Background colors and Paypal accounts

Just wanted to let you know I’ve added the option of changing the
background color of your Hyena Cart store. Dana and Meredith have
already taken advantage of that (see
http://hyenacart.com/KnitwitzBaby/ and
http://hyenacart.com/HiddenPearlCreations/ ) and it looks pretty sharp
🙂 I think it looks better if you choose a lighter color since the
table background is white. If you’re interested in changing your
background color, just send me the hex code of what you would like (we
can try a couple if you aren’t sure). Here’s a page with hex codes for
colors: http://html-color-codes.com/

Also, I’ve recently realized that it’s against the Paypal user
agreement to split payments between a personal and business account
when accepting business related payments. I’m going to leave the
option of separate funded and credit card payment buttons to use at
your discretion, but just wanted to let you all know their policy:

“PayPal account holders may not split payments between a Personal
PayPal account and a Premier or Business PayPal account by directing
buyers paying with credit card to pay their Premier or Business
account and buyers paying with PayPal balance or bank account to pay
their Personal account. If we find that you are splitting payments,
you will be asked to pay the fees you attempted to avoid. Personal
accounts are for personal use only. If you would like to do business
through your PayPal account, you must use a Premier or Business account. ”

Thanks so much for your business 🙂 Please let me know if you have any
questions, or suggestions for new features 🙂

Stockpage changes and charity raffles

I just spent a little time changing the cart a little. You’ll notice
the changes when you log on to the stocking page. You can now specify
the Paypal addy for each item (it will still default to the Paypal
addy you gave me, so you don’t have to fill it in for each new item).
Normally, you wouldn’t change that, but if you get a different addy,
or want separate addy’s for funded and credit card, or even if you
want to host someone else’s product for them (as long as it’s not too
often), you can do it now. You can also run a charity raffle like I
did in the KSS store with separate funded and cc Paypal buttons, and
add a charge to the cc Paypal to cover the fees (this is normally
illegal, but I think it’s justified in the case of charity). You can
also change the e-mail addy that receives purchase notices, in the
event that you change e-mails.

Also, I’m going to add a special storefront for charity raffles
sometime today, so if you are interested in running one, you could do
it in your own store, or together with other wahm’s (Pamela of Wooly
Wonders originally contacted me about this, so I’m pretty sure she’ll
be running one).

Wanna set up a Hyena Cart?

Well, all went smoothly this afternoon, so I think we’re a go for
Hyena Cart! I think spreading out the stocking times really helped
keep the number of simultaneous stalkers to a minimum. At most, I had
22 people refreshing the page, and it seemed to be running nice and
quick. I also had one customer say it was the best hyena experience
she’d ever had 🙂

I’ll be in a meeting for the rest of the afternoon, but should have
time tomorrow morning to get started on stores for anyone who’s
interested. I can take funded Paypal at karen@hyenacart.com for the
$10 setup fee. Let’s wait on the $5 monthly fee until your store is
set up and looking the way you want. You can also delay paying it
until just before you’re ready to stock, so you get the most bang for
your buck 😉

Here’s the info I need from you:

1) url of the logo or banner you’d like to use in your store
2) biz name the way you’d like it to appear in the store
3) your e-mail addy
4) your Paypal addy
5) any special wording you’d like for the buyer’s e-mail
6) url path to your images folder, if you’d like the image paths to
default to it
7) url of your biz main page
8) login id and password you’d like to use to login to your stocking
page (both must be 6-8 characters long)
9) url of a banner I can use for the “powered by HC” page, if you’d like

I can also change the defaults on the active and end times, purchase
price, as well as the item description and shipping details (saves
your c&p’ing the same thing over and over).

Let me know if anything’s unclear.

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 🙂