Archive for Listings
January 28, 2009 at 2:05 am · Filed under Listings · By JB
source: this forum thread
matt says:
Hello friends,
We have been following the various threads outlining some community members’ concern about items not appearing in the Recently Listed Items ticker on the homepage or Time Machine 2.
I would like to offer a bit of clarification here.
…
Etsy does not guarantee that your listing will include exposure in other places on the site, like the Recently Listed Items on the homepage or the additional shopping features. As Etsy has grown, an increased number of listings compete for time in these areas of the site. For the most time-sensitive of features, it may not be possible to show all items immediately as they are listed.
http://www.etsy.com/forums_thread.php?thread_id=6017266&page=10
matt says:
Hi Batiz,
No, it does not guarantee it. All of these features and search , default to the most recently listed item. Renewing may or may not get your item at the very top, but it will certainly put it before those who did notrecently list, renew or relist.
http://www.etsy.com/forums_thread.php?thread_id=6006289
HeyMichelle says:
Hi there,
Because of the volume of new listings, we are uploading new listings in “batches”. This means that there will be a delay for appearing on the Front Page and Time Machine 2. Additionally, items *may* not appear on the Front Page “Fresh Items” section.
Update Jan 29
Matt has posted this Storque article describing the issue.
One lever that we recently adjusted was the way that listings, new or renewed, are delivered to the site (see this post). This adjustment involved delivering items in very frequent batches rather than continuously in real time. As an outcomes of this change, there is less of chance that an individual item will appear in certain ways of discovering items on Etsy, including the Recently Listed Items section of the Homepage, the Fresh Items list on the Buy Page, as part of Pounce, or in Time Machine 1 or Time Machine 2. Each of these product discovery functions works differently and the chances of sellers actually seeing their items appear in all of these places depend on many variables including listing volumes at specific times, site speed, and each user’s speed of navigation.
He also has apologized for the lack of communication in getting this information to sellers (who may be still renewing frequently on the assumption it will buy front page exposure, as it used to).
1. Etsy needs to communicate site changes more effectively.
Correct, and I take full responsibility here. I would like to apologize to the community at large. We did a poor job of addressing this issue in a timely or effective way. Several lengthy forum posts, a few days after the issue first arose is not acceptable. I didn’t fully appreciate the need to communicate more comprehensively about this issue.
Many of you made suggestions about how Etsy can better communicate with sellers. One of the first steps we are exploring includes an “admin” (e.g. Etsy staff) announcement section of the Forums. Though the Forums get millions of unique page views per month, I realize that they are not read by all in the Etsy community. Nevertheless a dedicated Etsy admin forum might be helpful in making it easier to find our announcements about important changes. I will keep you posted on this.
In the mean time, I’ve learned a valuable lesson here, and will be working much more closely with engineering to make sure that important site changes and updates are communicated more effectively and in a timely manner.
Update Jan 30
Today Etsy sent a Tech Updates email (to those users who are opted in) which explains the renewing issue and links to the Storque article.
Also, apparently some older Storque articles and the Etsywiki have been edited to remove all the places where they said renewing was a good promotional tool or would give you any Front Page, Pounce or Time Machine exposure.
October 23, 2008 at 11:45 am · Filed under Customer Service, Listings, Miscellaneous · By GreenMamba
Members have been reporting a delay in having cancelled sales processed and fees refunded - in some cases the wait is up to three or more weeks.
In this thread, admin stellaloella explains what has happened:
We had a minor technical issue that has caused an unexpected delay in processing canceled transactions recently. The good news is that we hope to be back on track soon and processing these requests on a more regular schedule.
If you should run into a Feedback issue or other problem related to a canceled sale that you’re waiting to be processed, please email support [!at] etsy.com for help.
Thank you for your patience. We apologize for the inconvenience.
Posted at 11:30 am, October 23 2008 EST
No word on what the ‘minor technical issue’ was, when it occurred, or why the processing is now running weeks behind.
September 25, 2008 at 12:23 pm · Filed under Categories, Listings, Search · By GreenMamba
In this Storque article, admin stellaloella follows up on Etsy CTO Chad Dickerson’s Honest Beginning article, speaking frankly about the current state of Etsy’s search feature and the lag time in batch loading to category pages.
Excerpt:
Last week Etsy’s new CTO, Chad Dickerson wrote an honest account of some of the technical challenges Etsy.com is currently facing, specifically in reference to the search function. In that article, Chad mentioned some new hardware and “other tweaks” to improve things. Many of you may be curious about what we’re working on, how it’s helping and how it will impact your ability to shop and sell on Etsy. So let’s get right into the nitty gritty …
New Hardware
Without getting into too many technical details, last week we added some new hardware with the goal of improving speed. We’re happy to say so far it’s helped, and some of our slowest queries more than doubled in speed. This is a great improvement, but still below our internal goals — which means there is more work ahead. The Engineers are continuing to monitor search speeds and page load times.
The article goes on to address the following topics:
Simple Searches Redirect to Categories
Limited Number of Search Terms (or “My nots are not working!”)
Batch Loading in Search and Categories
What Does This Mean For Sellers? (or “How will shoppers find my items?”)
Excerpt:
Looking Ahead
Chad and the Engineering Team are working on longer-term solutions to our current search issues. We don’t want to disrupt site performance during the holiday shopping season, so in the meantime, the above measures are aimed at the goal of ensuring people can find and purchase the many incredible items available on Etsy.
We’ve closed commenting on this article. If you would like to comment, please join the discussion in this Forum thread.
September 17, 2008 at 12:23 pm · Filed under Convos, Features, Listings, The Future · By GreenMamba
Etsy announces the impending arrival (no firm ETA) of a long-asked-for feature, Shop Vacation Mode, and gives a sneak peek at how it will look and function:
Excerpt from the Storque:
Here’s a sneak peak of Etsy’s upcoming feature, Vacation Mode. Vacation Mode allows a seller to put her shop on hold if she is out of town, sick, or otherwise wants to take a break from selling. We’ll be rolling it out soon, so keep an eye out!
When in Vacation Mode, items in a seller’s shop cannot be purchased. The seller’s shop will appear empty, with a special vacation announcement. The seller’s items can still be viewed via a direct item link (if they are linked from an outside blog for example), and can still be Hearted (added to favorites), but will not appear in site searches or the Category Browser. Buyers can sign up to be notified via email when the seller returns from Vacation Mode.
How it works:
Your personal Vacation Mode settings:
- From “Your Etsy” click on “Vacation Mode” under Shop Setup.
- The Vacation Mode page has prompts for a vacation announcement, Convo auto-response, and on/off switch.
- Enter your desired announcement message and Convo auto-response about being on vacation.
- Leave the on/off radio buttons set to “off” if you are just setting up the process at this point and click “Save.”
Turning Vacation Mode on and off:
- When you are ready to go on vacation, click on Vacation Mode from Your Etsy and set it to “on” and save.
- Your shop will now be in Vacation Mode and will function differently:
- Your Shop Announcement has been replaced with your Vacation Announcement.
- Items no longer appear in your shop.
- Any Convos sent to you will get an auto-reply.
- On your Shop page, Potential buyers will see a field where they can opt into having Etsy notify them when the seller returns from vacation. Their email addresses will be kept private.
- On all of your listing pages, a banner appears across the top announcing that the shop is temporarily closed and the “Add to cart” button has been replaced with a greyed-out “on vacation” notice.
- Your items no longer appear in Gift Guides, searches, Category Browser, flash apps such as Pounce, Colors, Shop Local, or Geolocator.
For complete details about this - and a related ‘batch deactivation’ - feature, please read the full Storque article.
To comment, join the discussion on this Etsy forum thread.
September 15, 2008 at 4:58 pm · Filed under Bugs, Listings · By Deja Vu
Apparently there are some issues with relistings and renewals not showing up in category searches. MaryMary says that “the engineering team is aware of these reports and is currently investigating the situation”. She has asked anyone who is affected to post with specific details in this thread.
September 11, 2008 at 2:44 pm · Filed under Listings, Miscellaneous, Site Terms, Site Use · By GreenMamba
Today admin Matt, together with the Community and Customer Care Teams published an article in the Storque addressing the very hot topic of resellers on Etsy. It outlines the company’s plan for combatting the influx of infringing shops and goods, which will focus on the point-of-entry - or shop set-up - stage.
Dear Etsians,
With the exception of properly tagged commercial supplies and vintage, Etsy does not permit the reselling of items not made by the seller (see the DO’s and DON’Ts on Selling). We take this rule very seriously, and we share your frustrations when we see resellers intent on listing here. We know that this has been a growing concern of late, and we are addressing it as such.
So, what are we doing?
Creating Measures at the Time of Shop Creation and Product Listing
To a large extent, we created this issue for ourselves by defining in great detail what is and is not permitted for sale on the site, but at the same time establishing few, if any, barriers to entry to setting up a shop on Etsy (simply put a credit card on file). There is no doubt that more emphasis needs to be placed at the first point of contact with new sellers. Our focus must be on keeping these products from ever reaching the site. To this end, we have created an internal team that is focusing on developing and building these safeguards, as well as clarifying and highlighting our policies to new sellers who very well may just be confused. We have been following the many good ideas that have been raised in the forums and sent to community@etsy.com, and we are including them in our planning. We appreciate your input, and ask that you continue to share with us.
This will take some time. So…
In The Mean Time
We have also more than doubled the number of our employees who are trained to properly investigate and remove those in violation. The expanded team is already at work. Furthermore, we have taken steps to make sure that banned resellers are blocked from creating new accounts.
Flagging:
A far more robust flagging system is also already underway and will be implemented in the weeks to come. We are confident that it will allow us to handle flagged items and moderation more quickly and succinctly.
We do ask that you do not use the forums as a place to call out members as resellers (see the Community DO’s and DON’Ts). Oftentimes, these individuals are simply confused. Etsy admin need to treat each and every case (which often involve both buyers and sellers) as a private matter. Furthermore, many cases are not nearly as cut and dry as they may seem at first glance. This sometimes means that shops will not always be removed as quickly as we all would like.
Please continue to flag items that you feel do not belong on Etsy. We do fully investigate every flag, and this takes some time. I know this can be frustrating when it seems that there is inaction on the part of our Content Team, but we assure you that flagging does work. Can it be improved? Yes. Are we improving? Yes.
All of these steps are just the beginning. We will continue to work tirelessly to maintain the integrity of our marketplace. Tomorrow September 12, the Chatt with Matt will be on this subject. Please join us in the Treehouse room of the Virtual Labs at 1pm Eastern time. In anticipation of this discussion, we have closed commenting on this article so we can follow all your comments and suggestions in this forum thread
August 14, 2008 at 10:44 am · Filed under Listings, Miscellaneous · By GreenMamba
In this Storque article, and this companion forum thread, Etsy announces a tiny change to the left sidebar menu in Your Etsy > > Items:
Dear Sellers,
We wanted to inform you of a text change you will find in Your Etsy. The text link, Expiration Dates, has been changed to Renew Items. The line of text highlighted below now reads Renew Items:
“Renewing” has become the common parlance among sellers. It became clear to us that “Expiration dates” line of text was not catching the seller’s eye. The text change should make the feature more user-friendly for sellers and more obvious to new sellers.
No other changes in functionality, pages, or text have taken place and you will still find all of the same information on the newly named Renew Items page. Looking for your upcoming expiration dates for your listed items? They will still be right there where they have always been, just with a new name.
July 16, 2008 at 3:44 pm · Filed under Featured Listings, Features, Listings · By GreenMamba
Admin marymary announces, in this thread, a terrific new addition to all Etsy ‘Sold Item’ pages.
marymary says:
Dear Sellers,
We’re happy to announce a new feature on Etsy: your sold listing pages will now show available related items from your shop. This means whenever shoppers come across one of your sold items, they’ll see up to three items currently for sale from your shop. So if a shop is featured on a blog or website and your items sells out, the buyer is immediately shown other items from that seller still available for purchase. And if there’s an item that has the exact same title, that one will be shown first to make it easy for buyers to find.
FAQ’s
Q. Where will I see related items?
A. Related items will appear on the listing and transaction pages of sold items. So any way a buyer gets to a sold item’s page, they’ll see related items from that shop. The only place you won’t see related items is if you are a seller looking at your own sold listing, or if there are no other items in a shop.
Q. How many items will show in the related items?
A. Up to three related items will show on your sold listings pages at one time. If there are less than three items to show, we’ll show as many as are available. If there are no items to show, then the page will appear in the same way sold listings originally appeared — without this new feature.
Q. How does Etsy choose which items to show for each sold item?
A. First off, we search the shop for an item with the exact same title as the sold item. If there is an exact title match, we’ll show that first. If there’s more than one match, we’ll just show the first one. After that, we pull from the seller’s featured items; this will help give the seller a little control over what may appear on their sold listings pages. Finally, if there are no featured listings in the shop, we show the seller’s most recently listed items.
Q. What if there are no active listings in a shop?
A. No related items will appear on the sold items page if there are no active listings in the shop at that time.
To see a screen shot of what it might look like, please see the official Storque announcement for this feature:
http://www.etsy.com/storque/section/etsyNews/article/tech-update-related-items-on-sold-listings/2233/
Hope you enjoy and thank you for your feedback,
Mary
Posted at 3:13 pm, July 16 2008 EST
July 7, 2008 at 3:10 pm · Filed under Features, Listings, Shop Sections · By GreenMamba
Fromt this Storque article:
Dear Sellers,
You asked for it, and now it’s here! We’ve just integrated the step of placing an item in your shop sections into the listing process. No more annoying extra step after you are finished, and no more forgetting once an item is listed.
Here’s a screen shot of what it looks like during step 3 of the listing process:
If you still have items that are not listed in sections, you can manually add and edit them the exact same way as before by clicking on the “sections” link in Your Etsy. Now would be the perfect time to list a brand spankin’ new item to test out this great new feature! There have been several related requests that items be allowed in more than one shop section at a time. This is a feature we are still researching, but is not on the list of priorities at this time.
Again, thanks so much for all of your continued feedback and suggestions! We appreciate it. Here’s an article with some ways to use your shop sections.
June 23, 2008 at 3:37 pm · Filed under Categories, Listings, Search · By GreenMamba
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.
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