After more than a year of research, 2 different web developers, several months of testing, and countless hours of revisions, we are SO excited to introduce you to twinkietush.com!
Developing our site was no easy task. We had several obstacles and challenges along the way trying to incorporate all of our learnings from Hyena Cart and Big Cartel. We cannot thank you enough for all your patience and input while we built our site.
In building the site, we believe we have solved many of the issues we have experienced with our cart systems thus far. The most exciting and important feature we want to share is this: there is no longer any need to refresh your browsers when waiting for an item to become available either initially or from a pending status!
Now, when you are on a specific listing's page and you do not see the Add to Cart button, three possibilities exist:
1. The item is not yet available.
- If it's more than 1 hour from the available time, the date and time of availability will be posted.
- If it's 60 minutes or less from the available time, there will be a countdown clock running. When that clock reaches 0:00:00, the Add to Cart button will automatically appear. Refreshing is not necessary! :)
2. The item is carted by another shopper.
- In this scenario, you will see the window of time in which the item may become available for sale again. If the item is not purchased by the original customer, the Add to Cart button will automatically appear. Refreshing is not necessary! :)
3. The item is sold out.
We understand that not refreshing will take some getting used to, but we truly believe this will help everyone have an equal opportunity to cart items successfully at stockings. Refreshing your browser, while on a specific item's page, will in fact lessen your chances of successfully carting the item.
A few other features of the site we want to make mention of here include:
- A real time clock that is running dynamically on the site (no need to refresh for the current time)
- Shoppers will have 10 minutes to complete their transaction before the carted item is placed back into the available inventory. A countdown clock for each item is present in the buyer's shopping cart, and a message providing a specific window of time that the item may become available again is shown on the listing page for all remaining shoppers.
- Item statuses are shown on the product main pages as well as the All Items page for quick reference. You do not need to go into the specific item page to see if it is available for purchase. However these pages do need to be refreshed to see status changes.
- Past Items will now be saved and viewable in the Past Items category.
- A major change to note with the new cart system is that shipping addresses must now be changed during the checkout process on twinkietush.com - NOT IN PAYPAL. Once you reach PayPal, no changes should be made. Any attempt to change a shipping address or order information once in PayPal may result in your losing the item.
Over the next couple days, we encourage you create your user accounts (a free user account is required for purchasing) and browse the site! We anticipate that you will have questions and we're here to answer them. Please either email us at info@twinkietush.com or post on our Facebook wall. :) After a couple of days, we plan to begin putting items into the store to begin beta testing the site. Some of these listings may be for testing only, some may be for actual items. We will announce any test or "real" stocked items on our Facebook fan page. Once we are comfortable with the results of this beta testing, all twinkie tush items will be sold through the new website!
To help you navigate the site, we have created a Flickr album with screen shots of the main pages and some important notes for your reference. We will also include these screenshots in an album on our main Facebook page. Here is the link to flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/twinkietush/sets/72157632180627116/
We hope you all enjoy the site as much as we have enjoyed building it - it has been a long time coming and we are so thrilled to be opening the virtual doors to www.twinkietush.com! :)
