Archive for Listings
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.
June 18, 2008 at 11:09 am · Filed under Bugs, Listings, Site Security · By GreenMamba
Reports have surfaced detailing a glitch, or bug, in the listing process. Line breaks placed between paragraphs in the listing description seem to disappear at the last step (step 5 or page 5), resulting in a condensed block of text. It has been discovered that if the user clicks the ‘Finish’ button and the listing is published, all text appears to be formatted as it should be. Read about it here and here.
While trying to provide an example of the condensed description, another somewhat more alarming bug was discovered. A seller provided a direct link (instead of a screenshot) to the page containing the non-formatted listing description, as an example, and any user who clicked it ended up in that seller’s account. Access was limited to the one page being viewed (for example, clicking on ‘Currently For Sale’ in the left sidebar menu took me to MY current listings, not the other seller’s listings), but the fact that it could be accessed at all was cause for concern. The seller did end up with a duplicate listing of the item being listed. No word on whether that was caused by another user testing out the links and buttons, or by RD behind the scenes while he was investigating.
The security issue has been resolved. In the future, any direct links should lead to the brickwall graphic, accompanied by this textual warning “You’ve reached an error: You don’t have permission to change or remove this information. Go back” Thanks RD for the super-quick response!
The line-break issue is still under investigation.
RevolvingDork says:
There was an issue that allowed that final listing creation step to be viewed if the direct URL was given, but it’s now been corrected and is no longer possible.
Back onto the issue at hand, we’re checking out the spacing on step 5 and hope to have that solved soon…
Posted at 10:18 pm, June 17 2008 EST
http://www.etsy.com/forums_thread.php?thread_id=5670311&page=9
UPDATE by GreenMamba 6-18-08
The line-break issue has been resolved.
RevolvingDork says:
Thanks for your help in tracking this one down — it should be fixed up now!
Posted at 10:39 am, June 18 2008 EST
http://www.etsy.com/forums_thread.php?thread_id=5670311&page=10
June 11, 2008 at 9:52 pm · Filed under Copyright / Branding, Laws & Regs, Listings · By GreenMamba
Hints of behind-the-scenes edits of ’sold’ listings have surfaced recently in the Etsy fora. Today, Etsy member quirke asked pointedly (twice) for confirmation or denial that this was practiced/condoned by Etsycorp. The first thread was closed quickly, without explanation, by Etsy’s on-staff lawyer, SaraSays. The second, however, was answered truthfully, and at some length, by admin and co-founder Matt.
matt says:
Howdy,
I want to start off by apologizing for closing an earlier thread on this subject. Since we do not publicly discuss individual private matters, we thought that was the best course of action at the moment. That said, in doing so we did not address the questions you were asking, and I would hate for a bit of misinformation to create a great deal of speculation (yes, I know that closing a thread does not help matters). So, If I may, I would like to speak to your concerns here.
As a general policy we do and will not alter any sold listing records. I completely agree that this is inappropriate and of questionable ethics.
So, have we ever? Yes.
In extremely rare occasions and in our best efforts to responsibly comply with the DMCA (http://www.etsy.com/copyright_policy.php), we have had to remove text or images from a sold listing .
We have never removed the entire listing itself or altered the statistics or data of an individual shop or of Etsy as a whole.
While, obviously, I can not discuss these specific cases, I am happy to try to answer any other questions you may have on the subject and certainly invite you to email me at matt [!at] etsy.com . I also encourage you to check out our policies here for further clarification: http://www.etsy.com/copyright_policy.php
Thanks, Matt
Posted at 6:46 pm, June 11 2008 EST
For a bit of background on this issue, see here and here.
UPDATE by GreenMamba 6-13-08:
After two shut-downs, a third thread has been started by quirke, asking general questions about the practice and ramifications of editing ’sold’ listings.
And a fourth . . .
And a fifth, by another Etsy member . . .
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