That was March, hello April

Hi - starting a thread for any questions or comments on the April update blog post :smile:

Hi James,
Could you share more details on what the trail of google shopping will entail? Will we all suddenly start seeing our items coming up in google shopping searches or will you be picking and choosing which items feature? What sort of return/ result would you need to see to make it a permanent change?
Also I’m looking forward to being able to set up a local team/ group.
Sasha

Hi Sarah,

The Product Listing Ads (used to be Google Shopping) trial will involve working out what is sustainable to advertise and what isn’t. We have to be able to turn a profit on the advertising spend based on the lifetime customer value of the buyer (not just that order). If the LCV is £60 and we make 6% gross that equates to £3.60. PayPal fees take out 20p and 3.5% (ish) on each order. So the trial will take a broad section of things and choose a few of each to work with - categories, gift guides, shops - the aim being to see what is sustainable to promote. It may well be that PLAs don’t work at all, but I suspect it will be something we have to do tactically on certain indexes, such as category pages, gift guides etc rather than a blanket “everything over £10”. We’ll see! I’ll post the headline findings when we have them.

Setting up a local team / group. We’d love that! Do you have an existing team or group in your area (related to Folksy or just craft / interest based)? We’re hoping to trial it with Discourse and we’ll be looking for existing groups to help us with that.

Thanks,

James.

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Hi James,

All sounds very productive and useful! What does this mean:

“Scoping out transactional emails based on new items from favourite sellers.”

Thank you!

Susan

Hi James

I am so glad that you are bringing in keywords! I really have struggled with SEO without them. Can I make a suggestion, please?

When you feature items in the gift guides or emails, would you be able to email the shops to let them know they have been included? I find it really frustrating when I get GA that shows volume but have no idea of where they originate. I realise that we can go to the guides to see what is featured but it would be so much easier to make us aware.

One last question, what is Discourse?

Thank you for considering my suggestions,

Leslie

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Hi @susangreenbooks Good question, I wasn’t very clear was I. The My Folksy pages (items from your favourite sellers, favourite sellers and items you love) enables us to do some recommendations e.g. “people who like that also like this” and we’re planning on using this in emails, sending out recommendations that are unique to you, based on what you say you like. Is that clearer? What we don’t know is what people will find interesting and what they’ll find annoying: I know I find some emails to be too frequent and ‘spammy’ yet others I find useful and draw me back into looking at certain sites.

Do you get any personalised recommendation emails you find you read regularly?

Hi Leslie @ManiacalMosaics

Keywords are good for helping people navigate around content (jumping from say, a quilt cover with a pattern of stars to a bracelet with gems shaped like stars - totally different types of items related by the tag “stars”). What keywords / tags are unlikely to help with are visitors from Google search. Keywords have no effect on search value according to the most respected people in SEO (see moz.com). But we’ll be able to create pages of all the keywords, so you’ll be able to see a page of all things tagged “star” and this should have search value. Does that help?

Next - emails if you’ve been featured. Yes! We’d love to do this. It’s not too hard to do but we have a at least 4 weeks of effort ahead before we can start to look at new features such as this. But I agree it would be so great and is going on the long list of “feature requests” and I’ll personally champion it!

Your broader point about knowing where visitors are coming from is something that is a big piece of work. The Stats we provide are very basic and whilst they provide a simple and useful overview, we would love to improve upon it - not least to show when your items have appears in index pages e.g. search results and category views as this shows people are looking at your work even if they choose not to go through to a product page. This is likely to be a longer term bit of work.

What we do intend to do in the shorter term is make it far easier to see who has favourited your shop and who loves your items - possibly in an email digest as well as an improved page view.

Discourse is the forum software we use. It’s a brilliant piece of software we buy in as a service and plug into our own system. The people behind Discourse are some of the smartest developers around.

Thanks,

James

Thank you so much for your detailed explanations, James. This is why I came to Folksy - those that run this business interact and educate their customers (us). I am not going to say that I agree with everything that has been done to the site BUT at least you listen and explain why you have taken the position.

When I said keywords, I was referring to tags. I think you are right to prioritise the ability to be found on Google, etc.but once on the site we do need the ability to draw people into our shops based upon the search terms used. I am all for state of the art as long as it is inclusive of all.

Thank you for accepting my suggestion about the emails. It is bad enough that we usually cannot see what search terms have been used for “organic” searches any more but it can be impossible to know where we have been featured, Going through each gift guide to see where you have been featured when your inventory crosses a number of areas is time consuming.

Why is it important that we see who has actually favoured or loved the shop? Should we then use this information to directly promote our shop? As a shopper it would be better to give an opt in for a newsletter or notifications to potential customers in my opinion They would then only would be contacted by shops they want to hear from on a regular basis.

Sorry, I didn’t want to write a book :smile: but I am thrilled to actually get a personal answer from a site platform.

Once again, thank you for listening and tracking the actions that are important to us.

Kind regards,
Leslie