Folksy Blog

You can now re-order images on listing

Posted on October 8, 2012 by James

Today (Monday 8th Oct 2012) we’re releasing the work that allows you to re-order your images on the listing page. This goes live with the new, improved categories.

Previously the images on the listing page had to be uploaded in the correct order, with the main image loaded first. Many people asked to be able to re-order them on the listing page itself as they were unsure which one was best suited for the main image (and subsequent images) until they had seen them.

This is the section on the listing page where you can re-order images:

And here is what you’ll see when you add images:

As you hover over an image you’ll be able to grab and move the image to a different place and thus change the order. The main image, as indicated, is always the one on the left.

We’re really pleased to be able to offer this incremental improvement to the service in advance of the big Christmas rush. Hope it helps with listing! Do let us know what you think of it.

A note on Internet Explorer.

Microsoft Internet Explorer doesn’t allow us to do the same fancy javascript work that other browsers (such as Firefox, Google Chrome or Safari) do. So, whilst people using IE 9 will have a comparable experience to those using Firefox, Chrome and Safari, users of IE 8 and IE 7 will only be able to use the pre-existing image upload service and will not be able to re-order their images on the listings page. We suggest users of IE 8 and IE 7 upgrade to IE9 or change to a different browser.

Launching New Categories

Posted on October 4, 2012 by James

On the 12th September we announced the results of the category review in which we stated we were moving away from gender specific navigation. This had implications for categories and sub-categories.

In that post we said we were making some changes as a result of an extensive review and these would go live in early October. But first we wanted your feedback on the changes. You gave us that feedback and it was all really useful, thank you.

The feedback we got was broadly very positive about the suggested changes but offered four areas for improvement:

  1. Brooches and Cuffs were seen as being Jewellery items and not Accessories (even though many brooches and cuffs are textile based).
  2. Materials were important for sub-categories in Jewellery (e.g. stone, semi-precious gems, silver plate, copper, polymer clay etc.) even though you can filter results by material.
  3. Prints as a separate category to cater for reproduction artwork.
  4. Artwork should be categorised according to subject / content (e.g. Still Life) as much as practice.

The first two suggestions are straightforward and make sense. The third and fourth suggestions were out of the scope of our initial review but on reflection we felt that we would benefit from art and cards being improved and a “print” category adding and that Art should be pulled out as a separate section allowing us to have more categories for art each with it’s own subcategories, some of which are practice and subject based.

The New Improved Categories

Firstly, we have new sections which will be:

  • Jewellery
  • Clothing and Accessories
  • Homeware
  • Art
  • Cards and Stationery
  • Weddings
  • Supplies

Only the Supplies section is unaffected, but changes it’s title from Craft Supplies to Supplies. Every other section has some changes to its category structure.

See the full list of the new categories (PDF).

What does this mean for you?

Around 35% of items will require categorising in a new category. Most Jewellery and Artwork will be put in a sub-category labelled “All”. You should move this as soon as you can into a more relevant sub-category.

For example, if you have a necklace listed in Women -> Jewellery -> Necklaces this will move to Jewellery -> Necklaces and Pendants -> All.

Why “All”? We have added new sub-categories to better able people to find specific necklaces. So now people can choose from the following subcategories in “Necklaces and Pendants”:

Beaded, Enamel, Platinum, Beadwork, Chainmaille, Textile, Charm, Choker, Silver, Felt, Gold, Glass, Locket, Metal, Acrylic, Polymer Clay, Rosary, Shell, Stone, Copper, Gemstone, Jewellery Set, Semi-Precious Stone, Wire Wrapped, Wood, Ceramic, Painted, All, Everything Else.

Where we have created new sub-categories (mainly in Jewellery and Art) we need you to decide where to put them . We can’t move your work ‘automatically’ as we don’t know if that necklace, for example, should be in the sub-category “platinum” or “silver” without actually looking at each item ourselves and with over 40,000 items that need categorising this way, that just isn’t feasible. You know your work best and will know where to put it.

Babies and Children

As we’re changing the main navigation to move away from gender and “people” we split out Babies and Children categories like this:

  • “Nursery and Bedroom” becomes a room in “Homeware”
  • “Clothing and Accessories” becomes a category “Babies and Children” in “Clothing and Accessories”. We have merged types of children’s a babies clothes into one. So where there used to be Babies Dresses and Children’s Dresses we now have “Dresses”.
  • The Babycare category is merged into Babies and Children in Clothing and Accessories (e.g. mats and bibs and cloths).
  • “Toys and Activities” moves into the category “Nursery and Playroom” and becomes one big category (which is dominated by “Toys” anyway).
  • The sub-categories in “Parties and Events” are moved out to “Cards and Stationery” with “Invitations” and “Christenings” going into the category “Stationery and Bookmarks” and “Gift Bags” going into “Gift wrap, tags and bags”.
We feel it is all logical and from what we have seen of how people search and navigate around Folksy this will help improve things being found. However, we do understand that losing Babies and Children from the top nav will be seen as a retrograde step for people selling items for babies and children.

When will this happen?

Now! This deployment is already underway and you will see the changes on the morning of Monday 8th October. We wanted to get these changes in place well before the Christmas rush.

We suggest you look at the new categories (PDF) and see if your work is affected and then move your work to a more relevant sub-category or category as soon as is convenient, from Monday. Of course, even if your work is in a new sub-category “All” it will be still be visible and can be bought.

Questions?

We’re going to run a special forum Q&A to cover any queries you have on Monday 8th from 10.30am until 11.30am. The forum for that is now live so please add any questions you have or leave them in the comments here.

Thanks,

Renegade Round Up

Posted on September 17, 2012 by James

Ali and Jam from Hello DODO

We’ve been decompressing today after a mad couple of days. What fun though, we’ll definitely be doing Renegade again. It was great to meet so many designer makers and chat with them about their work and what can be done to meet their needs for online sales.

Our focus this year was on signing people up to our email gift guides and the cardboard postbox worked really well for that. We also handed out heap loads of our sampler containing (as sampler’s do) some examples of makers and work on Folksy.

What we might do differently next time is actually have a space to sit, for people to come and chat with us. A stall seems a bit weird when you don’t have things to actually sell. Next year it might be a chesterfield and a coffee table instead. And maybe a pogo stick.

What we also did do over the course of the weekend was take a portrait of each designer maker with a stall at Renegade. We thought it would be a nice way to document the event as the people so often take a back seat to the product. So here are a few of the great people we met (see them all in this flickr set):

 

Rosie plus the Boys

Claudia from Superfumi

mellybee

I am acrylic

Camilla from Butterscotch and Beesting

Kayleigh O'Mara

Art equals happy

Bunny + Windsor

Renegade Day 1

Posted on September 15, 2012 by James

Today was Day 1 at Renegade. An early start (following a late dash down on Friday) looked a bit like this…

But which soon became this:

A throng of lovely people all interested in seeing some of the best craft from indie makers in the UK. It was lovely to chat with so many of them.

The post box (and email cards) was super successful, no doubt partly due to the support Monkey’s encouragement, and the DIY logo started to take shape…

More fun tomorrow. Come along.

Better Categories

Posted on September 12, 2012 by James

In the last three months we’ve been working on a review of categories on Folksy. We’ve read your feedback, reviewed the site analytics and tested our assumptions and ideas. Now, we’re confident that the updated navigation will be better for you and your customers.

Category Review

We used a variety of different methods to analyse category performance:

  • Google / web analytics – to see how people enter and exit (and move around) categories. Good for existing category performance.
  • User testing the site – to see how people use categories and describe their browsing experience. Good to test out existing and planned categories but only in small groups as very time intensive.
  • Card sorting – a method to determine how people group together concepts / words. Good for testing out existing and planned categories. Scales reasonably well.

Each of these methods has its own benefits and also its own weaknesses but when taken together they provide a good means through which to assess performance.

What categories ‘do’

Categories act as a pointers to the kinds of thing a site sells: they are one of the ways to navigate around.

In sites where the stock is well known then categories are relatively easy to determine. If you sell footwear for example you might have Men, Women, Children as your top categories followed by different styles for example, casual and formal, or type such as trainers, boots, shoes, loafers, slippers etc. In a marketplace like Folksy where people could feasibly make just about anything (lunar spacecraft might be a challenge) it becomes slightly harder. We have to prioritise and adapt according to what people search for as well as what people list. We mediate between the two parties of buyers and sellers and try to reduce the friction involved in discovering things people might want to buy.

Analysis

Last year we implemented a new pattern for categories to Folksy. We followed the standard e-commerce model with the main section headings acting as a funnels to a much greater number of associated categories. This pattern widely used by department stores (for example see John Lewis).

The new categories were driven by sellers explicitly deciding where their item should go and putting their work ‘into’ a category. This replaced a hybrid category system we used to have that worked on keywords to determine categories.

We tested the ecommerce navigation pattern before releasing it and it worked well. It was familiar to people and it made them feel comfortable. However, there were also some issues. The most significant issue was that it forced jewellery makers and people making bags, sleeves and accessories to choose between a male and female audience when their products were often unisex.

These are the ‘headline’ things we have discovered through our analysis:

Many item and shop pages perform better as landing pages than category pages do. This is not entirely surprising as some items get shared widely and may become ‘viral’, shared amongst friends of friends on sites like Facebook and Stumbleupon and services like Twitter.

“Men” and “Women” as labels do not act as good ‘wayfinders’ into the kind of content Folksy has. Approximately one third of everything for sale on Folksy is a jewellery or accessory item. Yet neither are mentioned in the core navigation. For people coming to Folksy for the first time (wherever they land) this isn’t particularly helpful – more useful pointers would, we believe, provide better jumping off points into the content.

A formal taxonomy / category system is only part of the solution to browsing a marketplace. A common browsing behaviour on Folksy is often referred to”wilf-ing” or “what was I looking for?”. Having landed on Folksy they scan the content then follow interesting links, creating random trails of exploration. They aren’t necessarily guided by a premeditated decision to search for something specific, rather they want to be inspired or to discover something new, something unusual. So whilst categories work to help people browse, other prompts and features are also important such as search, tags / facets, editorialised content (gift guides, featured sellers) and also best sellers.

More labels are helpful. Category labels often act as prompts. Many people don’t know what to look for so are looking for prompts. The benefit of seeing lots of prompts needs to be balanced against the ‘overhead’ of processing all the labels (we can only hold around 10 things in our heads at any one time) and the space a large site-wide navigation would take up.

Makers don’t tend to make many things for men. There are roughly eight times more items available in the Women’s section than in the Men’s.

Labels/categories don’t need to be ‘logical’. Due to the type of work available through Folksy (and the number – over 130,000 items as I write) people don’t always think ‘rationally’ about particular categories. Combining practices (sewing, silversmithing) with items seems to help rather than hinder browsing. Some people want to explore through a variety of different views on the data (the items available).

New Categories

As a result of the review we have decided to change the category system to the following core section headers.

  • Jewellery
  • Clothes and Accessories
  • Home and Garden
  • Weddings and Parties
  • Art and Cards
  • Craft Supplies

The main changes are obviously using Jewellery and Clothing and Accessories instead of Men and Women. The other significant changes are:

  • Bringing Babies and Children under other relevant categories, so for example nursery will become a room in Home and Garden just like Kitchen and Dining, and babies’ clothes and shoes under Clothes and Accessories.
  • Pulling out party and event items from Babies and Children (which wasn’t performing well enough) and putting these within a section “Weddings and Parties”.

For a full breakdown of the new categories, please refer to this spreadsheet.

How will it affect you?

Only those people who list in Jewellery will have to re-categorise their work. All other items will be merged or moved automatically.

People who list in Jewellery will have to select a sub-category for their work. This will help people find their work more effectively. When the revised navigation is launched all Jewellery items will be placed in the sub-category “all”. You can then move your work to the relevant category using the bulk listing editor.

Your Feedback

We want your feedback on the proposed categories before we implement them.

Take a look at the proposed changes. The category changes are in yellow and we have included information on how the changes will affect different items.

If you have any feedback or comments please leave it via Suggested Features in Support. Only feedback provided through Suggested Features will be considered in the review.

The closing date for feedback is the 21st September.

When will this happen?

The navigation on Folksy will be changed on or before the 1st October after we have reviewed feedback. The bulk edit facility will enable people to move their work quickly and easily.

There will be no further public facing work released between October and December this year. After the major changes we released last year we appreciate that you’re busy focusing on making and selling and don’t want to be distracted with any new features or functionality. That doesn’t mean we’ll stop developing, on the contrary we’ll be continuing to improve the service but will not release any significant changes until the New Year.

Christmas

Last year we had a specific category for Christmas items and people have asked for this again. It was a temporary category and meant for things that were part of Christmas, such as Christmas Stockings, rather than potential Christmas gifts as *everything* on Folky is a potential gift.

The Christmas decorations category is now live and listed, as last year, under “Home and Garden” in the top navigation.

The category will be live until the end of January. Anything still for sale after this time will be able to be bought but will only be able to be found through search or via a direct link.

Going forward

We’ll be monitoring the new categories during the busy Christmas period and will provide a review of performance in the New Year.

Other findings from this review will be tested again and it is our intention to continue to find ways to improve the browsing experience with different and interesting ways into the variety of things available to buy on Folksy.