Etsy has gotten rid of the old “brick wall” graphic that you used to see when trying to access deleted shops or accounts that never existed. The new error page has links to continue shopping. This improves the navigability of the site and is much more buyer-friendly than the old brick wall, which had no navigation links.
Now, users can easily switch between searches for Handmade, Supplies and Vintage.
kfarrell says:
Here’s latest TechUpdate from the Storque: http://www.etsy.com/storque/section/etsyNews/article/tech-updates-prompt-to-switch-between-searches/2106/
“Since we launched separate drop-down searches for Handmade, Supplies, and Vintage items, we’ve been getting a lot of feedback from buyers and sellers. Thank you to everyone who let us know what you think of the changes — we’re listening!
We wanted to make switching your search between Handmade, Supplies, and Vintage a little easier, so we’ve added a little prompt to the top of the search results page. If you search in Handmade, links to perform the same search in Supplies and Vintage will appear. Searches in Supplies will show links to Handmade and Vintage, and searches in Vintage will show links to Handmade and Supplies.
We hope these changes makes searching on Etsy a little easier for you!”
Posted at 12:38 pm, June 26 2008 EST
Quoted from the companion thread, which can be found here.
As detailed in this Storque article, Etsy delivers on its promise to give a one-time listing extension, of four full months, to eligible vintage and commercial suppy listings. This offer was made to compensate sellers of these items for changes to the default search feature which separate their listings from the pool of handmade items.
Excerpt:
Dear Etsians,
Back in February when Etsy announced upcoming changes to the way search would work, we made a promise to our Vintage and Commercial Supply sellers that we would extend the life of their item listings by four months, for free.
The search changes took effect May 5, and we are now ready to honor our promise. We intend to start rolling out the additional four months beginning on June 30, 2008.
The four month free extension will apply only to Vintage and Commercial Supplies sellers.
Here’s the Plan for the Four Month Extension:
- Only properly tagged listings will get the four month extension, so this is a great opportunity to make sure your Vintage and Commercial Supplies items are properly categorized. In other words, make sure the top tag is “Vintage” or “Supplies.” In the case of Supplies, items should also be tagged with “Commercial.”
- On Thursday June 30, Etsy will capture a snapshot of all Vintage and Commercial Supplies listings on the site.
- Immediately thereafter, we will begin rolling out a free four month extension on all of these listings.
- The rollout will take approximately 30-45 days from June 30.
- We will keep you updated on the progress and will announce when the process is complete.
- After the process is completed, if you have any questions or concerns about specific listings, contact support@etsy.com. Please include the following words in the subject of your email: “4 month extension.” This will help us target your questions and get back to you more quickly.
Please see the article for a list of FAQs regarding this extension plan.
Also follow the announcement thread here.
This Storque article briefly outlines the changes.
Today, we launched some exciting changes to Etsy’s search engine. These changes were requested by the community and we think they help improve the shopping experience on Etsy.
We’ve separated item search into three new searches: Handmade, Vintage, and Supplies. The default is Handmade, with Vintage and Supplies available in the drop-down. You can also select “All items” to search Handmade, Supplies, and Vintage all at once.
Consequently, it is critical that sellers categorize and tag their items correctly in order to place them within the proper search. Last week, we posted some information that will help you with that process. You can read the initial heads up here — Tech Updates: Upcoming Changes to Search and Categories — and its companion, follow-up article here — Upcoming Changes to Search: Your Questions Answered.
Just to clarify, category bleed is addressed when searching via specific top-level categories, rather than via the search bar at the top of each page. The drop-down menu does default to handmade, and includes the other search options, both new and old, but searches the entire database, not within specific categories.
HeyMichelle says here:
I mean- the “no bleed” is for categories. By categories, I mean the category browser. Search does not search just within that category…
If you would like to search *just* the art category, type in your additional search terms from the Art category, a subcategory, or subsubcategory from the Categories pages.
There are numerous threads following this change, in several forum sections. There is also some speculation that the change has affected the ability to list new items in at least some categories. See this thread in Bugs.
update by JB:
The bug linked above appears to be resolved and was not a true bug, but a problem on one user’s computer.
This Storque article answers some of the most frequently asked questions regarding the upcoming changes to search and categories.
The discussion is still continuing in the related forum thread here.
In this Storque article, Marymary describes the long-anticipated separation of vintage and supplies from handmade items in the Etsy search function, as well as other important changes to categories and search. An excerpt from the article:
Hello Etsians!
On Monday, May 5, 2008, some important and exciting changes are happening with searching and categories. These changes are in response to feedback from all around the Etsy community, and were first introduced back in February with Rob’s Focus on Handmade Storque article. Here’s a rundown of what is to come:
We’ll be separating item search into three new searches: Handmade, Vintage, and Supplies.
Handmade Items – This is the default search. This searches all items on Etsy that are not tagged with “commercial” and do not have “vintage” as the first tag. Handmade supplies will still appear in this search. You can search tags and titles or tags, titles, and descriptions.
Supplies – This will search all of the supplies on Etsy, both handmade and commercial. Any item tagged “supplies” will show up in the results.
Vintage – This special vintage search returns only items within the Vintage category. This means items with vintage as their first tag (selected from the dropdown menu in the listing process).
The existing search will also remain available. Just select “All items” from the search bar to search handmade, supplies, and vintage all at once.
We’ll also be making changes to the category browser. Currently a top-level category such as Jewelry shows only items within the Jewelry category. The subcategories and sub-subcategories contain any items that have the tag “jewelry,” but are not necessarily in the Jewelry category. We call this “category bleed.”
The changes on May 5 will eliminate category bleed. All subcategories will only show items from within that category. Meaning the subcategories of “jewelry” will no longer pull up jewelry supplies.
The Patterns category is also gearing up for change, although this will not be part of the May 5 update. In order to help keep things organized, Patterns will be moving into the supplies category. A new drop-down will appear in the listing process for Patterns, prompting you to select handmade (if it’s your own pattern) or commercial (if it’s someone else’s pattern)
There is an accompanying forum thread here.
According to this Storque article, you can now search the fora by title as well as post.
Searching the Community section’s forums has become a bit easier today, as we’ve rolled out a forum “title only” search option. Previously, the only way to search the forums was to search all text across all posts.
You’ll find that “forum titles” is now the default search method when browsing forum pages. This will allow you to limit the range of your forums searches to only thread titles.
This is also a good time to remind everyone using the forums to use descriptive thread titles! Descriptive thread titles make it easier to scan through the forums, and they will now make it a lot easier to search the forums at large.
This is the first of a few near-term forum search upgrades — let us know if you like it!
You can make comments and suggestions in this thread.
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.
In this Storque article, Etsy reveals that you can now filter Colour Picker results by search terms.
The Color Picker, one of our oldest and most iconic features, has received a significant update today.
Now you can filter your color picking by using search terms! First, enter what you’re looking for in the text field on the left, then click a color on the right.
You’ll get some listings that match both the color and the search phrase. To see more results, click the “MORE” button.
You can also click different colors to see all of the results side-by-side!
In addition, we have tweaked the color averaging algorithm to be more precise. This will effect all newly uploaded listing images, so our results should get even better as time goes on.
These enhancements should make the color picker much easier to use. Let us know what you think!
You can chat about it in this thread.
In this thread, Revolving Dork said:
Today we’ve added the option to filter your results in items: tags, titles searches by a price range!
Search for items using the search bar at the top of any page, and you’ll see the new Price filter tool on the right side of the screen.
Simply enter a minimum and a maximum price, click on “Show Items”, and you’ll see only listings within your price range.
With this revision we’ve also increased the number of results shown per page to 21, from the original 15 (It always has to be divisible by 3 for the gallery view!). We think this will make it easier to browse through more listings more quickly.
Capping off this update, we’ve also removed the ability to sort items by their views on all pages. This particular feature has been broken for a while now, so we’re going to keep it out of the public eye until we can get a better solution online.
Let us know if these changes are helpful!
Apparently when the change was first made, it removed the item views column from individual shops, as well as removing it from search results. But that shop item views column has been returned now.
UPDATE by GreenMamba (February 8, 2008)
Observant seller SingingSky found a glitch in the newly added sort-by-price-range feature.
I just noticed when you put a price range in the new search function, and then “sort by” it resets to all listings, and you have to re-enter the price range.
This could be potentially annoying for buyers…
You should be able to define your price range and then sort your heart out!
At least I feel this would be more convenient :)
Within the hour, RevolvingDork reported the issue resolved - another super-fast fix by admin.
