We’ve been busy working on two related streams of work that came out of our 2014 roadmap. I want to introduce the work and say a bit about it.
Searching
Search has been frustrating people for a while. So we have taken the current model, which shows more items the more search terms you use (with the most relevant at the top), and changed it so that the more terms you enter into search, the fewer results it will return. This should mean you will get more relevant results when using search.
Search has been updated to help you find more relevant results
We have also introduced a more rounded algorithm that weights category as well as title (and the number of words in the title), description and facets. As buyers, you should find this returns better / more relevant results for most search terms (for example “red handbag” shows handbags that are red, whereas previously you got lots of prints of handbags too). For sellers, this means you should use better descriptions in your titles, rather than single-word descriptions as many sellers have started to do (and which worked with the previous search model).
This is only the start of improving search and we’ll be releasing improvements as we go and testing them to see how they perform.
Favouriting and “social ecommerce”
The second, related, strand of work is favouriting. People have been able to favourite items and favourite shops for a while now. We experimented with showing favourite shops and their new work using My Folksy. We learned a lot from this, namely that calling something “My Folksy” didn’t make what it was very obvious, and that the method for favouriting items (and finding them once you have) needed to be better. So we have made favouriting items easier: you can now do this directly on the item image on the index pages, the Folksy homepage, category pages and in search results using a heart icon.
You can now ‘favourite’ something from the item image
Navigating to your favourites is also easier: it’s a persistent link in the top nav that takes you to your favourite items (items you have hearted), your favourite shops and newly listed items from your favourite shops.
The new ‘Favourites’ page
It is, again, the start of a greater focus on showing “popularity” on Folksy. Once we have more data, we intend to showcase popular items, driven initially from favouriting activity.
That’s it for now. Have a play and let us know what you think.
James
11 comments
Hurray!
Just tried using Search and it is much improved, we now have a sporting chance of getting our prints found.
Thank you James :)
Thank you for the thank you :)
thanks James – not looking forward to editing titles again though ;-)
No, there’s no way around that. Sorry :(
Has this been activated yet? To test it out I searched for sheep brooch and the 3rd on up was a bird.
Hi Tessa. There will be times when one-word titles still rank higher than others, but we will continue to tweak the way the search engines work to give more relevant results.
Just checked out search – fab changes guys! My products actually pop up in relevant searches now :) Keep it up :D
Thank you! Thank you! This is the most welcome enhancement to Folksy ever. It will make a huge difference to who sees my stuff. Great work.
Oh, this is much better!
I posted on the (old) forum, my frustration with Search; I had searched for “bird lampshade” and ended up with about 1700 results, all sorts of stuff, almost all of it not related to my search.
I just searched for “bird lampshade” and got 28 beautiful lampshades, all with birds on!
Thank You! This has to make it better for all of us – as sellers and buyers.
Lizzie
Thankyou – excellent ideas. The old search was very tedious and unproductive. My shop empty at the moment but this will encourage me to make things again.
Sorry, must have misspelled website. Please see correction!
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