Seller's sales report and other features

I have been a Tindie seller for almost two and half years now and my overall experience so far is quite good. I greatly appreciate Emile and his team’s continuous efforts in improving its design and making the Tindie experience better for both buyers and sellers. I am creating this new topic to share my opinions (based on my seller’s experience so far) on improving the current seller’s interface, which hasn’t gone through any major revision in a while. The current interface is simple, straightforward and easy-to-use. But for growing Tindie sellers, with increasing number of products and sales, it becomes important to keep track of things like sales growth, how individual products are performing over time, when a product reaches market saturation and requires improvements or a newer version, etc. It would be really nice if we could have some reporting tools in the seller’s interface for analyzing long-term sales trends and evaluating the product performances. Here’s what I would like to say about the current seller’s interface and its improvement:

1. Adding orders filter option
Recently I had a bunch of backorders to be fulfilled and at the time of shipment it took me a while to spot them as they were all mixed up with other orders and were listed in more than one page. It would be really nice if Tindie could add one more filtering option (we have Country, State, Year, and Month now) to My Orders page to filter out the orders based on their fulfillment status. I would suggest adding a drop-down menu named “Orders” before the Country drop-down menu with the following options:
All: This can be made the default selection for the page and will list all orders just like the current default page does.
Unshipped : List all unshipped orders
Shipped : List all shipped orders
Backordered: List all backordered orders that are not fulfilled
Refunded : List all refunded orders

A little notification reminder on the upper right corner of the Orders page for number of unshipped and backordered orders would be very helpful too (like shown below).

2. Seller’s sales report
I would really like to see some reporting tools on Tindie’s sellers interface for the reasons I mentioned earlier as well as for assistance during Tax filing. For sellers with multiple products, the profit margins are not always kept the same and are determined by sales performance and market competition. Also, during promotion periods, some products are sold at discounted price. Therefore, a list of net earnings from individual products would be very helpful to compute the total taxable income at the end of year. While these reports can have several different formats, I have made some examples below to illustrate my point. All the numbers are arbitrarily chosen.

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I would also like to hear what other sellers have to say in improving the seller’s side of Tindie experience.

Thanks,
Raj

Thanks Raj for the kind words! I can’t really disagree with anything you’ve requested but just wanted to put a bit of context around why we haven’t put as much time into the seller interface recently. There is a constant balance in development priorities between the overall community, seller needs, and internal/HQ tools.

Early on we were building for sellers. Basic product create, refine shipping system (over and over and over), selling options (in stock, preorder, and backorder), product options, price tiers, etc.

Over the last year, we transitioned towards making it easier for customers. We removed many features over the last 6 months that weren’t being used to simplify the experience. Interestingly, the more features we removed, the more traffic and sales went up. This month’s redesign was our final major customer-facing push we’ll have for a while.

Right now we are focused on improving the site for new and smaller sellers. In looking at the data, the vast majority of sellers need help getting their first few orders. A few changes that launched and will be coming -

• Manually approve listings before they go live to improve listing quality
• Remove old products that aren’t selling to better showcase high quality products
• Refine new product process around qualities we know that will improve a product’s chances of selling (more on this later in the week)

Those are features that will improve every seller’s chance of success. However I think we can do more to make product development easier for the entire community. I’ll have more details on this in the future, but over the next few months we will be putting considerable energy towards community features all sellers can use.

That leaves the features you’ve requested. Many great ideas and it will just be a matter of prioritizing them with our small (3 person), yet capable team. Most sellers don’t really need those features, but for super-sellers they are definitely needed. There isn’t a perfect way to allocate time and energy, but I agree we need to work on them. We’ll just have to fit them in between other projects that impact many more Tindarians.

Hi Emile,
Thank you for your assurance and I will look forward to these features on Tindie. At some point, all serious Tindarians will feel need for them to study their sales trends and plan for their growth, which will benefit Tindie too. But I do agree with you on your current list of goals in making things easier for new sellers.

• Raj