Category: All HC Users

I need to do some upgrading and maintenance on Hyena Cart. The database is starting to struggle under all the traffic. Two symptoms I’ve seen so far are lotteries that choose second winners, and Paypal payments without the correct Item information in the subject line. it’s time to split everything into multiple databases. Hopefully when the upgrade is done, you’ll see no difference in how HC works.

Please plan for HC to be down from 10 pm Friday evening (5/12) until early Saturday morning. I will do my best to keep the downtime to just a few hours, but we’ll see how it goes.

Thanks for understanding!

Oh, and one quickie for HC Multi users: it turns out, when you delete a product from your database, it also deletes any orders you have that include that product. Until I get this fixed, I would recommend that you don’t delete products (or change their pricing). If you have a sold out or discontinued product, set the active date to something far in the future (like the year 2020) and it won’t show up in your store.

I had some complaints that customers didn’t like clicking through all the categories looking for available items, so I’ve added an “All items” choice to the left navigation menu which will allow them to view everything at once.

Also — I’m looking for some input: currently, everything in HCMulti (except the new “all items” page) is paginated, meaning you see a set number of listings and then other ones are linked to page numbers at the bottom. Would you like me to take that feature out, so your customer can view all products on one page; and in the admin, you can view all products and orders on a single page? If enough people would like me to switch it over, I’ll go ahead and do that.

Just wanted to throw out another idea for the HC forum store.
Remember, that’s the store where posters at the HC Forums can spend
HC$ they earn by posting on the boards.

http://hyenacart.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=535

Here’s the thought: you could stock percent off coupons to your store
and set a price in HC$. For example, list a 25% off coupon code in the
HC Store forum ( http://hyenacart.com/phpbb/viewforum.php?f=14 ) for
HC$5. When someone purchases it, you send them a discount code they
can use for 25% off anything in your store. The nice thing is, your
customer will probably try to spend at least $20 in order to get her
money’s worth. You can then use the HC$5 you earned to buy advertising
time at HC.

Have fun with it!

I’ve received some reports of lottery glitches lately and I think I
*might* know what’s going on. I just checked the database and there
are over 10,000 entries in the lottery table. It may be that the code
is searching for a winner, and doesn’t find one right away, so it goes
ahead and chooses a new one. I’m going to delete all lottery entries
older than two months.

In other news, the Hyena Cart forums are really coming to life. If you
had wanted to participate in the giveaway, the new rules are posted
here:

http://hyenacart.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=535

If you’d like to earn ad money, just post something in the Store
forum. When someone purchases your item by donating HC$ to you, you
can then go ahead and purchase ad time from me using this listing
(it’s a sticky at the top of the store forum):

http://hyenacart.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=536

Thanks everyone!

Just a couple of quick items. If you’ve been considering switching to
HC Multi, I’d appreciate if you could decide by mid-April. After April
15th, there will be a $5 charge to switch over. Hope you understand 🙂

In other news, a bunch of us are trying to get the HC Forums hopping
and revive the days of high hyena excitement. So far it’s going quite
well. If you’re interested in participating in the giveaway, just go
ahead and start posting at the forums. When you’re ready, post a
message in the middle of the thread… something like “Hey, the first
[fourth, seventh — your choice] person with at least 20 posts who PMs
me gets [a free diaper, a gift certificate, whatever]” When you’ve
done your giveaway, please email me this info:

1) the username of the winner
2) the item they won
3) a link to the thread where you posted the giveaway
4) the retail value of the item
5) your HC ad account username (sign up here if you don’t have one:
http://hyenacart.com/bannerad.php

and I’ll deposit the retail value of your item into your HC ad account 🙂

Thanks everyone!

I’ve been working hard this past month and I think I’m ready to offer
the new HC Multi cart. This cart is a more traditional shopping cart
where customers can place multiple items in a cart and then check out
with everything at once. You can see an example here:

http://hyenacart.com/HCmulti/

You can test out the admin interface at:

http://hyenacart.com/HCmulti/admin/

with username admin and password testacart.

The main features are the multiple item checkout, the fact that items
remain in-stock until Paypal has been confirmed, pattern download
information can be entered, and multiple currencies are supported. The
main limitations are flat-rate shipping (I may improve this in the
future), no auctions or lotteries, and overselling is possible in
high-traffic situations. HC Multi stores will still appear in the full
list of HC stores and the calendar as well.

You can read a comparison between HC standard and HC Multi here:

http://hyenacart.com/cartcomp.php

I think many of you have signed up with HC because it’s an easy cart
to use, but it hasn’t been ideal for your business because of the
one-at-a-time shopping limitation. I’m hoping that HC Multi will fit
your business better. In addition, I’d like to limit HC standard to
handmade items from now on with the exception of a few commercial
accessory items like wool wash). This will probably happen naturally
anyway. And note that HC Multi will feature a lot of handmade items as
well, just smaller items which may not be as high-demand as those on
HC standard.

If you’d like to switch your store over, feel free to send me an
email. The pricing is exactly the same, and switching is free. You’ll
be able to cut and paste any graphics and customization you have in
your current store. You’ll also need to cut and paste your listings
from one cart to the other.

Thanks for hosting your store at HC 🙂

I’ve done my best to write a tutorial to explain how to use the choice
options in most scenarios. Please check it out if you’ve been confused
in the past and see if it clears things up for you:

http://hyenacart.com/choices_tutorial.php

If you have some other cases you’d like to add, just let me know.

As new vendors come in, it’s been hard to keep everyone reminded about
not getting listed on the calendars too often. I had fixed the weekly
calendar so each store can only appear once, and I’ve just fixed the
monthly calendar so that each store can only appear a maximum of twice
per month. The stockings that will be listed are the two latest dates
in the month for which you have active items set.

Sorry if this inconveniences anyone, but the logistics are much easier
this way, rather then having everyone trying to remember to not to
have active items appearing on more than one day per week. Let me know
if you think there are any errors in the code and thanks for
understanding!

Well, I did quite a bit of coding today, but as usual, my to-do list
doesn’t look any shorter. But here’s the update:

1) I wrote a page that will email your vendor login info to you. You
can get to it from the vendor login page (which, don’t forget, is
listed on the main HC site under “For WAHMs”). There are two different
links, depending on whether you have your own store, or are part of a
congo:

http://hyenacart.com/Vendor_files/vendor_page.php

Just click the link “Forgotten Your login info?” or “Forgotten your
congo login info?” and follow the instructions. Let me know if you
have any problems.

2) Customer first names are now included on your order confirmation
emails and listed in your order history detailed view. This should
make it less awkward to write those emails rather than just saying,
“Hey you — thanks for ordering” 😉

3) I added a new way to browse HC items, the random spots page:
http://hyenacart.com/hc_spots_rand.php . You’ll also see a few random
items on the calendar page to tempt the hyenas 🙂

I know using choices is one of the most confusing things about HC so I
want to write a tutorial on how to use them for various situations. If
you have a type of listing you’d like to do, but haven’t figured out
how to get the choices to work the way you want, drop me an e-mail and
I’ll be sure to include that situation in my tutorial.