ZENCART ZENSDAY – HTML 5 / iOS-friendly forms. Make your site more mobile-friendly. When we improve our site, we share how we do it and release some code with our weekly ZENCART ZENSDAY! This mod will change all of your email fields from type=”text” to type=”email” where necessary. This will make it easier for people with iPads and mobile devices to type their email addresses into the field, and will gracefully degrade to type=”text” in browsers that do not support HTML 5. This came in by suggestion of a customer and within 24 hours, we rolled this out – thanks Brooke!
A while back I was bored and wanted to take a look at the gRaphael JS library, so I made a quick dot chart of our order totals by day of the week. Here it is!
You’ll need to download both the gRaphael library and the dot graph library both from the graphael website and place them in the admin/includes/javascript directory. Our file uses the non-minified version of the dot library, use the minified version if you want to save bandwidth.
ZENCART ZENSDAY! – Shorten & Prettify URLs. This mod will re-write your urls to look nice and pretty! There’s several plugins that SEO your urls for you like this one but they all seemed pretty complicated so we wrote our own.
Zencart’s inventory management is bulky and can sometimes take way too long to do really simple things – like changing the stock of many items at once.
To fix this, we’ve made an admin page calles easy_update.php that can do lots of stock changes at once, as well as organize products by stock, ordered but not shipped, and # of people subscribed. This is our daily go-to for the store inventory ‘health’ – letting us know whats the most important thing to get back into stock at a glance
Some of the people and companies that make/ship/kits and even compete with us, think we’re crazy for giving away core parts of our business like this. Easy Update is one of those – enjoy, go make an amazing open-source hardware business folks
Adafruit posts some Zencart zennieness every week. Here’s our first humble mod of the popular online store software.
Soon one or two popular PCBs will be available for a couple bucks from the PCB drawer. This is just a test, we don’t plan to go into the retail business.
We need a way to stop people from purchasing free prototype PCBs. It’s not that we don’t want to sell you prototype PCBs too, the logistics are just impossible though. Our first Zencart MOD limits PayPal payments to the for-sale boards, and keeps the prototype boards available via free PCB coupon only.
ZENCART ZENSDAY – Predictive inventory. Ok, folks this is likely one of the most useful parts of our Adafruit business we’re thrilled to share with the world… One of the ‘brick walls’ that any business eventually hits is how to manage inventory. If you’re a one person shop and you have 10 items to keep track of, you can probably do it all in your head. But once you get to 25 or so items it can get really messy. That’s why a few years ago we wrote up our own ‘predictive’ inventory system. Now to make it absolutely clear, this php code cannot actually see into the future. However, it can look into the past and make a good educated guess about how long your inventory will last assuming you have pretty steady purchasing history.
Basically, this code will look at all your product categories and items and sum up how many orders were placed for these items. Then it puts them in a table with the current inventory/stock. The table entries have a background of light red if your current inventory will run out before then. For example lets look at this screenshot:
If the future purchasing is like the past, then we’ll run out of 9V regulated adapters in about 4-6 weeks. If you know the approximate lead time for stuff you buy then you can just keep ordering just when the ‘red bars’ start showing up too much!
ZenCart Zensday – Text box length limits! Each week share different parts of our shopping cart system many use these in their own “Adafruit” like kit businesses. This week… Here’s a quick way to limit the length of customer comments on your invoices using javascript. Essentially, this is just a script to limit the size of a textarea element. This can be handy when you need to make sure a text field doesn’t have too much text in it…
We sell very technical things and we often have a lot of stuff we want to add to the product page – technical details like size & weight, electronic details for interfacing, datasheets, example code, schematics, files, tutorials, etc. Before you know it, customers are inundated with too much info! That’s why tabs can be very handy, they are easy to use and split up the information into chunks by category!
Back in stock notifications – Our zen-cart mods/hacks/tips & tricks! We use the Back in stock notifications plugin for zencart. The plugin itself works out of the box, and the installation instructions are easy enough to follow, but there are a few modifications to be made that we think makes it better.
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