indyish build 70. upgrades: regional shipping and product archives

more site updates. more new features.

1. Upgraded Shopping Cart lets you Set Regional Shipping:

indyish.com has been online for over a year now, and this is still probably one of the most requested features made by our core artists. As an indyish Artists, up until now, you only had one option for setting shipping. This often meant that you were forced to “average out” your shipping costs to an amount that would be suitable for all your customers, located in all regions of the world. Well, it was always pretty difficult to estimate the correct amount - resulting in either excessively high shipping prices (for local customers) or shipping costs that were too low (causing the Artist to lose money on international customers).

Anyway, now Artists can:

• set up to 3 different shipping prices (Canada, USA, International). Just log in, and go to your “Your Extended Profile” page in the back-end. Then scroll down to the bottom of the page and check off the section marked: “use custom shipping” to switch over to the new shipping system. Don’t forget to click the “save” button before you leave the page or your changes won’t stick.
• choose to sell only to specific regions, on a product by product basis. just leave a region’s shipping costs empty and the product will remain unavailable to customers for that region. (you must have already switched over to the new shipping system for this to work)

And, now customers can:

• set their custom shipping destination and view accurate shipping prices for each product relative to the region they’ve chosen. Just look for (and click on) the link marked: “Pick Destination” on any given product page.

2. Ajax Makes our Product Archives load way Fast:

As our Product Archives continue to grow, so has the time it takes to load these darn pages. In one of the last site updates, we tried to deal with this issue by seperating the archives into a series of pages (ie: the whole- « previous entries | next entries » -thing). But, it simply wasn’t enough to speed up page loads and still show a decent amount of products per page (archives current show 15 entries per page - we want to show more).

Now the Product Archives can:

• load more that 15 entries per page (we’ll be experimenting with the best amount per page over the next few weeks).
• load a page without actually loading the image previews for each of those entries until you click on them (ie: load only the image previews you want to see more closely).
• load image previews which can be maximized and minimized. click on the image to be taken to the actual product page (similar to how things were before but being able to see more of the product image should hopefully allow you to browse more efficiently).

Finally, i should mention a few more things:

• As an indyish Artist, switching over to the new shipping system will likely cause all your products to become “Temporarily Unavailable”. This is because you haven’t set regional shipping prices for any of your products yet. To avoid this, set all your regional shipping prices prior to activating (and switching over to) the new system.
• As a Customer, adding a product to your shopping cart will set your destination shipping automatically, but you can also manually set shipping by clicking on the link marked: “Pick Destination” (if you just want to get an idea for shipping costs to your region).
• Also, as a Customer, you probably won’t see any difference in shipping prices (by region) yet. This is because the Artists still haven’t had a chance to update their shipping prices to the new system and so their old (averaged) shipping prices are still given priority.
• On a somewhat unrelated note, RSS feeds for individual Artists have been on the fritz (right now they just redirect you to our main feed which includes all Artists, Blog posts, etc.) and so i’ve had to temporarily remove them from the indyish Feed Central page in order to minimize confusion. If you’ve already subscribed to an individual Artists’ Feed (not the main site feed) - just hang on to it a while longer and i’ll see if i can’t straighten things out.
• In addition, the RSS service (Feed43.com) that we use to show OneNeck’s Comix (from his feedless website) had to be removed (boo!) from the Networking page until further notice. This is because Feeds43 is experiencing technical difficulties and has closed off free accounts (possibly indefinitely). But i think OneNeck is currently having his site redesigned, hopefully with the ability to publish RSS feeds on its own, thereby eliminating the need to be dependant on a 3rd party webservice like Feed43. Still, and until then, the area has been conveniently replaced by a strip of photos from our Indyish group on Flickr.

So, go ahead and check out the new Product Archives (in any category) and if you’re interested in making a purchase here on indyish - don’t forget to look for (and click on) the link marked: “Pick Destination” - if you want to view shipping prices relative to your own region.

And, as always, if you have any questions about how any of this works you can email: support @ indyish.com. If you find any bugs, new or old, send an email to: bugs @ indyish.com.