Shop Sections Revealed

Hello. I’m pleased to announce that a feature that we’ve been working on for the past few weeks has been launched on Folksy today – Shop Sections.

As a guide to creating shop sections we’ve made a screencast for you watch below. It runs for about four minutes and shows the whole process of creating sections for a shop.

Folksy – Shop Sections Preview from Folksy on Vimeo.

Shop sections gives you more control over your shop allowing you to easily create categories for your items and provides a meaningful navigation for buyers looking through your items. It also allows buyers to quickly scan your shop to understand what you make and have available for sale.

We’re really happy the way this, much anticipated feature, looks and works. Accessed through the Your Account navigation you manage your shop sections on just two screens. Ease of use has been at the core of the design and we’ve spent a while making the tasks of adding sections, editing their labels, ordering the sections and sorting your items as intuitive and responsive as possible.

For example, you can order your sections by simply clicking and dragging them into a new position and you change their label by clicking on the text. All the changes you make on the page update immediately.

To sort your items you can either work through your list individually selecting the relevant section or use the handy ‘bulk sort’ feature by clicking on several checkboxes and using the drop down menu above the table to move the selected items into a single section. You have up to ten sections to create and manage your items, which will then be displayed on your shop page.

Creating an intelligible category management is good practice and avoids any confusion for the buyer so we’ve made each section exclusive. That means each item you have listed can only be placed in a single section.

When you create your shop sections they will be displayed straight away on your shop. Keywords will remain on your shop until you create your shop sections. However, all shops on Folksy will migrate to Shop Section on the 1st December, so you have until then to create your own. After the 1st December any shop without bespoke Shop Sections will be use the default shop section of “All Items”, until you create your own.

This new feature have been extensively tested in different browsers, however, as we have previously stated Internet Explorer 6 is no longer supported (by us or any of the major online services, for example eBay, Yahoo). If you are still using Internet Explorer 6 then we suggest you upgrade to a more modern browser like IE 9 (preview), Firefox or Google Chrome.

I hope you enjoy using this new feature do let us have any feedback through the comments on this post. In the meantime we’re going to get started on the next round of updates and additions to Folksy.