indieCart Seller's Blog

Some of you have noticed that I’ve added a ‘contact me’ link on your
store pages. I did this because I’ve been getting emails from
customers who are unable to find contact info anywhere on HC stores.
I’ve just added the option to customize this link with a graphic
(you’ll see it on your ‘edit profile’ link in the optional
customizations section. Also, if you want to eliminate it entirely,
there are instructions on your profile page to do that as well. As a
courtesy to your customers, please ensure that you have your contact
info listed somewhere in your store.

Thanks 🙂

Karen

PS ~ if you’re working with a web designer, please let them know that
they’re free to join this Yahoo group to get updates on new features,
etc. Thanks!

I think I’ve finally got the discount codes option working correctly.
You can define codes from your vendor pages (Discount Codes link) by $
amount, percentage, or free shipping. The customer enters the code on
their payment page. I’ve also moved the comments box to the payment
page as well, and am considering moving the shipping options there in
the future. I think it’s self-explanatory, but if you have questions,
or it’s acting buggy, please let me know.

Also, if you have used a designer to help customize your store, and
his/her business is not listed on this page:
http://hyenacart.com/customizing.php . please let me know.

The congo coding is nearly 100% complete. Please let me know if you’d
like to start setting one up. I’ve written in a lot of flexibility and
you should be able to make it look exactly the way you want. Pricing
will be $25/month. Here’s a Test Congo:
http://hyenacart.com/Test_congo/ to give you an idea how it looks.
Features include individual vendor logins, separated store listings,
and an automatically generated ‘about us’ page.

Finally, I’ve had a few people ask me about sales tax. I don’t plan on
including this in HC, but you can set sales tax in your Paypal
preferences. It will automatically be added in when the customer
checks out.

Thanks everyone for using HC 🙂

There are unfortunately times when we would prefer that certain people be blocked from purchasing from our stores. To address this, I’ve added a blacklist function to your vendor pages (at the bottom). You can add email addy’s of bad customers here. Be aware that this only blocks the customer from purchasing under that one particular address.

You will receive a notice if a blocked customer attempts to purchase an item from your store.

If you’d like to see how the blacklist works, add the email badcustomer@notnice.com to your blacklist. Then, login as a customer under the id badcustomer@notnice.com password phooey and try to make a purchase. The blacklist affects each vendor’s store separately.

Also, if you get a chance, just verify that the product details, lottery and auction functions are working as usual. I had to modify them to include the blacklist functionality.

It looks like the HC server is down. I’ll contact my host and see when
it will be back up again. Sorry for the inconvenience!

OK — I’ve just coded it so that you can offer your items by auction or by lottery. You’ll see a new field on your stocking page called “Stock type” and I think it actually works, lol.

You can set your auction/lottery to run as long as you want. You’ll need to identify what items are lottery or auction in your title, so it’s obvious to the customers.

Lotteries allow the customers to enter a drawing to see who gets to purchase the item. The code automatically tracks the entrants and chooses the winner at the end time.

Auctions are much like eBay auctions, with proxy bidding. The main difference is that they end at your set end time *or* 2 minutes after the last bid. This prevents sniping and is more like a real-life auction.

The lottery and auctions will stay in your in-stock store for 30 days past the end time, or until you change preview to 0. That’s so the listing doesn’t just disappear when the it’s over, leaving your customers wondering who won.

Please note — the lottery and auction codes have been tested pretty extensively now, but there’s always a chance something weird might happen. Please let me know if something goes awry.

Also — ** I will be out of internet contact from 7/15-7/24 ** If your payment is about to expire and you’ll be wanting to stock next week, you need to send Paypal before Friday. Otherwise it will have to wait until the 25th.

Thanks so much for using HC!

I’ve been meaning to do this forever — a list of our stores broken down by main product. So I’ve just added a field to your profile pages, at the top of the optional choices. Please choose a product type when you get a chance, and as soon as a good number of us are listed, I’ll make this page live on the HC site:

http://hyenacart.com/poweredby.php?list=3

I listed a few of you (hope you don’t mind) to check that the code was working properly. I’ll work on formatting, etc. when I see how our stores are distributed (lots of soaker stores, I know). I have 6 main categories, but let me know if you think I forgot something and you don’t really fit in anywhere.

I’ve altered the way order details are shown, both to you and the customer, and I think that the cart is much more understandable and professional looking. Rather than just listing the subtotal and shipping prices, and naming off any choices that have been made, the orders are now listed in table format. To see what I mean, make a test purchase here:

http://hyenacart.com/Test_cat/

(this item is a really good one to test: http://hyenacart.com/prod_details.php?id=39740&vid=1 )

New orders will look a little different than old ones. For orders placed before the update, you’ll just see the subtotal and shipping; and choices will be listed in the comments box. For new orders, each choice will be listed as a separate line item, with quantity, unit price, and total price listed. It is much more readable this way, and it should be much clearer to your customers what they bought and how much it cost. In addition, their payment page now reads much more like a traditional invoice. In fact, you could now print out the order_details page as an invoice.

Note that customers can change their shipping options after they make their purchase (sometimes they don’t have time to click all the right buttons in desparate hyena situations 😛 ), and that’s why I don’t report shipping options in your confirmation e-mail.

I’m hoping to add discount codes next, since that’s been a popular request.

I just wanted to let you know what the “CGI limits reached” is all about in case your customers are asking you…

The server is just a computer, and although computers are fast, they are not infinitely fast. So if several hundred customers are all clicking ‘refresh’ at the same time, it is just too many simultaneous queries, and the server throws up that error message. I’m actually quite pleased that the server is robust enough to keep chugging away at it and continue processing as best it can rather than crashing and dying. There’s nothing you or I can do to keep this from happening. It’s just too many customers trying to buy the same thing at the same time.

You can answer inquiries about whether a particular customer got an item or not by asking the customer to check her order history. If the item appears there, then she has successfully purchased the item. In addition, there is a link to the payment page listed in the table.

Oh, and one other thing I’ve been meaning to mention. HC can only prevent overselling on items where the quantity is set to 1. If you list something with qty higher than that, it should work under normal circumstances, but it is possible to oversell by one or two if there’s a lot of demand. So if you anticipate a hyena -frenzy, it’s best to list your items singly.

Thanks everyone!

Just wanted to let you know the comments/options have not been recorded correctly in the database since Wednesday evening. They’re fixed now though. Sorry for the inconvenience!

Just a quick note to let you know I just added a search feature to allow customers to search all your stores simultaneously!

http://hyenacart.com/hc_search.php

For now, it only searches for current in-stock items, but I’ll be adding checkboxes so they can search past, previewing and sold out items as well. The engine can only search 4 letter words or longer, so you might want to think about spelling out phrases like ‘all in one’ at least once in your listing. Oh, and the search is looking only in the title and description text.