You can test it by visiting BS list and their sold items. End of the list works better as top of the list often multi stock listings.
Correction. Just checked top of the list and got it first time on top 4 sold listings. I would be Furious if that were me
Think the ‘bug fixed’ is that it no longer does it on things in your own shop.
Glory Be !!
I just tried it on a couple of shops the first one has a lot of items in stock but it showed me a whole row of things from other shops rather than from the one I was interested in.
This really is just another complete hash up, so unfair to be directed to other shops. It is bad enough some of us have fallen off the radar completely but then by some miracle someone actually does manage to find our items they are then dragged elsewhere… " ooh no you don’t want that come and look at these instead, we like these".
Folksy seem to be doing everything to upset the apple cart at the minute, makes me wonder if the IT guy is trying to sabotage the whole site because it couldn’t get much worse.
Folksy we are paying your wages with our sales, when we don’t make any you wont get paid either.
It is the fact that the only promotion done to get people to our shops is the promotion that the sellers do themselves. Folksy social media promotions of actual things for sale are infrequent (except to get new sellers or suggest interesting teaching guides like how to tag so we are seen in the old search !). And when they happen they generally do not tag through to the sellers listing… if tags are added it is usually hours later by which time potential customers have been and gone. Often only tag is to the seller’s social media account which 50% of the time does not have a link to their Folksy shop.
So we do all the promotion. In our own time and on our own social media, our business cards and sometimes we even pay for it. I certainly do, several a year.
Folksy will tell you that they do have paid promotions. Yes 2 or 3 times a year teeny little adverts for their ‘special events’.
I would be most surprised if I, as a one woman business who works (long retired) about 10 hours every day on her glass and shops and promotion, , spent less in a year on MEta promotion for my own glass than Folksy do on advertising the entire shopping platform.
So when I have directed someone to something in my shop via a social media link or even a promotion i have paid for, and i find that if that item is now sold out, the (MY ) customer is presented with a set of gift guides for all sorts of things but none of mine, well it makes me extraordinarily cross…
This is MY listing, sold last month and promoted by me, on Social media with a link to it.
I looked at it signed out (YES i think they really have done one bug fix, to stop showing the alternative items or gift guides to the seller themselves) and this is what i got :
I wonder how we tell all the Folksy sellers who do not frequent the forum what is happening in their shops !!
@Bearlescent when I look at your last 4 sold items I don’t get the ‘you just missed it’ banner for the doll, I get links to gift guides for the picture and for the 2 teddy bears I get a row of bears in your shop
It’s really strange Sasha as we all seem to be getting different results. I looked at homemade with love (think that’s the name) shop from the best sellers, randomly clicked on a sold item and got no results from her shop at all when the style of her products are all very similar.
Lynn mentioned my shop and didn’t get results from mine but yes perhaps it is looking at similar products across Folksy. On your search it was positive and brought results from my shop but it is not consistent when other sellers have done the same and quite honestly if a shop has other items to offer it should pick those up not items from totally different sellers. If seems as though that may be one of the changes that has been made to suit the buyer not the sellers, but at the end of the day as sellers we don’t want a search taken away from our shops. Pleased to see on this occasion though my bears did show up but I am sure Lynn said it didn’t bring my items up when she looked at my recent listing of a doll which was sold and I do have another two with dolls in the title so it should have looked at those first. I Might need to do a few more searches and see what results I get.
Sasha it is random. Sometimes you get the items from the shop, sometimes nothing and sometimes that really bad gift guide list. You need to click a few times and it changes.
And as i said above. A LOT of traffic to my shop certainly is driven and paid for by me Sure this applies to lots of others too. So fine if someone landed on me randomly but not if they came to my shop because i lead them there… and then Folksy sends them away. That is not acceptable in any way shape or form.
@SashaGarrett @Bearlescent @JOYSofGLASS whereas I only got the gift guides!! Your bears will be seeing a lot of traffic today Debby!! Oh and I did find you in a search for 'collectable bears’x
Thank you, I meed that traffic 
Yes those results are not consistent are they but qt least you found some of my old bears x
I just tried your shop and sold items top 3 lines and of the items out of stock i got an equal number of… normal display of the sold item, others items in your shop and gift guides.It is totally random.
What really gets me is that this gift guide line is i am pretty sure newly added.. certainly have not seen it before and i click on lots of sold things. One of the couple of bug fixes Kim mentioned… hmmm i don’t think so !!
So while we are all so upset about never mind the useless search but also equally about the awful ‘cosmetic’ appearance of the Search pages… they have added yet another feature even worse than the last. Beggars belief !
It would seem so 
Here I am. A customer, not signed in to Folksy and I just found this nice horse suncatcher on Pinterest that the seller had kindly pinned their to promote her work.
Liked it very much so clicked to see it on the site and this is what I got
Now that particular horse is indeed sold but I, Joysofglass, professional glass artist, have THREE others. A White, a Brown And a Palomino and I was NOT looking for a gift, not for a wedding, for him or even for her. I was looking at that horse from that seller as I thought i might like to buy it from that seller and I am totally p****d off to be presented with a line of gift guides as if , I, the discerning customer, doesnt know her own mind nor what she wants to buy.
@Bearlescent I found the shop from the best sellers list and I’m guessing the item you clicked on was a miniature doll - the other items I was shown as things I might be interested in were all miniatures (mostly dolls house items) from other shops. So I wonder if the algorithm has picked up on the words miniature and doll in the title and decided to show me more miniature items for dolls houses rather than showing me items that are stylistically similar, the seller doesn’t appear to have any other items with the word miniature or doll in the title.
I’m also wondering if Folksy are doing a test to see which variant (no banner vs gift guide links vs similar items) gives a better conversion rate/ keeps potential buyers on the site for longer. Once they have collected data about how people behave then it could change (hopefully to the variant where they get shown similar items with the majority coming from our own shop).
Ah it could have been Sasha, I can’t remember exactly which item it was but that would explain it.
We will have to wait and see which variant they settle on. It would explain why you were shown more bears from my shop as they all have basically the same words in the titles, it does sound logical now thank you for testing it.
