One of the things we’re working on at the moment is how to tell you about what we’re working on at the moment.
So we thought we’d try putting it all in a monthly blog post where you can see what we’ve been doing and what’s coming next. We’d really love your feedback, and want it to be more of an interactive thing - a chance for us to keep you in the loop with developments and for you to tell us what you think about our plans.
The blog post is here ----->
So hop on over and leave a comment, or post one here if that’s easier.
Also, if you have any brilliant ideas for features, don’t forget that you can make suggestions and vote for ideas on our Knowledge Base.
I think improving / working on the Search is great. The gift guides you are creating are great and always nicely presented. But as others have said before, if some sellers are not included and on top of that, if the Search is not working well, then the chances of being found are slim. Occasionally, I do searches to see if my items come up and I get items not really matching or just 2 pages when I’m sure there are more. We should have both ways working well - Gift Guides and Search.
We’re going to start work on bringing tags / keywords back into Folksy. If you have a long memory you might remember that we stopped using tags back in 2012 as they were becoming unwieldy to manage and maintain. But they were popular and we know they can help support browsing around Folksy and now we have a strategy to make it relatively easy to maintain them. It’s a small thing but we’re really excited by it.
Improving search results when a customer is browsing the site is good, but will the keywords also be picked up by search engines to help bring the customer to the site in the first place?
Really glad that you’re bringing keywords back. I’m sure it will make a welcome improvement to the search function and experience for customers.
Interested to know your views on @JoSara’s query whether they will be picked up by search engines to bring people - hopefully some new customers - to Folksy
Good idea. I’ve just read it and excuse me if I ask “Are there plans to allow direct payment with credit cards?” Also can you look into why I get so many non payers, it surely has something to do with the checkout system. Please review the experience from a buyer’s point of view and make it all very simple and straight forward for them to complete a purchase, many thanks, Sue
Actually keyword metadata in the page has next to no search value with Google. So item pages won’t benefit although index pages for a tag e.g. the page of all the things tagged “rabbit” would generate search value if they were popular.
What is probably more significant is using the tag data in other ways, mainly through helping buyers move ‘sideways’ through the site and have a more serendipitous experience. For example, if you are browsing on an item page and you like the necklace of a silver-plated house you may want to go to see what other things have been tagged “house”. We don’t have a category for house and well, some people just want to see a range of more interesting and random things than categories let you see.
We hope it will become a useful way to promote more widely around folksy so you can see trending and popular tags etc.
@JamesB if a customer types a word /words in the search box, will item listings containing that word in the Tag keywords be picked up by the Folksy search process?
