Archive for Categories
March 1, 2008 at 9:48 pm · Filed under Categories, Search, Tags · By GreenMamba
In this thread, Etsy memberTwistedThicket inquired about the status of the promised, and much anticipated, search overhaul which would aim Etsy’s primary focus at handmade goods. Admin kfarrell had this response:
Hey folks,
I know you’re all patiently waiting, but I think this is a good time to mention the last line of Rob’s Storque article: “Like all tasks that require engineering work, things could take longer than expected, so please keep this in mind.”
Because Etsy is such a vast site, it is often hard to estimate exactly how long something will take. Doubly so because the site is constantly changing even as we’re working on it. Search changes in particular can be finicky because of the huge impact they have on the site’s speed.
Chris recently put through a bunch of great changes that have sped things up dramatically - meaning we can handle much more traffic before anyone will notice a slowdown. This is one of the many steps towards the improvements everyone is waiting for.
Thanks for your continued patience, although you might want to exhale, oxygen to the brain is a good thing!
Stay tuned to the Storque ( http://www.etsy.com/storque/section/etsyNews/ ) for tech updates about site changes, since the holiday madness ended the ninjas in Engineering have been cranking things out at a good clip. :)
Posted at 5:15 pm, March 1 2008 EST
Read the original Storque announcement here.
Previous coverage on UEN can be found here.
February 22, 2008 at 2:36 pm · Filed under Categories, Showcase · By quirke
In this Storque article, Etsy announces that instead of just appearing on the first page of a top category, the Category Showcases will appear on every page.
Dear Sellers,
The Category Showcases now appear on each page when you’re browsing the Top Categories. That means you get more coverage with your Showcase ads than before, since the Category Showcases previously only appeared on the first page. So enjoy and know that buyers will have their eyeballs on your items even more!
Thanks to Halflyng for the heads-up on this change.
February 1, 2008 at 7:39 pm · Filed under Categories, Search, Tags, The Storque · By quirke
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
January 19, 2008 at 12:25 am · Filed under Categories, Search · By quirke
Etsy has improved the search function to allow searching within categories and subcategories using tags. Previously, only searching within top level categories was possible.
See the related Storque article here.
December 5, 2007 at 4:56 pm · Filed under Categories, Search, Site Maintenance · By starrydesigns
Just FYI in case you had issues this morning.
http://www.etsy.com/forums_thread.php?thread_id=5356227:
New/edited listings may take a little bit of extra time to show up under categories and when using search. There is a little bit of emergency maintenance work going on which should be done by 8am EST….
- H
Posted at 6:48 am, December 5 2007 EST
November 29, 2007 at 11:47 pm · Filed under Alchemy, Categories, Currency, Features, Feedback, Listings, Search, Tags, The Future · By quirke
In this thread, admin kfarrell gives a general progress/status report on many of the top issues currently concerning Etsy members.
kfarrell says:
So without making any promises or specifying any timelines, I’ll address some of the features mentioned at the beginning of the thread. A couple of them aren’t really my area so I’m afraid I’ll have to skip those.
* Checkout process needs reworking
Yes, we are working on layout changes to make this process easier for new buyers on the site who may not already be familiar with Etsy and Paypal.
* Bring alchemy back
OK!
Seriously, it will be back. And better than ever!
* Deal with categories, tags, and search
Well now that’s three features, isn’t it ;) All three of these are being actively evaluated, tweaked, and redeveloped. They are all very complicated systems that work with each other, so nothin’s gonna happen overnight.
* Clarify the place of both supplies and vintage on the site
Vintage items belong in the Vintage category, handmade and commercially produced supplies belong in the Supplies category.
* More frequent and clearer feedback to the forums from the Etsy admin team (FAQs, stickies, etc)
We have recently release a new help guides section ( http://www.etsy.com/help_guide_main.php ) which we will be adding guides to on a continual basis. We are also going through and updating the FAQs.
* More warning and user testing before introduction of new features
We do collect a lot of user input before a feature is launched, and the lead time between announcing and releasing a new feature varies from project to project.
* Bulk/multi-update for items (Shipping profiles, prices, tags)
This is a great idea, although not something we’re actively developing at this very second because we have a few bigger fish to fry, and only so many cooks can be in the kitchen at a time! Also apparently the engineers like to sleep occasionally. Yeah, I don’t get it either ;)
* Multiple currency support for sellers and buyers
This is something we are working on.
* revise flagging system
We are indeed working on a far more graceful way to handle flags
We’re also working on about 50 other BigSecrets I sadly can’t tell you about, although none of them happens to be a Dodgeball game (bummer for dodgeball fans).
We do read *all* the feedback on Etsy posted here in the forums, including the stuff that’s sometimes hard to read. So please, continue posting your ideas (both positive AND negative), I just ask that you keep things constructive and refrain from personal attacks on admins or each other. There is a human being behind every avatar on Etsy.
November 9, 2007 at 5:33 pm · Filed under Categories, Listings · By quirke
In this thread and Storque article, new changes to the listing process for supplies and vintage items are explained.
Sellers of supplies already know that any commercially produced items (i.e. not made by you) must be tagged with “commercial” as the second tag. We’re making the listing process a little easier by adding a special prompt for either handmade or commercial on the two categories where we allow non-handmade items: Supplies and Vintage.
We’ve had many discussions recently, both on the Forums and internally, about the marketplace – specifically the distinction between handmade items and non-handmade items. This tagging change is a response to those discussions and a baby step toward the eventual partitioning of the marketplace.
While Vintage and Commercial Supplies are within our rules (and we like having these sellers here!), it’s often frustrating for shoppers to see these items in their searches and browsing, when looking for just handmade things. Adding the “commercial” tag to all non-handmade items as a step in listing will help us to help shoppers in the long run.
Special note to the Vintage crowd: The Dos & Don’ts currently do not say that Vintage items need to be tagged “commercial.” So please, Vintage sellers, do not fret that you are breaking rules by not using that tag previously.
This change won’t affect any of your existing listings, only new items listed on the site.
October 18, 2007 at 12:52 am · Filed under Categories, Listings · By Lis
Sellers listing new items today were confronted with new and, in some cases, seemingly unrelated suggested tags. Below is a screen capture of the suggested tags for the “jewelry” tag in the Glass category.
In this thread, RD explains,
We’re experimenting with increasing the number of suggestions to see how it goes.
All of the suggested tags are either children in the category tree or siblings — meaning they’re in the same parent category.
October 12, 2007 at 7:05 am · Filed under Categories, Site Use, The Future · By Kate Black
Rokali says: This is an interesting discussion and one we’ve been following closely.Etsy is first and foremost a place to buy & sell handmade goods. Any changes we make to the site will support this.
It is also Etsy’s mission to enable people to make a living making things, and an important part of this is sourcing supplies.
There are two distinctly different audiences for the supplies & finished goods. As Etsy grows, the ration of buyers to sellers keeps growing. In the beginning it was pretty much 1:1, as the people who bought were crafters themselves.
But as we grow, this ratio is now closer to 5:1, with 5 buyers for every 1 seller (we have about 500,000 total members). On a daily basis, looking a new registrations, it’s about 8:1 (about 1500 new reg. per day).
These buyers have no interest in supplies. When they search for things, they want finished products. As such, supplies will be excised from the default search, and we’ll create a special Supplies section on Etsy.
The people who want supplies tend to know far more about the website as well, because they’re most likely sellers here. The beauty of a website is that we can create new space for things as needed (and as we have the engineering resources to do the coding).
As for commercial vs. handmade supplies, this strikes me as a recursive scenario to supplies vs. finished goods. Inside the supplies section there would be a clear delineation.
Ideally such separations will help everyone: buyers looking for finished goods will not have their search results full of supplies; sellers looking for supplies will have a specific place to find them.
source: forums
October 10, 2007 at 3:22 pm · Filed under Categories, Listings · By Lis
In this thread, Etsy admin Iheartmoustaches gives an update on restructuring supplies category:
We are still working on the category restructuring and are focusing on the supplies section to be the first to undergo the reorganization. … It is not definite, but we are planning on combining both handmade with commercial supplies, and are working on a special filter to separate them while browsing or searching. …
[T]his new category structure will also include a few changes to the item listing process that will prevent commercial and handmade from bleeding together. We are also working on a way to filter commercial and handmade as well.
It is unclear if this is a change from previous admin statements:
* In the near future, commercial supplies will be separated from the handmade items and will not appear in default search results (”opt-in” search status).
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