Impression of a new portal user. :-)

2026-07-01 - Shop Front Sync

The Shop Front sync is currently broken on the new Neopets shop front layout.
EDIT Added support for Firefox, Safari, & Chrome. Please neomail dmitri_stanislaus if you still experience issues.

Submitted by P4Ssoa on Mon, 16/04/2012 - 6:42am
See next post ;-)
Forums: 
Development & Suggestions
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Hey Guys,
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I just started using the portal again. I used it a very long time ago, but back then I had made my own excel portal specified to my needs, so I never really used it in the past.
As a new user, I thought I may have a fresh view on things and I thought it would be nice to share it with you. Though please don't see this as negative criticism. I'm just hoping to help this already awesome project! :-)
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First thing I did was update my shop front into the portal. I'm doing the books category and I have over 10 pages of stock. It's a lot, and a hell to organize it myself. I'm hoping this portal can help me manage my shop and get me a better view of what items I currently have in my stock and what items I should still need to buy.
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I downloaded the program and read the guide
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After processing the shop front the program asked me what items are not in my specific category... The item box was big enough to list only a couple of items. I have over 10 pages of items and somewhere in there are 3 items which should be removed. It's a quest on itself to find the items in such a small box! :-D It would be a lot easier if the box contained 30 items, or perhaps even was shop-page specific or in alphabetical order.
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After uploading all the pages I went to check out the manage stock tool. First thing that came to my mind was: Why is the box (that is listing my items) so small again? I would think the items in my shop are the main focus of this section, but I can only see 6 of them?
Then I saw that when you click an item, you can see the item name, buy at,... I read somewhere that you can upload wiz prizes to your item database. Awesome feature! Really interesting! But when I tried to connect with the database, it said the database was down. After some research on the website I noticed this feature will be online in a few weeks. Is this correct? This would be a really nice feature :-)
I notice the portal is a nice management tool for shops, but you will have to fill in a lot of data manually. Manually imputting data requires a lot of time and is a boring job. People don't like to do that. So I would think there needs to be an easier way to set certain parameters instead of one by one.
This is why I would suggest: To get a better overview of all the items in your shop, it would be nice to make the item box larger, so over 30 items would fit in it. It would be very nice if you could sort the item list on:
  • Alphabetical order
  • Release (=item id and order they appear in your shop)
  • Price
  • Rarity
This way it would be usefull if you could select multiple items at once and edit their data. Like this you would be able to select all r90+ items for example and set their in stock quantity to 1; while you can also select r0-50 items and put their quantity to 5 for example.
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Rarity is especially usefull:
  • You can stock cheap low rarity items first and grow from there
  • You can check what faerie quest items (based on rarity) are missing in your shop
  • You can see what foods are gourmet (for the food category)
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Something else I'm missing in the portal:
Sometimes you enter a shop of the same category and you notice a lot of items are cheap! You want to buy lots of them at once, though you don't know what of these items you already have in stock, and what you priced them at yourself...
It would be very usefull when you could copy another person's shop front in the portal and compare what items you don't have yet, if you do, how many do you have in stock, and at how many neopoints did you price every item? What items are worth buying and what are not? Maybe in the future you could even compare this person's prices with the regular wiz prices from the neomallers database!
You can do the same thing when the neopets main shops restock. You just copy the items in the portal and you see what items you don't have yet. This would make restocking a lot easier! :-)
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So that would be my first impression and thoughts about the portal. :-) I hope you guys have feedback on this too!
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Greetings,
P4Ssoa
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ps: Wow you even need skills to format your post in this forum *lol*
P4Ssoa | Mon, 16/04/2012 - 7:47am |

There is one word to sum up the crappy user interface - it's old and outdated and was meant to run properly under 1024x768 resolutions. With HD resolutions of 1980x1080, it's really ridiculous :P The web portal was supposed to address this but it ran into some issues - mainly dealing with database resources. Rather than restrict usage/making it a premium feature, i decided to prolong the release until everything works well. There's also the security side too since you're feeding stuff into the server. The forums got busted over the april fools trick. Im not sure what happened but i guess the thing i created didnt work too well with the updated neomallers for some reason... If anyone knows of a good way to effectively process a MySQL table of 100-500k rows, let me know.. as this is the problem that is stopping the online version from being released! ----------------------------- [color=purple]Are you protected?[/color] http://www.neopets.com/~punchback_bob CG information & more
----------------------------- [color=purple]Protect your account[/color] http://www.neopets.com/~punchback_bob CG information & more
saudor | Mon, 16/04/2012 - 5:55pm |

I see. That does clarify a lot of things! :-) I don't know anything of MySQL/php or other coding language or server stuff. If it's a one time process, maybe you can use macro's? If not, I have no clue.
P4Ssoa | Tue, 17/04/2012 - 7:27am |