This is just my opinion and I would be interested to hear the opinion of other sellers. I love the idea of theme of the day, but feel it could work better, and work better for a wider cross section of sellers. We have discussed on this board the issues of people not sticking to the theme, so I won’t go into that. There are a couple of things that have struck me having used it for several months now when the theme fits my work.
Firstly I think it would really help to have a couple of sentences of introduction underneath the title of the theme - to communicate to customers what the theme is about and what they can expect see listed under it. For instance, for fragrances which has been a recent one, if there were a sentence which said something like: From a welcoming fragrance in your home, to bath and personal perfumes, our makers have all the scents you’ll love. A bit of explanation would really help the more obscure topics like Earth Day.
Secondly, taking fragrance again as an example, with a broad topic like that, would it be fairer to limit the number of items each maker can tag? When I looked at the theme of the day on that day, all but one of the images was from one maker, and all their images were the same, with just the fragrance that was different. (I realise that I was looking at a snapshot, and that the view would change on my next visit, but on that particular view it was all but one from one maker) Because of this it didn’t look inviting or interesting to a potential customer. We have limited ‘favourite things’ tagging to one item only. Would it be fairer to all of us if tagging generally were limited to four items? That would give everyone a better chance of being seen, and give a much more varied look to the selected items on the page.
I think your idea of a couple of sentences to introduce the theme of the day is a good one, Judy. It might also make some sellers think about what they are tagging, especially if the introduction sentence was published alongside the tags on the sellers notification.
Restricting the number of items per shop, I’m not sure about. Depends on how it would work. Left to sellers to only tag 4 items? We know what happens then. Folksy admin have enough to do. I think it would only work if something could be written into the coding that picks up the tags.
Maybe some more “boards” on Instagram & Facebook along the lines of the Folksy Friday would help as well.
I understand your points @ChrisOsbornJewellery and I do agree that a sentence of explanation would help sellers understand what Folksy is looking to display in relation to the theme. As to numbers of products, I was rather hoping that people would self police to four, but as you say, that hasn’t proved very successful so far! I find it disappointing when shops ‘flood’ theme of the day with masses of their items, even if technically the theme fits.
It’s a tricky one. The tags would need to be more obscure. For instance when the tag is ‘tea’ then most of my items would come up or ‘wool’ then again most of my items would come up. Again ‘candle’ then a whole shop may come up on the theme page if they make candles.
Hi Judy. I like your idea of having a few sentences to explain the Theme of the Day but I’m not sure that it’s something we’ll be able to do because of the time pressures. Even though it’s only a few sentences, having to write one for every day would still take a while (these things always take longer than we imagine!) and I’m not sure how much value it adds for the customer. If it’s something lots of people feel would significantly improve the section though, we can absolutely look at it.
I will talk to the team to see if we can/should restrict the number of items from each shop.
I still really like the feature and enjoy looking through it every day but I’m definitely open to suggestions or ideas that will make it work better.
I like the idea of a short description. Sometimes the theme is so vague I am unclear as to whether I can show any items or not so I don’t which means I only get to contribute a few times each month. The current one I am grappling with is texture - everything has texture!
Limiting numbers would be a good idea to ensure variety but some of the tags people will already have on their listings as they are relevant so I’m not sure how it would be done.
Thanks for the thread. It certainly got me thinking!
I like the idea of a sentence to explain the theme of the day but I’m not keen on limiting the number of items that a shop can have per theme. Some shops are already limited as which of the themes they can join in with because of the nature of their work and I wouldn’t like to see them limited further. Whilst I accept that for a theme such as ‘fragrance’ the images could end up all being very samey the flip side is that for a theme such as ‘stripes’ a shop could actually have a very diverse selection of striped items which wouldn’t look samey. There have also been occasions where only a couple of shops tagged items for a particular theme (the chainmaille theme springs to mind), if they had been limited then there wouldn’t have been much to look at! Perhaps rather than limiting the number of items a shop could tag for a theme a limit could be placed on how many items from that shop can appear on the front page such that each of the 8 images are from a different shop.
@folksycontent Re adding a sentence of explanation, I think it adds value to the customer because it helps suggest what they are likely to see. If they aren’t interested in what they see pictured on the page at that moment, then it would tempt them to click ‘more’. Taking my example of ‘fragrance’, if they only see a selection of soap, and are actually interested in fragrances for the home or car, then the sentence would explain that by clicking on ‘more’ they would see a whole range of fragrances for a whole range of usage. In my former life I was a copywriter, and I am happy to help write the theme of the day explanatory sentence if need be.
@SashaGarrett I think your idea of spreading out items from one shop is really good, so that they don’t all appear from the same maker on the page at once. The ones I saw were exactly the same image, but with just a different fragrance, and that’s why it looked so odd.
I do think limiting items tagged would be a good thing and to avoid common tags that sellers would use anyway on their items maybe we could use the month as part of the tag i.e ‘april fragrance’ or ‘aprilfragrance’
@aamjewellery That seems a really good idea to me - to attach the month to the main part of the tag. It would mean that there would never be any problem with the algorithm picking up people’s existing tags inadvertently, which in the past has meant that people have been featured in theme of the day when they had not intended to be, through existing tags. Brilliant!
I definitely don’t think people self policing the number of items they tag is a good idea. A lot of the tags selected are words that people (with relevant items) should already be using on their items, and if you say for example you should only tag 4 items, that means a lot of people would have to go searching through their shop looking to remove tags that are already there, which would then interfere with the site working properly, as if a buyer (unrelated to theme of the day) was searching for that tag, there would be limited results, and the item they potentially would have bought might not show up.
Plus not everyone uses theme of the day or would want to go to all that work removing tags, so there’d be a lot of people with more items tagged, which would end up with too much work for staff to police.
Although adding in the month may get around that, I think it’s good that the tags generally are things that people would use anyway, as it means sellers that don’t even know about theme of the day can be included, and you probably get a lot more items with greater variety. If it’s a unique tag people wouldn’t ordinarily use, you limit what shows up in theme of the day to those sellers who are aware of it, have the time to change their tags every month and have the space for it (longer tags may mean people hit the character limit more).
Plus as @SashaGarrett says, there are just some themes where there are only a few sellers with relevant items, so on those days you want the sellers to have as many items tagged as possible to fill up the page.
I think if limiting items is something that’s wanted, it would be best done with coding so it doesn’t interfere with the normal use of tags and it stays inclusive, so it may depend on what sort of limitations are possible to be added.
Thanks to everyone for their thoughts - it is a complex situation with regard to ensuring a good cross section of makers and disciplines. I appreciate there may not be any easy answers - but perhaps the sentence of explanation is a positive that might help customers and makers.
If you were to limit the amount of items people could tag would defeat the point of tags altogether. The point of tags is for sellers to add them to their products for customers to find. Lots of shops do not add enough tags or ones suitable for their products, I find this time and time again whilst searching for items for the Folksy Friday boards. Some obscure tags don’t work for customers anyway so although we look for them for our products when that is the tag of the day a customer probably wouldn’t. As a customer I wouldn’t put ‘fragrance’ in the search box, I would put something like ‘soap’, ‘wax melt’ ‘candle’ ‘perfume’, ‘lavender’ , ‘rose scented’.
Also sorry if this sounds harsh but fairness in selling is not a thing, if you were selling well at a craft event and the person next to you hadn’t sold anything would you tell your next customer to buy from the seller next door instead because they haven’t sold anything?
It is up to all of us to advertise our products in the best way possible to make sales. So it is important to tag appropriately and use as many tags as possible to get customers to find our goods, because they are looking for those tags on more than one day, not just on the tag of the day.
I think most of us tag our items to help customers find our items in searches not necessarily to appear in theme of the day, (yes I check the list and if a tag is relevant to an item will use it but that is not the primary reason for tagging) so by limiting the number of items anyone can use a particular tag on against the purpose of adding tags.
It would be interesting to collate whether there is any serious growth in sales around theme of the day items. Personally i have seen no evidence of any sales increase around theme of the day items and beggining to question the time spent in adding / deleting tags. Would welcome others experiences.
I would also challenge the relevance of having pages and pages of themed items - who is going to find your prized item on page 46.
The theme of the day items are also shown on the home page on random rotation so whilst your item might appear on page 46 of the all the items it has a good chance of being seen on the front page as well - I certainly see higher impression/ view counts for items I tag for ‘theme of the day’.
The ‘theme of the day’ also gives me a reason/ excuse to post about items, especially older pieces of stock, on instagram thus giving them a fresh airing to help drive potential sales.
I agree with Sasha @SashaGarrett that the theme of the day gives you an excuse to post older items on other platforms like Instagram (it also gives Folksy a bit of advertising). I think a lot of good points have raised here. I wouldn’t want to see theme of the day go. On balance, despite some shops not exactly playing by the rules, I think it is a good way of getting pieces shown. I also think that we need to remember the purpose of the tags is to help customers find our pieces, so maybe the question is more: should theme of the day have a separate heading in the product page & not be part of the tags at all?
I fully acknowledge that there’s the odd seller who has abused the theme of the day by mistagging and/or changing tags to deliberately appear, even when they don’t actually have anything relevant, but I also appreciate that there are some days when the tag is so “on point” for a number of sellers that it looks like they’re overwhelming the page, when in actual fact, it’s just a coincidence. I’d hate to see the feature go just because of the behaviour of a few, as I really enjoy seeing work I haven’t spotted on some of my trawls through the categories, and I’ve actually bought some items purely because I saw the seller via totd. I don’t know what’s the best solution, I’m guessing like life in general, there will always be those who do whatever it takes to push to the front, irrespective of whether they’re entitled to be there or not. Still, it allows me to identify those I wish to avoid buying from, so on the whole, it’s counterproductive!
This has been a really interesting discussion - but can I just flag up what I said originally when I posted this topic:
‘I love the idea of theme of the day, but feel it could work better, and work better for a wider cross section of sellers.’*
There have been some great suggestions as to how this might be achieved, and lots of informative technical explanations as to how Theme of the Day actually works. It was not my intention to suggest that it should be discontinued, and I have found it very useful in terms of views of products.
