Major upgrade: HC Multi

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!