Making Hivelist Great Again- Updates To E-Commerce On Hive

It's another bull season in the crypto industry, and guess what? Hivelist is still here! Not only did we survive the bear market by the skin of our teeth, but we have matured and improved along the way. In this post we are going to touch on some of the most recent updates that reach across the entire platfrom. We are working hard to not only make Hivelist great again, but encourage e-commerce on Hive!

Where We Fell Short In The Past

We have been spending time trying to figure out where we fell short in the beginning of the project and how we can improve for the future. One of the biggest places we fell short was in marketing. We have failed completely in this effort and haven't been near as consistent as we should be. We were hoping the community would help us spread the word and our affilate program could not only help people earn money, but bring more people to Hive. So we are going to be putting the majority of our focus behind marketing going forward now that the heavy lifting of development is done.

Another place we failed was realizing that as we are based in the US, much of the Hive ecosystem is not. This has forced us to learn a lot about global trade and dealing with various issues that brings.

Another place we messed up was cutting off fiat payments completely from the store. This really killed the momentum that we were building. We got many "atta-boy's" along the way, but found it to be a fact that people do not want to give up their crypto. We are firm believers that cryptocurrency is here and was created to build an alternative economy outside of the goverment ran fiat systems and corrupt banksters. But found that most people still prefer to spend their fiat and hoard their crypto. We let this go on too long and it has really hurt. But in this latest update, we have changed some things.

User Interface Upgrades

Menu and Domain Consistency

Many of the recent upgrades for the user interface have been a long time coming. One thing we did in the beginning was instead of using subdomains, which would have been the way to go, we used different domains as the project evolved. This created a consistency challenge and has been kind of a headache to explain and deal with.

Now, all of the menus are consistent across both the on-chain and off-chain sites and they all tie in together in a way that unless you were watching the URL bar, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference! So we have finally tied all the pieces together without having to rebuild everything.

When you go to the 'Store' menu, it will take you to the Hivelist.store domain. This is a Wordpress/WooCommerce powered retail store. So when you create an account here, just know it's not an on-chain account, even though we encourage you to use your Hive username when signing up as a customer and require it for store vendors so we know who to pay in HBD for sales. We are working on a Wordpress plugin that will let you use Hivesigner or Hive Keychain to create your Wordpress account, but haven't been successful in that venture yet... To come sometime in the future...hopefully, lol... You will see a 'Login/Register' option that will turn into the 'My Account' menu on the right hand side (on desktop/laptops) once you are signed in.

The menu options will change slightly in that the 'Store' option will now have a drop down menu that will show the store categories and help you navigate around the store.

When you click on the 'Classifieds' menu option, that will take you to the Hive Engine based part of the platform that has the on-chain classifieds network which is our Hive based version of Craigslist, or at least our attempt. When you sign into this side of the site, you are signing into your Hive account.

In the menu, you will see the dropdown option change to the 'Classifieds' menu. This will show options for your feed, and explore option, and the various classifieds categories. Use the category tags in your post to earn LIST tokens!

On this side of things, the side bar has menu options that will take you to template posts for the various categories that you can use to help you get started with your advertisement post.

Default Darkmode

As you see in all of the images above, you will notice a theme, or a theme change I should say. We have added dark mode to the main site and store! The on-chain classifieds already had it, so in the name of consistency, and some community feedback, we added darkmode to all domains, and made it the default!

This is something we tried in the past, but the first versions of the WP Dark Mode plugin we used was lacking a bit and caused more issues than what it was worth. But they have done some great updates to the plugin, so we added it and everything works and looks great! We have had to go in and do some custom CSS and settings to get it all to work right, but the work as been worth the results!

Retail Store Payment Updates

As I stated above, we have brought back fiat payment options to the Hivelist store! We went with Square because it's the only major payment processor that hasn't cut us off for being a crypto company. Stripe cancelled our account a couple of years ago when we got into NFTs. Silly. But Square is a-okay with everything, just limited to certain regions. Please note, there is also an additional fee for paying with fiat to cover the processing fees. No extra fees for paying with HBD, BTC, BCH, or XMR!

Card payment acceptance with the Square app is currently available in the US, Canada, Australia, Japan, the United Kingdom, Republic of Ireland, France and Spain. We currently don’t support payment card processing outside of these countries or in U.S. territories such as Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, and Northern Mariana Islands. Our account is setup by our parent company, The Logical Dude, LLC, and you may see this on your statement.

With the WooCommerce Square app, we also are able to accept payments through Cash App, but it's only available for US and UK customers. It also gave us the ability to accept Apple Pay and Google Pay for those who are able to use those payment methods. So for many people, we have your fiat payments covered. For the rest of you, we still accept and prefer our crypto payment options, HBD, BTC, BCH, and XMR!

Reduced Prices To Start A Hivelist Store

This is another feature that is overlooked by many Hivers is the fact that you can start your own e-commerce hustle with the Hivelist Store. This is where you have control over your store, your products, prices, shipping rules, etc! We do take a 10% commission for hosting and payment processing. When you ship the item to your customer, or when the order completes if a digital order, we will send you HBD for the sale! This is great for those who create their own handmade items or resellers.

The fee for this has changed over time, and right now, is only $5 to get your own store started! The funds for this are used to buy SWAP.HIVE and LIST tokens from the market and deposit into our DEFI diesel pool to add more liquidity for traders!

Print On Demand Listings Are Now FREE!

In effort to encourage more creators and communities to sell their merchandise on Hivelist using our print on demand options, we have made this a FREE service! This means you can submit your designs to be used on an array of clothing items, accessories, home goods, printed art, etc.

We do take a higher commission for this service as it requires some middleman work on our end, but you no longer have a listing fee and you can get paid in HBD! So if you have a community or brand either on Hive or not, let us put your logo on some cool merch and sell it on our store!

Affiliate Program Update

We have talked about this in a previous post, but just to remind you we have an affiliate program for the Hivelist Store that will earn you 5% commission on all sales you drive to our store! You will be paid in HBD, so you need to make sure you get registed with your Hive username so we know who to pay!

First thing you do is create a customer account on the store by using the Login/Register option in the menu. Once you have an account, you can then sign up as an affilate and get access to your dashboard.

Here you can see your referrals, sales, and how much you can expect to be paid. We pay affiliates with HBD on the 1st and 15th of every month.

One cool thing you can do is go into the Link Generator and copy your overall referral link, or you can create a referral link for a specific product! Simply paste the URL of the product you are wanting to promote in the box and it will generate a referral link for that product!

Our affiliate program is a great way for Hivers to earn some extra money, even without having your own products or designs for sale! This also helps us spread the word to a greater audience and can help be a great attractor to the Hive ecosystem.

Wrap Up

To wrap things up, this is one of the biggest updates in the history of Hivelist. We are excited for this renewed motivation to build an alternative economy using crypto payment and trying to bring more focus to the Hive ecosystem through the amazing use case of e-commerce.

Let's get back to the idea that crypto is here to create a new economy and businesses that accept these priciples can't survive without your help! So next time you want to do some online shopping, come see what the Hivelist Store has to offer or go check out the classifieds to see what the community is offering!

Together, we can make Hivelist and HiveCommerce great again!

Keep calm and Hive on!

https://hivelist.io

If you like our work, please support our developer by voting for @thelogicaldude on Tribaldex with your WORKERBEE power!

An E-Commerce Solution For A Cryptocurrency Based Economy

Web 3 Classifieds Network | Multivendor Retail Market | NFT Marketplace | DEFI Pool

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