indieCart Seller's Blog

Hi everyone,

We have been having a very spirited discussion in the Shop Talk forum (PM a request to a forum mod of you need access) here and then continued here. The upshot is that there is strong demand for a site redesign, among many other things. I would love to broaden the conversation and get more input from sellers who may not be on the forums. Feel free to read through the discussion if you like, or, if you prefer not to (or don’t have time), I just have a few things to ask for now.

First, if you have a site suggestion or feature request please post it on this page:

Feature Requests.

Or, if you see a request already listed there that you agree with, please vote for it. This will help me gauge demand and prioritize the numerous requests that both you and the shoppers have. Note you need to be logged into your shopping account in order to post a request or vote. Also, if you’ve made a request in the past and I’ve promised to put it on my to-do list, if you could re-post it to the Feature Request page, that would be extremely helpful to help me keep everything in one place. Thanks!

Second, here is an image of the proposed site redesign (click here for a bigger image). I’d love input in the comments section here. I will make the site skinnable so if you prefer the current look, you will have the option of continuing to see the site the way it is now. In either case, in the coming weeks, I will be putting more control ion the images that can show on the front page to emphasize truly high quality products and really showcase the best of HC 🙂 Thanks everyone!

Hi all,

As part of the change I mentioned in the last posting, I also had to change the logic of how images are resized in your listings. Whereas before, the code would check your image size and resize if it was too big, this piece of code was beginning to conflict with image hosts like Photobucket, causing slowdowns and page freezes in some stores. I removed that code and also completely removed the image resizing, which unfortunately caused some sellers’ listing pages to become distorted with huge images.

So, I’ve added another option to the Store Settings >> Store design page called “Item listing image width.” It’s set to 0 by default, which means your images won’t be resized. But if you set it to a number (400 works pretty well), it will resize all of your listing images to this width. If you host your images on the Hyena Cart server, you shouldn’t have to mess with this setting.

Thanks!

Hi all,

Just a head’s up that I’ve added the ability for you to define the widths of the listing and category images in your stores. Note, though, that I set the default at 200px, which will make images smaller than that appear blurry in your store. If you’ve noticed this issue, please go to Store Settings >> Store design, and look about halfway down the page. You’ll see fields to define your image widths. Set those to your actual image widths (125px is the other commonly used size), and your images should be back to normal. Thanks, and sorry for the inconvenience!

Oh, one other note. If you are receiving payments for orders via Paypal, but they aren’t being reflected as “Paid” within your store, please check the following:

• First, confirm that your Paypal account is either Business or Premier
• Next, log in to your Paypal account, go to the My Account tab, then click on Profile, More Options. Under Selling Preferences, go to Instant Payment Notification Preferences. Make sure that option is turned on, not off
• If it was off, set it to on and set the url to http://hyenacart.com/include/paypal/ipn.php

Thanks!

Yes, it’s been a bit quiet lately. We’ve been making some minor changes and upgrades in the background, but nothing that really needed to be announced.

This feature, however, is something we think you’ve been waiting for: you can finally organize your store listings within multiple categories. You’ll see check boxes at the top of the ‘add’ and ‘modify’ listings pages rather than the drop-down menu that used to be there. Check as many categories as you like 🙂 There’s also a new batch edit page that allows you to change categories of multiple listings at once. Sorry if you were the victim of any glitches in the past few days as we were laying the groundwork for this change. Hopefully the bugs are worked out now and you don’t have any issues with this new feature. If you do, please let us know.

And, as always, thanks so much for hosting your store on Hyena Cart!

I know, sometimes we just need a kick in the pants to do the more chore-like parts of running a business. So how about, instead of a kick in the pants, I offer you some positive motivation? Follow the directions below and, I will add a month’s paid time to your store. I’ll give you a week: from now until midnight on 5/4. Enough time to do it, but not enough time to procrastinate too much.

So here’s what you need to do:

• For your overall store:
• Add keywords to your store in the Store Settings >> Profile Page >> Key Words field. Make these descriptive and specific to the products you make (for example, ‘hand made natural soap’, or ‘hand dyed merino wool’). This text won’t show up in your store, but it will show up in your meta-tags
• Add a description to your store in the Store Settings >> Profile page >> Store description field. Make it keyword rich (in other words, if you make pocket diapers, include that phrase a few times in your description text). This text won’t show up in your store, but it will show up in your meta-tags
• Add some text in the intro or footer section of your store that includes key words describing your products. It’s a good welcome message to have at the top of your store: “Welcome to ABC store. We offer hand dyed yarn, hand spun yarn, hand knit soakers, and knitting patterns. Please feel free to contact us with any questions.” You can also add some more information at the bottom of the page: “My hand dyed yarn is dyed in colorways inspired by nature. The yarn is organic Blue Faced Leicester from Scotland, etc. etc. etc.”
• Link to your store from some external site (your own website, your blog, your facebook page, etc.)
• For each listing:
• Make your title descriptive enough to be found via a google search. Too often, we use colorway names, or other names that are meaningful to us and our loyal customers, but don’t actually describe the item (is it a dress? is it yarn? is it a diaper? is it a napkin?) Whatever it is, make sure that word or phrase shows up in the title of your item
• Use specific key words in your description as well. Consider including several combinations of your key words (for example ‘natural soap’, ‘handmade soap,’ ‘all natural soap’
• Fill in your tags section with keywords. Include various combinations of your key words
• Don’t forget you can use the Batch Edit pages to make these changes more quickly and easily!
• Email me at hyenacart [at] gmail.com with
• A link to your store
• A link to the external site that links to your store (from the 4th bullet under the overall store instructions)

Why would you want to do all this work (other than getting a free month of paid time)? Well, consider this — the most trafficked stores on Hyena Cart get their traffic not only via the main site pages, but also via search engines, especially Google. Doing this work to SEO your store will increase your chances of being found via web searches, by new customers who are actively looking for products like yours!

What if you’ve already done all this? Send me your info anyway, and I’ll still give you a month’s paid time. You deserve it 🙂

Thanks everyone!

Hi all,

This one’s been a long time coming. For Individual store (aka HC Multi) sellers, Buy Now listings can now have quantity greater than 1, and choices as well! Items are taken out of stock as soon as the “Buy Now” button is clicked. Shoppers can purchase a Buy Now item, shop your store more, add more items, and check out with a single order. Pending Buy Now purchases are now listed on your Order History page, which also allows you to be able to flag non-paying buyers.

I’m excited to add this capability, because I know a lot of people have been needing it. I’ve tested and debugged as best I can, but please let me know if you or your shoppers are having any issues with Buy Now listings. Anything that was pending just as I made the change may be wonky, so just contact the helpdesk with any questions: support [at] hyenacart.com

Thanks everyone!

Hi everyone,

There have been a lot of little changes around the site lately, so I thought I’d give a general update:

• First off, we got a server upgrade — hooray! Please let me know if you are still experiencing slowdowns during stocking times. For the most part, it seems like the response times are much improved
• If you haven’t looked at the main Hyena Cart page lately, it’s worth a peek. We’ve refreshed the look and added product photos from randomly chosen in-stock items that have been Spotted by shoppers. The category menu on the left has also been updated with more search terms and a nicer-looking page and url when clicked. See, for example, one of my favorites: fudge
• We’ve added a “peek” function to the category pages and the calendar. To see what we mean, hold your mouse pointer over a store name. It pops up a small window with a sampling of product images from the store
• Over on the forums, if you’ve made your Pack page public, and the email address you use for shopping and forums is the same, you’ll notice that you know have a Pack Page button when you post. It’s been fun seeing everyone’s Spotted items and favorite stores. There are so many amazing items being offered! Here’s my Pack page, in case you’re interested: link
• Speaking of the forums, Becky is gearing up to host another amazing HC$ day this coming Monday. That’s when a ton of HC sellers offer items for 100% HC$. Want to learn more about HC$? Click here. And here’s a list of the items that are already previewing: list
• Finally, we’ve revamped the information pages about signing up to sell on HC. To make things easier for new sellers, we’ve gotten rid of the HCS and HCM terminology and simplified it to shared and individually owned stores. So you’ll see fewer references to HCS and HCM in the future.

I think that’s it for now. Thanks so much for being part of HC!

Hi everyone,

Just wanted to announce HC’s Penny Promotion: For a limited time, the sign-up fee for stores is being reduced to one penny. This sign-up fee includes a week of paid time. So if you know anyone who has been considering opening a shop, now is the time! How long will the promotion run? we have no idea!

Also note that the affiliate program is on hold during the Penny Promotion.

As for the server slowdowns tonight — sorry about that. We are looking into it and trying to figure out how to prevent slowdowns in the future.
Thanks everyone!

Those of you who already have awesome store designs can just skip on by this post. But if you have struggled with putting together a nice looking store, you can now use the new “Store design” page (under the Store Settings menu) to create a great look for your store. There are three ways to use the page:

• Choose template (easy): simply choose a template, hit “Update config” and you’re in business!
• Customize template (intermediate): either start with one of the pre-made templates, or start from scratch, choosing a background, and colors for the border, text, links, etc.
• Customize CSS (advanced): this is the mode we’ve always had, allowing you full control over the css of your store

The Profile Page has been updated to remove all the design / appearance options that have been moved to the Store Design page.

The old profile page is still available for those of you who just don’t like change (it’s at the bottom of the Store Settings menu).

And finally, one HUGE WARNING. If you choose or customize a template, it will overwrite all of the css / text you have in the intro section of your store. Please save your current intro text to a separate file if you’d like to try playing around with the templates.

The nice folks at http://backgroundlabs.com are generously allowing us to use their backgrounds. I’ve added my favorites to the Customize templates page. Let me know if you like the looks of any of their other images and I’ll add them to the choices.

Thanks everyone!

Finally! A way for shoppers to share their Spotted items and Favorite stores. Check out your own HC Pack page: go to your My HC page (for shopping), and look for the Pack Page link in the left hand menu. You’ll be able to set whether your Spots and Fave stores are public or private (default is private).

So set yer pages up and then post the links here (or on this forum thread). Let’s finally see each others favorite items and stores

Here are mine, although I need to do a lot more window shopping to really do justice to the amazing things on HC!

http://hyenacart.com/hc_profile.php?hc_id=1&page=spots

In the coming weeks, pack pages will get more integrated into the forums and other parts of the site (for example, auction bidders and drawing entrants will be hotlinked to pack pages). Note that your privacy is very important at HC, so defaults are all set to private. I’d love to see everyone share though!

In other news, as sellers, you now have a widget you can use to showcase your HC items on blogs, websites, etc. Go to your vendor pages under Promote >> HC Widget to see what I mean. You will get a code to embed all over the ‘net 🙂

Let me know your feedback on both the pack pages and widgets.

Thanks, as always, for hosting your stores on HC! And Happy New Year too 🙂