers.com/Store/ ). I spent a lot of time on it,
but at the same time, I want to share it with other hyena-stalked
mamas, because I really think it will make life easier for us as well
as our customers.

The best thing about this cart is you can stock it beforehand, but
nothing will show up in your store until you say so. Also, you can set
stocking times to whatever you want, and the hyenas won’t be able to
buy until the set time. They’ll be able to preview items, so they can
get a sense of what will be available in what sizes (you could let
them preview for several days beforehand — or however long you
wanted), but the “Buy Now” button wouldn’t appear until your set time.
You can stagger the stocking times of items to try to minimize the
load on the server and prevent it from bogging down. All the customer
does when they want to buy is enter they’re e-mail address and click
“Buy Now.” An e-mail is sent to them and you with the purchase
information, but you have to finalize payment, etc. via e-mail
(there’s no integration with Paypal or anything like that). The amount
available is automatically decreased by 1 (I’ve programmed it so
customers can only buy one item at a time). There’s also no storage
of customer info — all this cart will do is track your inventory,
your stocking schedule, and who bought what. The best part is — you
don’t even have to be at your computer for a stocking! Just step away,
let the hyenas fight, and come back after the dust has settled and
finish up payments etc. by e-mail.

I’ve been thinking about how to make this super-affordable for you,
but still somewhat time-worthy for me, and this is what I’ve come up
with. I know you all already have hosting and websites set up, so all
I’d be offering is a store page. Something like
yourbizname.hyenacart.com (I just registered hyenacart.com). If you
wanted to customize it with html, etc. so it matches the rest of your
pages, you could send me an html file, and I would insert the cart
right into it. My thought is a $10 setup fee, and then a $5 monthly
fee. Ultimately, I’d prefer payment in 3 month installments, but
anyone who’d be giving this a try and just wants to try it for a month
or two is welcome to pay monthly at first. I only anticipate that
there would be 5 or 6 of us who need this type of cart (it obviously
wouldn’t work for someone who stocks snappis and has 100’s available),
so this isn’t exactly making me a mint, but it pays for a little of my
time.

This is, of course, all contingent on whether or not the cart works
for me 😛 I’m knitting as fast as I can and hope to stock my store in
about two weeks. If all goes well (and I think the only thing that
could go wrong is for the server to get bogged down and crash — but I
know for a fact that the cart won’t oversell), then maybe we’ve got a
solution that will help us and those poor hyenas out there. The set
stocking time will also prevent those all day stalkings that make me
feel terrible when I read about them, kwim?

So anyway, I just wanted to contact you and let you know that this
solution will be out there. I’m sure you’ve all put thought into other
ideas — OSCommerce, eBay, lotteries, etc. but this is a simple cart
that I believe will work really well. If you’re interested, please let
me know and I’ll put some time into programming something kinda
user-friendly for store stockings and a page where you can see what’s
been sold, and what you’ve stocked but isn’t showing in your store yet
(for an example of a page like this, see
http://koolsheepsoakers.com/Store/index_me.php — the Test Future Item
2 is stocked and ready, but isn’t showing up in my store yet, because
I haven’t set it to).

Thanks mamas 🙂