Archive for Tags
December 21, 2009 at 4:25 pm · Filed under Etsy Staff, Miscellaneous, Site Maintenance, Tags · By GreenMamba
According to this just-published Storque article, Rob Kalin/Rokali will be returning in 2010 as Etsy’s CEO. Maria Thomas, acting CEO for nearly two years, will be leaving Etsy. Here is the article (authored by pesmou and Rokali) in it’s entirety:
Rob Kalin, a.k.a. Rokali, is an Etsy founder.
As 2010 begins, I will return to Etsy as CEO, and Maria will leave the company.
Maria joined Etsy in the middle of 2008 and led Etsy through an important foundational phase. We are a profitable company now, and Maria helped us reach this major milestone. She worked day and night, weekday and weekend; she traveled around the globe meeting up with hundreds of Etsy folks. Her long experience and business skills were hugely helpful.
As Fred Wilson, an Etsy investor and board member, says: “Maria took the helm at Etsy nearly two years ago and has led the company through a critical period of retrenching, rebuilding and significant growth. Beyond the financial, Maria worked tirelessly to right the ship and to focus the company on being true to its founding vision and values.”
Jim Breyer, also an investor and board member, adds: “Maria made important contributions to building the operations of the company during her tenure, and we appreciate it.”
From all of us at Etsy, a big Thank You! and a friendly embrace, Maria. We are grateful for your dedication.
I will be sharing much more with everyone in the near year. I look forward to seeing familiar faces again, and all the new ones, too.
Rob
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Dear Friends and Colleagues,
When I came to Etsy nearly two years ago, we were a young start-up with grand ambitions and great potential. Today, Etsy is a thriving, global community fueled by millions of buyers and hundreds of thousands of sellers.
Thanks to the tireless efforts of Etsy’s remarkable employees, we’ve created a vibrant marketplace and a brand that’s on the leading edge of a cultural movement. I am so proud of the progress we’ve made since early in 2008. We’ve overcome incredible challenges…from our honest beginnings dealing with departing colleagues, endless technical challenges, and broken elevators, we’ve persevered to welcome new members to the team, shore up the technical infrastructure, celebrate our new office space, and – most importantly – to deliver more services to our customers. I want to thank all of you for the opportunity to work together and for teaching me so many things about this extraordinary community.
Etsy is a now profitable company; in the last two years, revenue has increased seven-fold. In the past month alone, around 11 million visitors have stopped in to be inspired, to shop, and to connect. Last week, we announced our first major acquisition and in January, Etsy will open its doors in Berlin. In many ways, the journey is just beginning.
I want to communicate heartfelt thanks to Etsy sellers and shoppers. I have had the privilege of personally meeting or interacting with thousands of you from New York to Vancouver to Minneapolis and Paris and all across the globe. The spirit of craftsmanship is present in your varied and beautiful work and in your collective pride to do a job well, always adding a personal touch. It was incredibly motivating to hear your stories of hope, confidence and economic empowerment. It is this sense of humanity and connectivity that attracted me to work at Etsy in the first place. You reinforced for me the importance of Etsy honoring personal, individual connections even as business blossoms.
I will continue to shop on Etsy and look forward to watching it grow. And, I hope to continue learning from the difficulties and possibilities inherent in all our crafts.
Thank you and I wish you all a joyous and productive 2010.
Maria
___________________________________________________________
There will be a Town Hall meeting with Rob in Etsy’s Virtual Labs in the New Year that will be recorded for those who cannot attend. For now, happy holidays!
Follow the discussion in this thread.
February 1, 2009 at 8:36 pm · Filed under Shop Statistsics, Tags · By JB
Source: my own Google Analytics stats, as far as I can tell this is an unannounced change. If there is some admin announcement buried in a long forum post, please let me know and I will add a source link.
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Update Feb 2:
Etsy has announced the changes that they added on Jan 29.
http://www.etsy.com/forums_thread.php?thread_id=6026206
http://www.etsy.com/storque/etsy-news/tech-update-etsy-web-analytics-enhancements-3350/
These sources did not exist yet when I wrote this article, but are a good place to discuss the changes where Etsy admins may answer any questions you have.)
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Starting on January 29, 2009, Etsy has added search terms to their referral urls. This means that when you do a search using Etsy’s internal search engine, whatever keywords you searched for will be part of the item link that you click.
Example:
Do an Etsy search for fused plastic heart, with the drop down menu set to handmade tags and titles (default setting)
This will be the search results:
http://www.etsy.com/search_results.php?search_type=tag_title&search_query=fused+plastic+heart
Now when you see my item (I am eclipse), click that and look at the url in your address bar.
new url:
http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?ref=sr_list_4&listing_id=20247898&ga_search_query=fused+plastic+heart&ga_search_type=tag_title
prior to January 29th, the url used to be:
http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?ref=sr_list_4&listing_id=20247898
The old url only told you that someone found you in search (that is what the ref=sr means)
and it told you that your item appeared 4th in the list (list_4), but you would have no idea what the person was searching for.
The new, longer url contains all the keywords you searched for
ga_search_query=fused+plastic+heart
and it contains what setting you used in the drop down menu
ga_search_type=tag_title
What this means for sellers:
What this means is that now when I check my Google Analytics stats, I can see exactly what people were looking for using Etsy’s search engine! Before the 29th, Etsy’s Google Analytics would not track internal Etsy searches, it only reported keywords from google searches (and many of those were incorrect, see this previous UEN article).
Your older stas prior to Jan 29 will still show the old referal urls, but going forward your new stats since the 29th should show the improved referral data.
This is a major improvement in the stats available to Etsy sellers.
Thank you Etsy!
To see the new referral urls in your GA stats, log into google analytics and then click “View report”
then in the sidebar click “content”
then click “top content”
the urls will be listed in the “page” column. Hover on the little arrow in the box icon to see the full urls.
(click this photo to see full size version)
You may want to change your date range to Jan 29-today’s date, in order to see only the stats with the new, improved urls.
Please Note that this info is not in the “Traffic sources” or Referring sites” sections, but it DOES provide referral data. The referrer is coded INTO the url of the item itself.
January 5, 2009 at 3:08 pm · Filed under Search, Site Use, Tags · By quirke
In this Storque article, Etsy announces a significant change to its search function.
This week we are replacing Etsy’s existing search technology with Solr, an industry-leading, open-source search system. Solr is currently in use by major consumer sites like NetFlix as well as important e-commerce sites like Zappos. We believe it will provide Etsy the foundation to scale in terms of both speed and functionality.
You may recall that Maria Thomas, Etsy’s CEO, recently mentioned that we are going to be focusing on search in 2009 and that we intend to orient Etsy’s search function more to buyers’ needs. This first phase launch of Search is the first in what we expect to be a series of improvements to Etsy’s search function throughout the year.
For this initial launch we primarily focused on improving the speed with which search results are returned on Etsy. We believe you’ll notice immediate and significantly faster results though specific return times will vary based on your location and type of connection.
In addition to speed improvements, the Solr technology is smarter than our old search technology in how it handles certain queries. A specific improvement worth mentioning is the way in which the new system handles searches containing compound words. In our old system, a search for “notecards” would bring up items containing “notecards” in the tag, title or description field, but items containing only “note cards” (two separate words) would not show up in results. With our new search system, searches containing compound words like “notecards” or “hairbows” return all associated items.
There’s no need to make any updates to your item descriptions and tags to accommodate these improvements but this launch is a great time to remind sellers about the importance of accurate tags, titles and descriptions. You can find more info on how to best tag items in these tagging how-tos.
Future phases of Search will include upgrades to the relevancy and ranking of the results. The way current search results are displayed (ranking) is based on chronology (most recently listed items first). We believe that Etsy buyers will be better served by a system that takes into account both ranking and relevance in a way that helps them find items they’re looking for according to various criteria by category. And, for those buyers who may not know what they’re looking for, we also hope to introduce later in 2009 tools to foster discovery based on all the hearting and curating that takes place across the Etsy community every day..
While our main goal with search is to help buyers find what they’re looking for, we are mindful that sellers want various options to promote their items on Etsy. Redesigning the search function and creating new ways for sellers to advertise on Etsy are two important initiatives that are in the works for the first half of 2009.
Our new search system will be launching later this week; we will update this note when it’s actually live. We look forward to your feedback.
You can comment in the accompanying thread.
Information on Solr is available here.
Update by JB, January 8, 2009: The changes to search are now live in production.
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 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
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 13, 2007 at 1:40 pm · Filed under Tags · By Lis
In this thread, Etsy admin HeyMichelle clarified how the tag “art” should be used:
The Category (first tag) Art is, in general, for items that only function as art. If it fits in another “what it is” type of category (eg. Jewelry, Housewares), your first tag is that category. However, if the term “art” applies to what you are making, you may use “art” as one of your extra tags.
This is how it works for buyers:
If the buyer is looking for an art print, they will search “art print” or “painting print” or something like that.
If they just want to browse through all art, they click the category “Art” (which I find is generally only things that belong in the Art category, with only a few incorrectly tagged items here & there). If they want to narrow it down, they will click one of the subcategories on the side. Now, we are only finding things correctly tagged with Art as the category (and maybe a few rare flagrant mistags, which you send to flagged [!at] etsy.com.
Example: mosaics
If I made a mosaic scuplture piece that has no function other than being art, it’s category is Art. Then I tag it scupture, mosaics, etc.
If I made a mosaic mirror, it’s category is Housewares so it can be with the other mirrors. I also tag it mirror, mosaics, and art, since I feel it is art.
October 24, 2007 at 4:10 pm · Filed under Features, Search, Site Use, Tags · By The Janitor
New info added to this UEN post. Let me know if you all have a preference as to new posts or my continuing to add to the existing ones.
October 22, 2007 at 9:37 pm · Filed under Features, Search, Tags · By The Janitor
New Storque-provided info is incorporated into this post.
