indieCart Seller's Blog

Now *this* is the type of message I like to send you. After years (and years) of requests, I have finally added the ability for you to list your stores in multiple categories (yippee!!). You’ll see where you can do this on your profile pages. Please, please, do not abuse this feature by listing your store in unrelated categories. This is not fun for shoppers. I would even ask that you try to list your store only in categories in which you stock items fairly often or have recently stocked items. For example, if Store A stocks cloth diapers and sometimes soap, it would be best if that seller only lists herself in the soap category when she has soap in stock. Make sense?

I have also added three new categories: Pet Items, Sweet Treats, and Upcycled Items. Can’t wait to see you fill them in 🙂 Note that there may be a bit of a delay before the number of stores updates on the main page.
Finally, you’ll see when you list a featured shop ad, that you’ll need to choose just one category to be listed at the top of the ad (otherwise, it could get a bit busy with multiple categories listed).

Please let me know if anything’s buggy or isn’t working the way you expect. Thanks!

Hi all,

This is not my favorite type of email to send out — I’d rather be notifying you of a great new upgrade (some are in the works, but nothing to roll-out right now). However, I have been spending more and more time lately transferring feedbacks between stores, and I think it’s going to make the most sense to start charging a fee for this service.

From here on in,  if you would like to transfer feedback between stores, there will be a $5 charge. Please Paypal this amount to payments [at] hyenacart.com and put the url of the feedback page you’d like to transfer from, and the url of the feedback page you’d like to transfer to, in the comments section.

UPDATE: To request a feedback transfer, please go to your Store Settings >> Request changes page and follow the link from there.

Thanks for your understanding!

Hi all,

Just a quick note to let you know that the Google Base code had stopped working but is now fixed. There was a new required parameter that has now been added to the file generation code. For more information on Google Base (or Google Product Search, click here). Please give it a try, and if you are still unable to load items into Google Base, email the support desk at support [at] hyenacart.com.

Also, there has been a bug with HC Multi checkout — only with certain stores, and only with shoppers using Internet Explorer. The checkout process would hang up and not take the shopper to the Paypal site for payment. I have now added a button that can be clicked to force the page to go to Paypal in the event that it hangs up. That should fix the issue. Again, please let us know if you or your customers are having problems.
Thanks everyone!

Hi everyone,

Apparently Paypal has been cracking-down on gambling using PP funds. Some sellers have had their accounts suspended because the word “lottery” has been red-flagged. I have reworded all of the references to “lottery” in HC to “drawing”. As pointed out by one of our sellers, this is actually more technically correct as

The definition of lottery is:
1 a: a drawing of lots in which prizes are distributed to the winners among persons buying a chance.

Whereas drawing is:
: the process of deciding something by drawing lots

So, lotteries are now drawings. I would suggest that you no longer use the ‘lottery’ terminology lest PP suspend your account as well.

This also has implications for running charity raffles (where buyers do purchase chances to win). I won’t be monitoring this, but be aware that Paypal is not tolerating usage of their service to support gambling of any sort, including raffles and lotteries.

If you see the word lottery left over on any of the HC info pages, please drop me a line at support [at] hyenacart.com so I can get it fixed, thanks!

Also, there’s been a bug in the auctions and lotteries that was preventing them from showing up correctly in shoppers’ purchase histories and checkouts. I just fixed this bug, so it should no longer be an issue moving forward. If any of you have shoppers that would like their purchase histories corrected, please have them contact the support desk at  support [at] hyenacart.com with a link to the item they won.

Thanks everyone 🙂

Hi all,

Just wanted to let you know that the new search function has been installed on the site: here. As you’ll see, you can now sort search results by price, stocking time, ending time, or alphabetically by store name. In addition, searches can now be filtered by stocktype. Finally, there is now a store-level search that allows shoppers to see which stores carry the item they are searching for, and allow them to expand a store’s listings dynamically. Give it a try and see what you think 🙂 A few notes on the listings that show up in the search table:

1. only stores with paid dates within the past two months are searchable
2. only listings with end times within the past two months are searchable (also HC Multi items with undefined end times)
3. for HCS stores, only items with preview set to 1 or stocktimes in the past are searchable (in other words, items you’ve set for future stocking, but don’t want previewed won’t show up)
4. for HCM stores, only items with “Show” checked will be searchable.

If you have any items that should be showing up in search but aren’t, please drop us a line at support@hyenacart.com and we’ll take a look at it.

In other news, Prudence at Cuddlebug Cloth brought the Pay it Forward movement to my attention. She outlines the idea on her listing here. I think it’s a wonderful idea and would love to see more PIF listings on HC. And remember, we have three-letter search now, so shoppers will be searching on “PIF” 🙂 Let’s spread that good karma around!

Finally, I’d like to update the HC categories (i.e., the ones listed on the main page). Please comment here with suggestions. If we have enough stores to fill out a category, we’ll add it in. Also, if you have suggestions for more tag words to include on the search page, please post those as well.

Thanks everyone!

Hi everyone!

I’m excited to announce that the new storetop menus are now live across all HC stores 🙂 If you get any questions from your customers about how to use the menu, or what features it includes, please point them to this page.

In other news, there are three gorgeous new store templates to be found on your Store Settings >> Profile page. They were designed by the very talented Kandace of Kandace Wright Designs. Check them out — they are something else!

I hope to have another exciting announcement regarding the search function in the next day or two. Stay tuned!

Thanks for shopping/selling HC 🙂

Phew! I’ve done a lot of debugging on the storetop menus and they are just about ready to be rolled out. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, please check out this post.

Please please check your store designs with the new menu. If you have design issues, and would like me to fix them, please post a link to your store in the comments to this post, a description of the issue, and give me permission to tweak your design to fix the issue.

If you’re a do-it-your-selfer, you can try the following fixes for the most common problems:

1. Mysterious white bar at the top of your store (below the storetop menu). This is caused by setting a margin at the top of the page. The margin needs to be zero’ed out. For example:

   body { margin: 37px 0px 10px 0px; }

   needs to be changed to this:

   body { margin: 0px 0px 10px 0px; }

2. The storetop menu is too far to the right. Some of the links don’t show on the page. This is caused by a

   body{text-align:center}

   style definition. If this is removed, the issue will go away

3. You use white text for your links, so the storetop menu, being white on white, is not very useful. You can add this style definition to your style sheet:

   .navhc a, .navhc a:hover {color:#000000;}

   where you can change the color to whatever you desire, and the link text will then show up correctly.

4. Your store table is wider than your design: check your Store Settings >> Profile page, and ensure that the “width of storetable” value is not too large.

Remember, if you would prefer not to make these changes, please comment to this blog post with permission for me to make the changes for you. The menus will roll out in a week, so again, please check your store designs!

One last note: many of you have commented that the menus seem too small and inconspicuous. My hope is that, since they stay at the top of the browser window no matter how far down the user scrolls, that they will be noticeable because of that.

Thanks everyone!

Whew! I have been working for what feels like months on the storetop menus and they are finally ready for beta testing. What I mean by that is that I have not rolled the change out across the site yet, but I’ve created links that allow users to turn them on and off and try them out.

What are storetop menus?

They are menu bars that will appear at the top of every store that allow the shopper to navigate through HC much more easily. In addition, in Firefox and Chrome, the menu bars stay fixed at the top of the window, so no matter where you’ve scrolled down to on the item listing, you can still see what time it is, and access all the features of the menu.

So what are these wonderful new features?

• There are drop-down menus so the shopper can navigate to his/her My HC and other utility pages
• There are drop-downs to navigate back to the HC calendar or search page
• There are store-level drop downs that can take the shopper to the store’s feedback page, main page, mark the store as a favorite or share the store via social networking sites like facebook, twitter, etc. There’s also a new store-level search page to search through the listings of a single store
• There are item-level drop downs which allow the shopper to spot the item, share it via social networks, or my favorite new feature: we’ve partnered with MyRegistry.com to allow the items to be added to a universal registry list (along with items from any other site on the web)

So, how do you access this amazing new menu?

Click on this link to turn the menu on site-wide: http://hyenacart.com/calendar.php?stmenu=1

After clicking on that link, all the stores will have the storetop menu.

If you’d like to revert back to non-storemenu view, you can click on http://hyenacart.com/calendar.php?stmenu=0

Please leave comments, questions, and bugs under this blog posting. I’m especially interested in having you test this on your own store, to confirm that the menu does not conflict with your store’s design. I’ve tested a lot of stores, but obviously, I can’t test them all. I know of two bugs that will need to be fixed via modifying a store’s design. If, in your style sheet, you define a body tag margin at the top of the page, it causes a horizontal white bar to appear. Zeroing out the margin fixes this. Also, any store with white or very light font will not work well with the menu since it has a white background, so we’ll need to put a quick fix in. I have an idea how to do this, but need a store to test it on, so please send me a link if this applies to you.

In addition to the store menu, there are a few other enhancements:

• Slight reformatting of product listing pages to make them more readable and user friendly (in HCS, price is now shown up by the title, and time left until stocking is listed at bottom of listing)
• Stores with paid time longer than two months in the past will show up as inactive. This is to prevent sales from stores where sellers have not listed in a while (we’ve had both annoyed sellers who assumed their listings would expire with their paid time, and annoyed shoppers who have purchased items from old stores)

I’ll add more if I can think of it, but that’s the main gist. Please let me know what you all think. I’ve had the menus turned on for a week or so now and find it much easier to navigate. Plus, I’ve had a ton of fun sharing links via facebook and twitter. Which reminds me, we’d love to have you join the HC facebook page, fan page, and follow us on twitter.

Thanks everyone!

*ETA* OK — known bug — the drop downs are not working in IE. Will get that fixed as soon as I can figure it out! Fixed that error. Please refresh a few times if the menus are looking funky

It’s just non-stop updates lately, huh?

OK — first of all, if you log into your vendor page and go to Product Listings >> View/Edit items, you will see that there is now a column called “Spots.” This column shows you the number of Spots that listing has received. So far, people don’t seem too opposed to having this number be public, so that may come with the new storetop menus, but we’ll see how it goes.
In addition, I’ve updated the shoppers’ My HC pages to allow the capability of deleting Spots. I was hesitant about doing this at first, but have decided it makes the most sense to give the shoppers the ability to organize their lists as needed.

More updates to come soon. Thanks everyone!

Hi everyone,

Just a quick update for HCS sellers. You’ve probably noticed that the comments never come through on your order emails. That’s because the email gets sent out immediately, even before the buyer has had a chance to enter comments. I’ve just altered the order confirmation email to clarify this point. In addition, if the buyer does enter comments, an additional email will now be sent to the seller to alert him/her. Recall that you can always see the full details of the order (including comments) via the order history page.

Also, I’ve posted a poll on the forums regarding showing the number of Spots a listing has received — whether to keep it private or show it publicly. Please respond when you get a chance: poll

Thanks everyone!