indieCart Seller's Blog

I’ve been getting some bug reports about images not resizing or loading really fuzzy. If you’ve been having problems, please try downloading Firefox and using that as your browser if you don’t already. Also, this may not work, but check the extension of your filenames. If they are in caps (i.e., JPG or JPEG), try changing them to lowercase letters and seeing if that helps. Let me know how things are going by posting on this thread: http://hyenacart.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=8502

Also, I am going to be clearing out old images in the near future. Everything older than 3 months will be purged. There are over 15,000 images in that directory at the moment (yikes!) and that may be making things wonky as well.

If you have been unable to use image uploading for over a month, please let me know and I’ll adjust your paid date to compensate you.

For HC Multi users again —

Just want to make sure this is clear — it’s perfectly clear to me, lol

You can now delete any products that you don’t need any more and it *will not* affect orders that have already been placed, whether they were placed before last night or not. The orders that are showing [Item deleted] are from items that were deleted previous to the changed I made last night. None of your future orders should show that message.

Sorry for any confusion!

I’ve taken a hiatus from KSS knitting so I can concentrate on Hyena Cart stuff. I’ve added some features and fixed some bugs and have mostly been posting them at the HC Forums, but I thought I’d write an email and update those of you who haven’t had a chance to read there much.

First of all, I’ve added a feature for the customers to be able to view their 10 most recent spots on their “My HC” page. Some of you have asked for a way to see how many times your items have been spotted and that’s on my to-do list.

I added some new categories to the store listing possibilities, including Patterns and Home Decorations & Bedding.

I’ve fixed some HC Multi bugs that have been hanging around since HCM launched including: 1) “Invoice already paid” error message from Paypal, 2) e-check payment handling, and 3) editing / deleting items edited or deleted order histories of orders that had already been placed, 4) the “viewall” option on the store config’s never worked properly; so those are all fixed now.

If you’ve emailed me recently, you’ve probably discovered my web-based phone tree. I think it answers most questions and common inquiries. If you have a question, try checking out this page to see if it helps: http://hyenacart.com/more_info.php

Finally, the HC Forums are really hopping these days and you can often get an answer to a simple question there faster than I can provide it. Try posting at the HCQuestions forum if you need help: http://hyenacart.com/phpbb/viewforum.php?f=3

My next big to-do’s are to add the capability for congos to easily re-order their stores on their main shopping page, and I may have a solution for the disappearing emails we’ve always had (or not had). There are tons more on the list, but those are the next ones up. If you ever have a request, you can post it at the HC Bugs & Requests forum: http://hyenacart.com/phpbb/viewforum.php?f=24

I’ve just added some more opportunities for you to customize the look of your store. If you check your Profile page, you’ll see two new fields at the end that allow you to add header and footer code to your product details page. Combined with the code you can add to your main store page (in the Intro and Counter fields), you can now set up your HC store to seamlessly coordinate with your main site. To see what I mean, click on this test store: http://hyenacart.com/Test_congo/

In addition, you can add some style code in the product details header section to change the font and sizing of the page. Here’s an example:

the description after P controls the bulk of the text, and the description after H1 defines the title style.

If you’re curious, that’s a new project I’m working on, HyenaCongo. I know quite a few of you are running informal congos. This will be a more formalized congo which has separated stores and individual vendor logins. The cost will be $25 / month, so you’ll probably want at least 5 vendors together to make it cost effective. This should be ready to go before the end of August.

Some smaller items:

– Added a new store category, “Little Bit of Everything” for those of you who don’t quite fit into any of the other categories.

– Changed the default dates for stocking a new item to the current date at noon.

– Added Yahoo group and FAQ links to the bottom of the vendor page.

Other things I’m working on:

– HyenaCart+ which will be a more traditional cart which allows customers to fill up their cart and check out with multiple items

– Discount codes

– Mass edits (editing multiple items at the same time)

– A listing of web designers who can help you customize your HC store

I’ll keep you posted as I finish things up

Oh, one last thing — I can accept cc payments now. E-checks are also fine and I will reset your stocking date when you send payment, before the check clears.

Thank you so much for choosing Hyena Cart!

I’ve been realizing lately that I spend upwards of two hours a day answering email for HC. I really like to do it, but it doesn’t leave me any time for making all the coding improvements I’d like to do. So I’m trying to streamline the sign-up process and also let you make some of the changes that I’m often requested to make, including adding categories, changing image upload status, changing store names, switching cart styles, etc. So if you need to make any of these changes, log in to your vendor pages and use the “Make changes” link. There may still be some bugs there, so please don’t hesitate to contact me if things don’t work correctly.

I also added an automated reply to my karen@hyenacart.com addy. I really hope this doesn’t make HC feel impersonal. I still want to hear from all of you and communicate with you directly, I just want to cut out some of the more repetitive tasks.

Thanks so much for hosting your store with HC

I’m cleaning out some old files that I’m pretty sure are outdated. It shouldn’t affect anything on your end, but if you notice something acting funny, please let me know.

I will be off-line from 7/14-7/24. If you have anything urgent that needs to be taken care of before I go, please contact me as soon as possible. Otherwise, I’ll get back to you all the week of the 24th.

This first part is just for HC Multi users. I’ve added some options to your store config page at your request.

1) Subcats — this option determines whether clicking on on a category in your navigation tree shows all the items in that category (default), or a listing of the subcategories in that category. This is useful for those of you with a lot of items listed in your store.

2) Previews — this option determines whether or not future items are visible in your store

3) Landing — this option determines whether your link from the calendar and list of stores pages shows all your categories, or all your available items

4) Echecks — this determines whether items are taken out of stock when a customer pays by echeck. The default is no, which waits until the echeck clears. Note if you offer patterns, you probably want this left to no because otherwise customers will be able to see your pattern info before their payment clears. I haven’t been able to fully test this, so please let me know how it works for you.

In other news… I added the word “Accesories” to the Jewelry category so that can be a category to list purses and handbags, etc. I also added a “Patterns” category.

I also changed the code so that your paid date must be within the last three months to be included on the list of stores.

Finally, every once in a while, I receive a payment for your monthly fee where the number after “ID#” is missing. If you could pay attention when you hit the Paypal button and make sure the item title is complete, that would be helpful. Also, if you notice a pattern of when that number doesn’t appear, I would appreciate it if you could drop me a note.

There was a glitch earlier, but everything should be working now. Sorry about that!