I guess that could be another issue worth reporting!
Yes but Worse.
My shop is Not found on shop search.
Because it is on holiday… That is exactly when I want it to be found so customers see my holiday announcement
My listings do now appear on searches. I presume they were temporarily absent after I had relisted everything…
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That’s not ideal!!
Ever since I joined Folksy if my shop is on holiday mode I am in fact invisible, none of my items appear in a search but there are some shops that will appear even though they are in holiday mode.
I have questioned this and that is how it is suppose to work, but if someone typed my name into search it would bring up my shop, if they were looking for a bear none would feature.
Today when looking for dolls a crochet doll was featured and the shop has been on holiday mode the past few years…mine on the other hand that were listed a few days ago didn’t even make into the search.
If that’s the way holiday mode works then that is fine but it is very unfair if it doesn’t apply to all shops, I really do not see any reason why we have to become invisible if we are having a week off it doesnt make any sense.
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I apologise to all the other stained glass sellers on here that the searches results for
Stained Glass
And
Stained Glass Suncatchers
Are filled with my listings mainly to the exclusion of anyone else. Not my doing and out of my control as I am holidaying in Malta and my shop is also On Holiday !!
..
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I like how quick the search loads, but there it ends I’m afraid.
Like others, I’m frustrated by the clumping of items. Some sellers are completely invisible. Other sites have solved this, so it must be possible.
I dislike the chaotically sized pictures, which seems worse for some searches than others.
I don’t mind the prices being shown, it’s clear for the buyer, but displaying the shop name is crucial and needs to be reinstated, especially as buyers have to purchase from individual shops, rather than putting items from multiple shops in their basket.
I searched for blank cards, which comprise about 90% of my shop, and I didn’t feature at all, but when I searched ‘handpainted card’ almost my entire shop popped up. ‘Handpainted’ is usually the first word in my title. My shop is on holiday at the moment and it was older items that featured first, maybe they’d had more hits due to their age???
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Sorry, I forgot to mention the gift guide banner… If Folksy want to put a team-selected banner into the search results, it should be MUCH smaller, so that you can clearly see that the search results continue after the banner. Currently, the banner just makes it look as if the search only returns a few items.
I searched on ‘teddies’ which returned pages of teddy cards. ‘Teddy dolls’ returned a few actual teddies and ‘teddy toys’ returned pages of teddy bears. It seems buyers might need to be oddly specific.
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Is it only 7 pages of results, forever?
Thats rubbish if so. If its a temporary thing then perhaps the new search was launched too early, as thats just not acceptable.
Id imagine some search terms would produce pages and pages and pages of results. Its up to the searcher to decide when theyve seen enough, not folksy.
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These are the issues I’ve observed so far.
Only seven pages of results = only 336 items being returned. The reason Folksy has restricted the search results to seven pages will be to increase the speed, but this strategy is the kiss of death for the majority of sellers who will now never appear in search results.
One of the longstanding issues with Folksy is the invisibility and lack of sales - restricting search results to only 336 items seriously amplifies this problem. Sellers currently experiencing a lack of sales will disappear from sight completely.
Search needs to return all results, not just 336, so I would suggest using Lazy Loading for an increase in speed without restricting the number of results.
The Pinterest-style layout is chaotic and cybersickness-inducing. This layout especially alienates neuro-divergent people who cannot cope with it. Even for non-neuro-divergent people, it is difficult for the brain to make sense of what the eyes are seeing when the eyes are being simultaneously pulled in many different directions. You will only see uniform layouts and one size image containers on search results pages, category pages, and product pages on ecommerce websites.
On all of the search results pages there are three empty containers where listings should be. These empty containers are directly above the big gift guide ad, making it look like the page of results ends there when it doesn’t.
The big advert for the gift guides is in the middle of every page of results. This needs to go.
To search for shops, a buyer needs to click on “Searching for shops? Click here” which is a link underneath the search box. Clicking on this link brings up a list of 48 shops, making it look like those are the only shops on the site. The search bar on this “shops page” invites customers to search those shops. This is misleading customers into thinking there are no other shops.
Listings no longer have their shop names. This needs to be reinstated.
With the search results restricted to 336 items, no shop names on listings, and only 48 shops listed on the shops page, if a customer doesn’t know a seller’s shop name they will never find the seller or their listings.
The red price label is a jarring warning sign. If a price sticker is to remain, it needs to be a calming, inviting colour. Green and blue are the best colours for CTA buttons and price labels.
The item titles are restricted to only 23 characters including spaces, so you don’t know what the item is unless you go into the listing page or hover over the title and look at the link that pops up at the bottom of your screen, and that only works if you are using a computer, you cannot hover over anything on a mobile. Item titles need to be longer.
If Folksy was one of my clients, I would be advising them to rollback this change and remediate these issues for a better release.
14 Likes
I think the search result has changed slightly tonight…I am sure yesterday one or two of my bears came up on page 6 or 7, also tonight we have teddy bear christmas cards that i dont remember seeing yesterday.
Search "teddy bears’', not one bear from my shop shows but the second to last item on page 7 is my pack of bear cards.
Primarily a bear maker and ‘bear’ is in the title of my shop name and in the title, descriptions and tags of most items in my shop so how do you find teddy bears if you want to buy one ?
I have now wasted way too much time on this, hopefully it will change in a day or two.
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The whole search process on any site is always very similar. I would love to see something radical, completely different, that focuses on shops not on individual items. Let me try to explain. When you go shopping in person you first go to a High Street where there are lots of different bricks and mortar shops, that is like going to Folksy. Let’s say you are looking to buy a bear, as that has come up as an example (and I like bears!) Imagine if, as you enterred the High St, all the shops that sold bears just threw their bears into one big heap in the street, (with some others throwing in some bear related items too), and you then having to sort through the pile trying to find if there was anything you liked. The ones at the bottom totally obscured by more and more piled on top, and the shops with lots of bears piling theres on top of others. Thats a bit what the search is like now (not just on Folksy but any internet shopping). What actually happens in the bricks and mortar High Street is that you go to look at the Shops that sell bears. And you start with a glance at these shops and sum them up. You get a feel of the sort of style they are, the sort of prices they have, etc and probably rule some in or out . And only then do you go into some shops and look at individual items. I would love to see a search option that mimics this. So, when you type in “bears”, you dont have pages and pages of items thrown at you to try and rummage through, but rather what comes up is a list of Shops that sell bears, each one, regardless of its size, having just one or two items shown. You can then glance through and see which shops stock the sort of thing you are seeking, and then click on a shop, rather than an item, and go and see their full range. A totally different approach, and probably not practical to implement, certainly not easily as it is so different. But worth a thought. And to note that the new search moves even further away from this approach, with the shop names not coming up at all, so you are faced solely with the heap of bears with no direct way of looking at a shop’s full range, not even a label on each bear as to which shop it came from.
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100% with you on 100% of that. Thanks for detailing it so expertly. X
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Oh how clever! A very novel approach.
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@PoppyKayDesigns @samazama
I think both these sellers have done a really good job in putting themselves in the shoes of the customer, while also meeting the needs of the makers and Folksy, and I would love to see a search that took in these points.
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Adding my two cents as I’m looking for a sun catcher at the moment and would love a Folksy one, so I’ve been playing with search terms: I don’t like that Gift Guides are splat in the middle of the page, they imply that you’re at the end of the search but there’s a whole half page to go, plus more pages to click through. I also don’t like that I’m seeing dozens of items from one shop, instead of a mix from lots of shops. I know vaguely what I’m looking for and want to browse lots of options to see what I like. The current results imply only three or four Folksy shops sell sun catchers, but I can tell from the number of pages on search that there are more than that. But if I were new to Folksy I might assume there was only four shops and stop browsing fairly quickly if all four had designs that weren’t quite what I was after.
I do like how easy it is to see the price of each item, and the filter options are easy to use. Would love to filter by colour if that was an option!
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Well, I thank you for making me laugh! 
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Made me cry not laugh ?
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Suncatcher red. As a search term does work . Lots of mine but I’m on holiday 
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This is probably where AI (love it or loathe it) will be able to help at some point. You’re absolutely right, this is the way most of us would prefer to shop but I think IT development is stuck on a loop of how it’s always been done and rehashing that rather than taking a fresh and human based approach as you describe. Imagine if you land on a marketplace and an AI assistant asked you what you’re looking for, what your top price point is and then went and got you a selection of items meeting the criteria with links to the shops next to them.
Of course AI bots have to be a bit smarter than they currently are to do this effectively, but they’re learning quickly…
No results for @JOYSofGLASS shop, no matter how I search for it. Capitals or not, with spaces or not. With the spaces, I get a page of results that contain the words “joy” or “glass”, but not the right shop. Presumably because the shop is on holiday, but if my assumption is correct, customers looking for a shop while the shop is on holiday, then they will think they packed up and probably won’t come back and go elsewhere. I also assume there are more shops that contain these two words, than one page, but I cannot be sure about that.
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