indieCart Seller's Blog

Hi all,

Just wanted to make sure you knew that there is an HC$ scheduled for this Thursday, April 12th. If you’re not familiar with HC$, please read this post on the main site blog that gives more information.

Becky, our forum admin, has set up a thread in the Shop Talk forum that has more details on how to participate as a seller. If you have any questions, be sure to post on that thread.

Hope to see you as a participant in the event. It’s a lot of fun 🙂

OK – initial feedback was that the task was too complicated and didn’t always seem to work. So we’ve changed it to a much simple task. Shoppers will be shown a random five-letter word and asked to type it in before purchasing.

Can everyone take another look and give feedback again?

Buy Now listing

Hold listing

Thanks!

Hi everyone,

It’s come to our attention that, more and more, some shoppers are using automated scripts to gain an unfair advantage during stockings. These scripts access listing pages at a much higher rate than humans can achieve by manually refreshing, and, more often than not, result in a successful purchase for the script users. In addition, these scripts seem to cause undue load on the server, causing an overall bad user experience for everyone else (slow page loading times, etc.)

To combat the use of these scripts, we have just installed an option for single-store users (congos to come later) that allows you to require an “are you a human?” task before purchase. This is very similar to the strategy that sites like Ticketmaster have employed for those Hannah Montana ticket sales (they face the same issue with users attempting to purchase using automated scripts). You’ll see this option at the very bottom of your Store Settings >> Profile page.

No solution is perfect. The issue with this solution is that shoppers will now have to do a small task in the midst of their panicked attempts to hit “Buy Now”. We have chosen to use a service called “are you a human?” because it seems easier and more user-friendly than the weird, wavy text captcha’s that are typically used on the internet. We’d love to hear what you think. You can test out the shopping experience on this Hold listing (please delete from your cart after you’re done so someone else can give it a try), and this Buy Now listing (you can test purchase with no obligation to actually pay or buy anything).

Of course, you can leave this option off if you don’t have an issue with high-demand stockings, or prefer not to add this task for your shoppers. However, if you do find that certain shoppers seem to have an unusually high rate of purchase, you may consider using this to even out the playing field.

Again, please let us know your thoughts. Thanks!

Hi everyone,

I just wanted to let you know we are upgrading to a bigger, better server (yay!) this Saturday night. The site will be unavailable from about 11pm to about 7 am. If anything’s wonky on Sunday, please rest assured that we’ll be working to get everything back to normal over the course of the weekend.

We are hoping that this upgrade will alleviate the crashing issues we’ve seen in the past month. Thanks so much for your patience as we work through this.

Also, we’ve had some reports of problems with Buy Now stockings (shoppers unable to cart items they have purchased.) If this occurs, please have the shopper contact the helpdesk at support [at] hyenacart.com. We do really want to fix these issues and make the shopping experience less bumpy! That goes for all bugs — please report them to the helpdesk so we can get them fixed.

Thanks everyone!

First off, for those of you who don’t frequent the forums, we’re excited to announce that we’ve hired a PR firm, JW Public Relations! We are working with Jennifer to build awareness for HC and put us top-of-mind for anyone looking for eco-friendly handmade products.

We have a few things in the works, including:

• We issued a press release and will continue to release more ongoing
• We’ve started a blog for shoppers here. We’ll be featuring articles on green living and also on our lovely sellers. If you’re interested in being featured, please contact Jennifer at jennifer [at] jwpublicrelations.com. Also, if you have any ideas for future articles, please post here.
• Jennifer is collecting samples to send to bloggers, etc. for exposure and reviews. Again, if you’re interested in sending any samples for this purpose, please contact Jennifer.
• We’ve integrated the forums into the rest of the site more closely. There’s now one single log-in for shopping the site and forums

A few other notes:

• Emails were slow this week. Sorry about that! A few emails got stuck because of invalid email addresses and it backed up all other emails. Things should be back to normal now.
• High-traffic stockings: we’ve been doing a lot of work lately to minimize errors during high-traffic stockings. We’ve gotten to a fairly good place now, but if you are still experiencing slowdowns, the following will help: please try not to have too many items go live simultaneously. If you can stagger your stocking, even by a few seconds, so items go live in batches of 5 or so, that should make the stockings much smoother. Thanks!

Hi everyone,

One of the major pieces of feedback from the fall was the lack of a good image uploader on the site. There are now two new uploaders installed — a Flash-based one and a new java-based one (the java one is a trial version, so it’s limited to the thumbnail + three product photos)

I really need your feedback to figure out a few things:

• Should I go ahead and delete the original java uploader? It doesn’t seem to work anymore for the majority of users
• Are people able to use the new java uploader? Note this is a trial version, so it’s limited to a thumbnail and 3 product images for now. If it’s working for people, I’ll buy a license and that limitation will be removed
• Are people able to use the Flash uploader?

I’ll go ahead and leave the slower, non-java, non-Flash uploader available as well, but keep in mind that your image sizes need to be less than 2Mb in order for that one to work.

My main question is — do you now have a viable image uploader option available to you?

For everyone who isn’t currently using image upload capability because you had bad experiences in the past, I’m going to make the new tools available to you for the next few weeks for free. Please give them a try and see what you think.

Your replies will be *extremely* helpful, so please respond. Thanks!!

Our new look is rolling out. You can see it on all the main site pages. This blog, the forums, and the vendor pages will be following over the course of the next week.

I hope you love it — I certainly do! For me, the logo is fresh, inviting, colorful, and really reflects the way I view the site. Our tagline has evolved from “A collection of earth-friendly shops” to “Eco friendly and handmade items for you and your family,” which is better reflective of all the amazing products you create and sell.

(by the way, if you prefer our old look, you can click on the “Classic view” link found in the footer of the main site pages.)

In other news, we’ve been continuing to follow up on your requests from the Features Request page. A few highlights:

• You can now set start and end dates on your discount codes. Just in time for Black Friday 🙂
• The Spots’ Corner stocking pages have been completely revamped
• The search box now has an autocomplete feature which suggests keywords based on most-searched terms on the site. The search page itself has also gotten a facelift
• There’s a new Flash-based image uploader available to those who host images on the site. Please give a try and let us know how it works for you

Again, I thank you so much for all the great input over the past few months. I think we’ve truly taken Hyena Cart to a fresh, new, udpated and better place. Please keep those requests coming! Thanks everyone!

Hi everyone,

Thanks again for all your participation in making our site better 🙂

First off, the facebook app is working now! I can’t tell you what a journey it’s been to make that happen. It included an operating system upgrade, which affected some of the functionality of the site, the purchase and installation of a site security certificate, and an upgrade of the app itself. But everything seems to be more or less back to normal now, whew!

The changes to the seller admin pages are done for now. As promised, you know have:

• Persistent login option for shared stores
• Quick edit option for single-user stores (we’ll see how people like it and roll it out to shared stores if the feedback is positive)
• Batch edit option for orders (mark all “shipped”, for example) for both styles of stores

Image uploading is still a work in progress. On single-user stores, there’s a new Flash-based option and I’m looking for your feedback. The old java-uploader is simply not working anymore. We’re looking to replace it with a much better version, so stay tuned there.

Some of you have not been happy with the changes, and I’ve included an old version of the “View/edit listings” page for both styles of stores if that was your preference.

I also made a few changes to the check-out process for single-user stores. Shoppers now have to explicitly choose a shipping option (rather than having it default to the lowest-priced option), and if they are checking out without logging in, they are asked to provide an email address. I’m hoping this helps with two things: 1) shoppers checking out with incorrect shipping options, and 2) orders coming in with no contact info.

We’re now working on improvements to the main site pages in anticipation of the roll out of the new logo and site appearance. Purchase history, favorites, and the Spots’ Corner stocking pages have been updated. We’ll be working on improving the search page, and making the log in process less confusing.

I know all of these changes can be unsettling, and all of the bugs can be frustrating. I am grateful for your patience and feedback / help in improving the site. Please continue to make suggestions on the Features Request page and feel free to give us feedback anytime by posting here on the blog or emailing support at support [at] hyenacart.com.

As you’ve probably noticed, a whole host of changes have been rolling out on the vendor admin pages. You’ve already been providing great input and feedback and I just wanted to give an update and hear more about how it’s going. So, what’s new?

• Single user store owners (i.e., HC Multi users):
• You now have the option to stay logged in to the vendor pages (also, if you go to the login screen, you get a warning message, but it does provide a link that takes you back in to the main vendor pages or log out)
• The product view / edit page has been split into tabs and paginated. If you want to see all of your listings on a single page, there is also an “All items” tab, and, at the top right, there is a choice for how many items per page you’d like to see (you can choose all). Also, there’s a tab called templates. If you want to create a template, all you need to do is create a listing and make sure the text [template] appears somewhere in the title of the listing
• The batch edit page has been completely redone. At the top right, you can check boxes for the fields you want to edit. You can also sort, filter and choose how many items to show per page. Finally, a ‘check all’ box has been added to the Show and Delete fields
• Finally, I just added a pop-up date chooser for choosing active and end times for your listings
• Multiple user store owners (i.e., HCS and congos)
• Same splits and options on the View / Edit page as above. I also added the old way of viewing the page as an option (last one on the Product Listing drop-down menu) for those of you that preferred that way of viewing listings. The filtering and sort options are new for you, so hope you find them helpful 🙂
• Same changes on the batch edit page and also added batch edit capability for stocktype and shipping text, which were missing before

And coming up in the near future (next couple of weeks):

• “Remember me” login option for HCS stores
• Pop-up date window for HCS stores
• “Quick edit” pages for both store styles, allowing you to edit multiple listings at once to a common value (e.g., setting the end time to a particular date or updating to a new shipping price for multiple listings at the same time)
• Better, more robust image uploader
• Batch editing of order history

There were definitely some bugs the past few days, so I’m sorry for that. If you were having issues, give it another try as I’ve done some updating, and if it’s still not working, please post here or contact the help desk.

The site redesign is coming along and I’m very excited about our new logo. I’m going to keep it a surprise for now, but hopefully you’ll be seeing it within a month 🙂
Finally, I know the HC Store facebook app isn’t working any longer. Facebook has recently made another change and I’ll need to do some repair work / upgrading of that app to get it to work again. I’ll be working to fix this as soon as possible.

Thanks everyone! The feature request page has been working out really well. Don’t forget to post all your great ideas and requests there.

Hi all,

First off, I’ve added definable image widths for listings to multi-user stores and congos. You can find the setting at the very bottom of the Store Settings >> Profile page. Set it to 0 if you’d like your images to show as-is with no resizing at all.

Next, I’ve re-formatted and added some features to the Feature Request page. You can now see the status of requests, and view which ones have been recently closed (for example, I’ve increased the number of info pages sellers can have to 50 from 5, increased the number of store you can mark as favorites to 300 from 30, added a Beauty & Face category to the site, started vetting images that show on the front page of the site, and removed the need for account activation when shoppers register.) You can see which requests are getting the most votes and which ones are in-progress (some really exciting ones in the works right now). You can also vote against a request if you don’t agree with it.

Again, thanks for all the great suggestions. Keep them coming!

Thanks everyone!