As many of you know, today’s stocking on Hyena Cart was
incredibly problematic and frustrating for everyone. We have dealt with crashes on HC before but
this was our worst by a mile. After so
many months of various issues with HC we have decided that we can’t risk
another stocking like this. We have
utmost respect for Karen and her site and we have loved being there, but we
need to ensure that this doesn’t happen to our customers again.
As I mentioned on facebook earlier today, we have been
working behind the scenes for some time now on building our own cart
system. I want to give you more
information about our progress there. In
March of this year we selected and began working with a web development
company, after many months of meeting with other web developers who were unable
to address and solve our specific problem.
We had very high hopes that this company would build us a site that
would meet our needs and in fact we planned to launch the new site this
month. In early June we received notice
from the company that their programmer was unable to complete the project, and
we were left back at square one, frustrated and disappointed.
We are currently in the final stages of selecting a new web
development company and hope to have that selection finalized this week. We hope and anticipate that the new site will
be ready to launch sometime this fall.
Why is it so hard for us to find the right developer? From what we can tell it is down to the
specific needs of our company. We have a
fairly unique problem that requires a unique solution. While our day to day traffic on the store
site is fairly low, our stocking-time traffic is incredibly high and the extremely
high refresh rates at time of stocking are taxing on a server. We need a server that can accommodate that
concentrated traffic combined with a cart system that will not allow oversells. Additionally we need a cart system that will
allow us to stock multiple diapers simultaneously in order to give more people
a chance to purchase one (instead of stocking one print at a time, giving the
person with fastest internet the chance to cart every diaper.) This isn’t something most programmers have
encountered before and requires a highly customized solution.
Since we are looking at a few more months before
twinkietush.com is ready to launch, we have decided to go back to Big Cartel in
the meantime. There are some drawbacks
to BC, but we feel that it is our best option at this time and we believe it
will be a great temporary solution.
Please check out this blog post from the last time we stocked on Big
Cartel – some of the information doesn’t apply (like it being a trial, for
example) but there is a lot of important and relevant info about BC to look
over. Barring a major stocking problem
or other unanticipated circumstance we plan to stick with BC until we can move
to twinkietush.com.
We are also working very diligently on a significant
production increase. I will have more to
say on that subject in the coming weeks but for now I will just share our
excitement at the rapidly approaching changes and improvements we are working
on! As always I am so thankful for the
amazing extended twinkie tush family – you and your beautiful little ones – who
make all of this possible and who inspire us to be our very best selves and the
very best company we can be.
YOU.ARE.AWESOME. nuff said. :)
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