Category: All HC Users

Hi everyone,

Sorry for the issues with HC Multi stores. I realize they are running very slowly. I think this is due to database size and I will try to correct it as soon as possible. Hopefully by tomorrow night but it might be the night after. I realize this is very inconvenient and I apologize.

First of all — sorry about the down time this afternoon. The database server crashed, but I moved the database over to our new server (something I’ve been meaning to do anyway) so we should be good now.

I have two more goodies for HC Multi users. First — if you go to your orders list, you’ll see a “Download order history” link. This will download your order history to your PC in CSV format. Just in time to do your taxes 😉

The second thing is, there is now a “Show” option when you stock or edit an item. This determines whether or not the item listing shows up in your store. I added it to the multi-edit page too. Hope that gives you more of the functionality you need.

HC Standard users — you’re probably starting to feel left out and neglected. I’ll be getting you up to speed soon. First I need to code the utility so customers can change their email addresses (this has been on my to-do for over a year!) and then it will be your turn.

Thanks!

Ok — I know this has been a long time coming. I finally got around to adding a multi-edit feature for the HC Multi users. This allows you to edit all of your items simultanously. Should be especially helpful as you set your shipping pricing. You’ll see the “Multi-edit” link on your left-hand menu.

And the HC Marketing campaign is starting to get in gear. There are fliers to printout and business card graphics to download and customize on the HC Marketing page. Also, you might want to consider buying some of these beautiful postcards:

at the HC Marketing shop. I am really pleased with the way these came out! These are perfect for handing out to playgroup moms, craft fair shoppers, family and friends. If every registered HC shopper were to bring in 10 new shoppers, we’d have over 100,000 hyenas out there!

Which reminds me — if you do pass out HC materials, make sure to put your referral id number (found on your My HC shopper page) on them and ask people to enter that when they register. The person who brings in the most new shoppers who buy at least one item at HC will be eligible for a prize later in the year 🙂

Thanks everyone!

Hi all,

Ok — I finally got around to adding additional Product Type capability for congos. Congo admins can now go to their profile pages and choose *one* secondary Product Type category for the entire congo. They will still show up on the Congo category page. In addition, I coded up a detailed congo page which lists all of the stores in each congo and how many current or previewing items are listed in each store.

ETA: if there’s a store in your congo that you don’t want to have shown on that list, just set the Order number to greater than 1000.

Things have been busy this week so I haven’t made any progress on the HC Multi stores. I will keep working on those as I find the time.

You may have noticed that I did not raise the store sign-up fees on Jan. 1 as I had planned earlier. This is because I had another thought. You can read about it and respond here, if you’re interested.

As far as feedback goes, my current plan is simply to more closely integrate the HC stores with the feedback on the WAHM Feedback forums. I believe these written reviews are a lot more informative than simple numerical ratings. In the future, it will be simpler for customers to get to this feedback as well as leave feedback for purchases.

One final thing — with lotteries… as you’ve probably noticed, lottery entrants are cleared two weeks after they enter. This is causing some lotteries to choose new winners at the two-week mark. To prevent this from happening, you should delete lotteries before the two-week mark, or change their stocktype to “Standard.”

Thanks!

A few questions / issues have been asked more than once so I thought I’d send out a quick note:

• If your store is not listed on the category page, check 2 things. First — your paid date must be within the past two months. Second — you must choose a category on your Profile page. If you chose one last night, it may have switched to the wrong category — go back to your Profile page and confirm that the right one is highlighted.
• Several of you have asked about being listed in multiple categories. There’s no way to do this at the moment. I am going to make a change for congos though (not yet, but soon). In the future, all congos will automatically be listed in the Congo category. The congos can then collectively choose one other category to be listed in. Hopefully, I’ll get a chance to do this in the next few days.
• ETA — those of you who stock several different types of items — you can always change your category anytime you like. If you do a stocking with more of one type of thing, for example, you can switch your store to that category. Then switch to a different one for another stocking.
• Some HC Multi users may have experienced checkout errors this morning. I mistakenly uploaded some files that aren’t quite ready for prime-time yet. This should be fixed now. Email me if it’s not.
• Some stores are not showing the correct number of available items on the category pages. This is most likely due to stores switching from HC Multi to HC Standard. If you’ve done that in the past, I may not have deleted your HC Multi product tables, and that’s what’s screwing the code up. If this is the case, please post to this thread and I’ll get that corrected.
• The Login and Register links were not showing up well for some browsers. I think that’s fixed now, but email me at support@hyenacart.com if you’re having a hard time seeing them.
• I renamed the Soakers category to Knitted and Crocheted items, and the Web Design category has become Graphic Design. Remember, you can always email me to request a new category 🙂

Thanks!

I took this screen shot for posterity’s sake:

That’s the old Hyena Cart. Welcome in the new HC:

I’m hoping you all agree that this is a positive change.

The things to notice:

• Cleaner, more professional look. Easier to navigate with clear links at top, breadcrumb trail, and context-sensitive left-hand menu
• New category pages which list the stores in each category along with the number of items available in each store; also with links to filtered calendar for each individual category
• Privacy statement and Terms of Service
• Help section with site map and FAQs
• Improved search and search bar on every page
• My HC orders page more organized
• Small issues fixed including tabbing from id to password field in login and being able to hit ‘enter’ on search page to start search

Thanks to Andrea of Wanted Web Designs for laying out my initial design 🙂 Hopefully you agree that the overall design is more appealing and easier to use (once you get used to it!)

Vendors — note that you can now find the vendor login pages either by clicking the “Login” link or under the “Sell” menu. Also, your paid date must be within the last two months in order to show up on the pages of stores lists.

Please take a moment to read through the Terms of Service. I don’t think there’s anything in there that will be surprising, but it is a living document and I’m willing to make modifications if you find anything unexpected.

HC Multi improvements are about 75% done. I’ve added shipping options and am in the middle of adding choices with pricing and quantities. I’m hoping to get that rolled out in the next few weeks with the Buy Now, auction, and lottery capability soon to follow.

After that, I’ll be working on a feedback system and the changes to make customer lives easier (persistent logins, ability to change email addresses, etc.) Then we’ll start marketing. I’ll be asking all of you for help. Our goal: to make 2007 the year of the Hyena!

Thanks so much, everyone!

First of all, I want to give all of you a huge thank you for your responses to the vendor and customer surveys. All in all, I got over 1000 surveys back and most of them contained very thoughtful and intelligent comments in addition to the numerical ranking. I went ahead and chose the two winners of the $10 in Paypal. The vendor survey winner was naturebabyknits, and the customer survey winner was azure 🙂

I have read each and every survey and wanted to share some of the highlights with everyone:

Customer survey highlights:

• First off, the customers were quite clear that overall, each Hyena Cart store is seen as it’s own entity. One store does not reflect on another. As one customer put it “HC reminds me of a mall, they have Dillards and Dollar Tree’s right next to each other, but completely separate.”
• Next, customers were overall having fun with the large number of vendors on the site. Most comments asked for an improved search and a better way to organize the stores so that people could find the items they’re looking for more easily.
• Few people wanted to see a subjective rating system of any kind but many people would like to see feedback integrated with the cart and tied to specific transactions.
• Customers gave high marks for the quality, variety and uniqueness of the products offered at HC.
• Whether or not to limit HC to handmade items was a polarizing question, with many strong feelings towards handmade goods, but the overall number coming out to about 40% against limiting to handmade items and 60% for the limitation.

Vendor survey highlights:

• 40% of vendors were not at all concerned about pricing or quality in other stores, while 60% were somewhat or very concerned
• Most vendors find the cart pretty easy to use, with a slight learning curve.
• I was happy to see that technical support was rated very well, despite my automated reply technique. A few people commented negatively on this, but the overwhelming majority were very positive about the support they receive 🙂
• The overwhelming response for future priorities is advertising.

Based on all this feedback, my top priorities for the next few months will be:

1) Improve HC Multi so that it eventually becomes the only primary (edited: only is a strong word — I won’t force anyone to switch 😉 ) HC cart. Customers really want to be able to check out with multiple items and the cart system is more similar to what they are used to. I will be adding shipping options to HC Multi, as well as choices that have costs and quantities associated with them. Finally, I’ll be adding auction, lottery and BIN capablity to HC Multi’s so they will do everything HC Standard does and more.

2) Re-vamp the HC site, giving it a fresh look and making it more easily navigable by people who aren’t familiar with HC.

3) Improve the search feature so that searches can be limited to titles or tags, certain price ranges, etc.

4) Implement a feedback system per transaction

5) Increase the initial HC sign-up fee to $35 and limit future stores to handmade goods only (neither of these changes will affect current HC stores). I will implement this starting Jan. 1, 2007

6) Make small changes to improve the customer experience including: staying logged in via cookies, being able to change email addresses, maintaining a favorite stores list, being able to purchase without logging in (only for Paypal verified purchases i.e, not auctions, lotteries, or BINs), being able to pay without having a Paypal account.

7) Add a User Agreement and Privacy Statement to the site.

8) Kick off the HC ad campaign

I’m hoping (hoping!) to have much of this complete by the end of January. Some of it may slide into February. I want to finish a good chunk of it before starting the ad campaign, but I guess that’s not 100% necessary.

After that, there’s still a very long to-do list, but these are the things I will be focusing on for the next little while.

Again, thank you so much for your input. It has helped me refocus on HC’s reason for being and it’s future path.

First of all, thank you *so* much for all of your feedback via the survey. I am extremely grateful for your thoughtful replies and I think I’ll be able to make some meaningful changes to the site soon.

In the meantime, one issue I saw that came up in both the vendor and customer surveys was the wish for HC Standard stores to have multiple item check-out and the resistance against HC Multi stores because of their “look” and the multiple clicks needed to navigate them. To be honest, I don’t see adding a cart to HC Standard in the near future. It’s a fairly major undertaking and I still feel that vendors who tend to sell multiple items at a time should consider switching to HC Multi. To that end, I’ve just added an option to the HC Multi stores that gives them the HC Standard look and feel.

To do this, go to your Shop Config page, scroll down to the “Landing” option and choose “Table View.” Your store will then show all items in table format like HC Standard stores. See the sample store, for example: http://hyenacart.com/HCmulti/

I hope this change addresses some of the issues you brought up. Of course, there are a ton more, but this was something I was able to tackle in an evening 😉

Thanks again!

Hi everyone 🙂

I have just coded up a survey for you to take next time you’re logged into your vendor pages. I don’t think you’ll miss it. The link is in an ugly green box that will come up on your welcome page 🙂 I would really appreciate it if you would take the time to respond. I’m trying to prioritize my mile-long to-do list and would love your input. Your survey answers will be kept completely confidential, although I may share some of the statistics with you all when more people have responded. As an added incentive, your response will add you to a drawing for $10 (Paypal, HC$ or paid time on your cart — whichever you prefer).

Also, I tweaked the Spots code yesterday to filter out items with the words “free” or “ffs” in the list of Most Spotted and Recently Spotted items. I really want these lists to reflect the most amazing and breathtaking items being offered at HC, not the free-est. I’m also filtering on the word “sneak” to keep sneak peeks off of the lists, reserving them for actual items for sale. There’s nothing wrong with offering free items or creating fake listings for sneak peeks. I would just ask that you continue to use those words in the titles so they are correctly filtered out of the Spots lists.

Finally, I will be adding a customer survey as well (hopefully sometime tomorrow), so you can expect to see that too, when you’re logged in to shop 🙂
Thanks for your help!