indieCart Seller's Blog

I just wanted to share this graph with you all. It shows the amount of traffic coming to HC via search engines:

Looking back weeks and months past, the traffic has always remained more or less the same as what you seen in the first three weeks of the chart (the troughs are weekends — I guess mamas are too busy on weekends to go shopping?). But as our recent SEO changes have been indexed by google (our main source of search traffic)  you can see the steady increase since the beginning of November. Cool, huh?

A few tips to help internet searchers find your awesome goodies:

• Ensure that your titles have a good, specific keyword in them — “Mosel Valley” (picking on myself, here), is a lovely name for a yarn, but the title of the listing should be something like “Bluefaced Leicester yarn in Mosel Valley colorway – 4 oz”. Put the keywords towards the beginning of the title.
• Use your keywords in the body of your listing text as well (in this case, “Bluefaced Leicester yarn”, as well as “hand-dyed yarn, “soft wool yarn” etc. would all be good). Put your most important keywords towards the beginning of the text, but sprinkle other keywords throughout in a natural way.
• Use your tags — they are another way to signal to a search engine that your page is relevant to someone searching on your keywords.
• Use the shop description and keywords fields on your Store Settings >> Profile page as another way to emphasize your keywords (place them up-front in your description text, for example, “Kool Sheep Soakers features hand-dyed yarn, hand-knitted soakers, and longies in unique colorways with custom embellishments.”)

Let’s keep helping the world discover our lovely handmade and earth-friendly items 🙂

Just a quick note to let you know I’ve made a few small changes to the HCM vendor pages:

• You can now sort your items in various ways including alphabetically by title, by price, by stock time, by end time, etc. This is available on the main Edit page as well as the Batch Edit pages.
• When you are on the list page, filter by a category, edit an item, and are returned to the list page, the category you filtered by is still chosen.
• There are now small thumbnail images shown on the order detail and printable order detail (pack list) pages.

Let me know if anything’s buggy.

Also, I didn’t realize this, but facebook has removed the ability to add tabs and apps to personal pages. Thus the HC Store and HC Faves tabs will no longer work with personal pages. You can still have the HC Store tab on your fan page, though. I am also brainstorming on adding more social networking features directly on HC (so shoppers can share their spotted items, favorite stores, etc.) More to come on that topic.
Thanks!

I have been doing a lot of studying on a huge topic — Search Engine Optimization. One of the things I’ve learned about is the advantage of having ‘pretty’ url’s, i.e., url’s that contain keyword text. So, I have been working away at creating nice url’s for all Hyena Cart listings. I’ve just made the changes live. While I tested as much as I could, there may still be some bugs in the system, so please let me know if you have trouble viewing listings, purchasing, spotting, etc.

One other advantage of the nice url’s is that when the links are cut and paste in forums, blogs, facebook, etc., the store name and the title of the item are part of the link, giving a better idea of the link content.

Hopefully we’ll see our listings rise in the search engine rankings 🙂
If this goes smoothly, I’ll be working on changing the facebook and google products links as well. All of the old links still work, so no worries there.

Thanks everyone!

Hi all,

I’ve just been updating the Inspire Handmade site and added this Browse page to let people browse handmade stores: 

http://inspirehandmade.org/browse.php 

To enter your store on the page, click here: 

http://inspirehandmade.org/linkpost.php 

Please only enter your link once in a 24 hour period. They’re listed from most recent first and the latest 50 are shown. 

Let me know how it goes  

Oh, and please consider posting your handmade inspiration story. I love reading all your stories!

Thanks!

Something has gone funky with the server and no one can log in to their shopping or selling accounts. We are working on fixing the issue as quickly as we can!

Hi all,

Sorry for the non-stop posts lately. It’s just busy season at HC, I guess.

I’ve just added two new fields to your Store Settings >> Profile pages (near the top). One is called Keywords, and the other is called Store Description. Please fill these in for your store. They will show up in the meta tags at the top of your store page (they won’t be visible in a browser, but the search engines use these tags to find and index sites). Use the most relevant keywords you can think of for the types of items you carry in your store — for example, hand-dyed yarns, cloth diapers, organic childrens’ clothes, etc.

For the description, just fill in a short blurb about your store and re-iterate the types of items you carry.

I’ve also made some other changes to help optimize your listing pages to be found by search engines:

• The item title is now part of the title meta tag (and also shows up in the top part of the browser bar
• Your tags are now entered as keywords in the meta tags
• The first part of your item description is used in the description meta tag

Thanks everyone!

Hi all,

We had a spirited discussion about adding advertising to Spots’ Corner today, both on the forums and the HC Facebook page. As background, Spots’ Corner is one of the most highly viewed pages on the entire Hyena Cart site. It gets roughly 360,000 page views per month. Because of this, we’ve been brainstorming ways to fully leverage the traffic to generate ad revenue. One of the ideas we came up with was to put google ads on the site, but your overwhelming feedback was that that was *not* a good option (that was very loud and clear, lol).

So here is what we’ve done: we’ve separated funds added to your Banner Manage account by whether they came from Paypal or HC$. Spots’ Corner ads can now only be paid via Paypal funds, not HC$. All other site advertising can still be paid by either. Any funds you already had sitting in your account have all been counted as Paypal funds, but moving forward, HC$ and Paypal $ will go in separate buckets.

In addition, we’ve added some 120×60 buttons at the top of the page. We’ve gone ahead and added any button ads that were already running on the forums to SC, just so there was something in the space for now 🙂

Finally, we’ve shortened the time blocks for purchasing ad time (just on SC), so rather than paying $10 for the entire month, you can choose to pay $5 for 2 weeks.

Just as one last plug, banners placed on SC, whether at the top or bottom, generate about 4x as many clicks as other HC ads (see here), so it is well worth it to purchase advertising space there.

Hope that addresses everyone’s concerns. We are keeping the ads focused on the earth- and family-friendly shops you love 🙂

Thanks!

Hi everyone,

I’m very excited to announce the Hyena Cart Affiliate program! You can now earn $5 for every seller that you bring in (note, the affilate page is accessed via your shopper account, not your vendor account).

For details and instructions, go to the Affiliate Page link (in the left hand menu of your My HC page), or go directly to

http://hyenacart.com/affiliate_page.php

Please check it out and let me know if you have any trouble with the system.

Thanks!

Hi everyone,

This one has been on the to-do list *forever*, but is finally ready! HCS and congos now support 5 different currencies: USD, CAD, GBP, EUR, and AUD. Let me know if I’m missing any currencies that someone else would like to see. You can set the currency for your store on the Store Settings >> Profile page. For congos, this is a congo-wide setting. The default was set to USD, so if you want to remain on USD, you don’t have to do anything.

Also, with regards to the non-updating inventory control, I have a few responses to the comments that came in:

• If you want items to come out of inventory when the shopper pays via e-check, you can set that option on the Store Settings >> Profile page (it’s the “Accept echecks immediately” option)
• If you have some example Paypal receipts from orders where the inventory didn’t work, and ones from which they did, it would be really helpful if you could send those to hyenacart [at] gmail.com, noting which ones worked and which ones didn’t
• If it never works for your store, please check that you have a Business or Premier account, and if it still doesn’t work, send an email to that effect to hyenacart [at] gmail.com
• Also note, manually marking an order Paid will not take items out of inventory. You’ll also need to manually update the quantity of the listing.

Please let me know if you notice any wacky behavior in the HCS stores from the currency changes. And thanks for hosting your stores on HC!

On HC Multi carts, for standard listings, items are not taken out of stock until payment is completed via Paypal. However, we have had several reports trickling in that customers are completing checkout and payment, yet the inventory is not being updated. I am trying to track down how widespread the problem is. Could you do a quick sound-off on whether this has been an issue for your store or not? Thanks!