In this Storque article, Rob/Rokali describes some new changes to the site, focused mainly on tweaks to browsing and searching that will result in reduced category bleed, and vintage and supplies being screened out from the default search settings.
The tagline on our homepage reads Your place to buy & sell all things handmade. This was our focus when we launched Etsy two-and-a-half years ago, and it will remain our focus. However, a bit of housekeeping is needed to maintain this.
Etsy currently has over 1.1 million active listings, and more than twice this number of items have been sold. Way back when, in April or May of 2005, when we were laying out the top-level categories, we included two categories that we thought would be of great use to the community: Supplies and Vintage. We’re glad we did this, and we have been happy to see these categories thrive.
As Etsy continues to grow and the circles of people who know about the site spreads beyond crafters, we see the ratio of buyers to sellers increase. What began as a one-to-one ratio is now five-to-one, and we hope to see it around ten-to-one by the end of this year. This means means more buyers for every seller. It also means the vast majority of people coming to the site are coming here to find “all things handmade.”
We’re super sensitive to how the small businesses get pushed to the perimeter of marketplaces. Indeed, we created Etsy for the specific reason of making sure that handmade goods were kept in the center. We’re going to make some changes to the current site to make sure the center can hold.
What’s going to change?
We’re tweaking how both browsing and searching work.
The main search bar will default to searching only handmade goods. This means that vintage items and commercial supplies will, by default, be excluded from search results. Of course, the searcher can opt to include them by selecting the correct option from the drop-down menu to the right of the search bar.
Right now we have what we call “subcategory bleed.” When you click into, say, Art, you only see items whose first tag is Art. But as soon as you hit a subcategory in Art, like Drawings, you see all items who have both those tags, no matter what the first tag is. This will be remedied to work in the way that most people expect it to work (from other ecommerce taxonomies): Art > Drawings will only show items with the first tag Art; in other words, items inside that top-level category.
Three Special Considerations
One: Patterns will be moved to their appropriate places: handmade patterns with the handmade crafting supplies, and commercial patterns with the commercial supplies. The Patterns for sale on Etsy are both handmade and commercial, and should be tagged appropriately. This moving will be done automagically, and we’ll give specific advance notice for it.
Two: Handmade supplies are handmade, so they’ll still be included in the default results.
Three: We know that changes like these will require some getting used to. We’re going to give all commercial supplies and vintage items an extra 4 months of listing time in light of this.
What’s the timeframe for these changes? Our goal is to put them in place by the end of this month. Like all tasks that require engineering work, things could take longer than expected, so please keep this in mind.
The comments for this article are closed, but here is an accompanying forum thread for discussion.
UPDATE 02/02/08:
Rob/Rokali has provided a mock-up of how the new header might look.
UPDATE 02/02/08 by JB:
Rokali has posted his follow-up
March 1st, 2008 at 9:48 pm
[...] Previous coverage on UEN can be found here. [...]
February 4th, 2008 at 6:45 am
the fact that they are just now making the mockups and still haven’t really decided how it will work gives me the idea they actually just began this project, not that they had been working on it for the past year.
which then prompts the question, what have they been working on for the past year?
February 4th, 2008 at 2:48 am
Yeah, their Storque pages load VERY slowly with that many comments. Engineering team, bad engineering team. It’s a lousy design, so bad design team, too. The Storque could be overhauled in lots of ways.
AS for the search bar, it’s great that the CEO of Etsy is so involved that he is making his own mockups of the search header and discussing it on the forums - or is it? Is that how large companies CEOs usually spend their time?
While I admire the aesthetics of Etsy, the site seems a bit lacking from a usability standpoint. Kalin might do well to delegate the task of interface design to people trained in such things, and he can concentrate on running his now-large business. I’ve seen comments o the forums about ‘they haven’t been doing xx thing because they have been busy getting investor money, etc.’ and I wonder, what about these other 50 employees?
A normal way to do it would be for the CEO to have the management skills to find someone he trusts to create 3-5 versions for him, and then he chooses. Not for the CEO to sit there and do it himself! Maybe I don’t understand Business 2.0.
However, this is the feeling I got from his ‘podcast’ - that every single little interface change on Etsy must be prototyped in Photoshop by Kalin, and then sent to engineering to be implemented. It makes sense, unless perhaps when he is too busy to do such things? Could it really be that the reason Etsy hasn’t done this or done that, is because the person in charge is too busy to do it himself and he has not effectively delegated responsibility to others?
As for the new bar thing, it doesn’t seem to me that adding new options to that search menu is the best way to deal with a major change like this. I think most site visitors will overlook that, and it is a problem of type - choosing what sort of terms I want to search by is what the menu is for - adding options that choose what regions of the site you want to search is muddling the menu’s mission, and it’s poor interface design. Back to the drawing board, I hope.
February 2nd, 2008 at 10:06 pm
I could be biased in my “yay” because intuitively the header is the way I navigate and where my eyes go. I wonder what the topbar versus left sidebar breakdown is among people who are not familiar with the site or just acting off the cuff and intuitively. Sometimes I think something could be added to the left sidebar and I would not know for months if I didn’t read forae, etsynews, and storque once in a while.
February 2nd, 2008 at 9:06 pm
Hmm it even seems that comments are still open on the Storque article, at least the “post a comment” box is open but I did not try to post one. Although the comments page is taking 5 minutes to load and might be timing out for some people. I don’t think their system can handle over 100 comments on an article. They probably need pagination.
February 2nd, 2008 at 7:59 pm
The new header has me asking a simple question - is it clear to visitors that this is where the major searching happens, and are they going to understand the changes being made to put Handmade on top of the hierarchy? Or are they just going to be confused?
I always thought new visitors to the site are so bombarded with First Click choices on the Front Page that they might miss the Header altogether. Or spend so much time trying to figure out what all those boxed on the Left Hand Side mean? pounce, what the heck is that? shop local - do they mean near me? - Time Machine, what the heck is that? Geolocator, is there a map on here?
What I think might be missing in “making changes” on Etsy is that they continue to do Etsy-speak and talk like a insulated group, rather than a simpler-shopping-site geared to helping the Buyer make a purchase. I also fall into this sometimes, because I had to struggle to keep up with all the Esty lingo.
By slightly modifying the header tho ———- doesn’t that kind of mean “in the box” thinking instead of “out of the box” ??? And, while Etsy is in the midst of making changes, do you think Etsy could make other modifications that make sense so that it hangs all together? Are we in for another 5-6 weeks of mass confusion on the site and hundreds of Forum posts asking what the heck is going on? Are more visitors going to abandon the site once they look at the Front Page and don’t have the time to figure it all out?
February 2nd, 2008 at 7:58 pm
I think that the blog post at The Thicket meant to say that comments on the Storque article are closed. Perhaps they could amend that post to reflect that, and to mention that comments are OPEN at the UEN!
February 2nd, 2008 at 6:57 pm
wierd, that trackback says comments are closed here. They are definitely not closed! Anyone is welcome to comment.