Originally published at: http://blog.tindie.com/2014/12/2015-year-tindie/
As 2014 is wrapping up, we’re in full swing getting ready for 2015. We’ve now surpassed 800 inventors selling over 3,700 products! Last month we passed 110k visits from 173 countries. The Tindie Community is growing including engineers from Fortune 500 R&D Labs to Manny, an 11 year old inventor from North Carolina. Because of…
Now that is a tough one. How to get a decent photograph of myself…
I don’t like the idea of having my photo and name on my store page. There is nothing wrong with having a store/brand name and logo like it is now. Besides what if multiple people are on the team? People come people go, brand stays.
I’m sure you’ll be able to figure it out 
If you look at Airbnb, Etsy, Kickstarter all have more info on their sellers which I think makes a much better experience which translates into higher sales for sellers. \o/
@femtocow fair enough. One counter - just took a few screenshots from Etsy which make it more relatable. It’s incredibly difficult to connect with an avatar or store name. By using real names and photos, we make it more personal and I think that is huge. This is the first time most visitors will see a project - to know there is a human face/story behind it, will go a very long way. Example Kickstarter videos…
But thanks guys for starting the dialogue… I wanted to get that post up sooner rather than later for this reason. Thank you!
Can you share a bit more on why the markets are confusing? Paradox of choice? They’re useful when looking for something specific. Maybe they can live on as tags (which people should already be familiar with) and/or be used for search.
@gzip sure thing - it’s a bit of paradox of choice. Because there are so many, people don’t want to browse through them to find what they are interested in. If you’re interested in something specific, we want to point them to search. For the casual visitor, it makes sense to quickly let them narrow in on what they are interested in.
Many of the markets are subsets of DIY Electronics. So if you’re interested in synths, robots, or IoT, you probably won’t get to what you want. This was much of the problem we had originally, there became so many categories that it was a mess to navigate. Narrowing in the initial categories a visitor sees will make it much easier to understand as we will be making the homepage & category pages curated lists of products vs autogenerated now.
It’s basically letting the casual visitor pick their flavor of Tindie. Do you want DIY or more finished projects? Do your interests lie in one specific area - ex 3d printing or Sound? Those visitors are different than the Arduino enthusiast. We just want to make sure everyone feels like they have a place on the site. Right now that is very muddled.
I think tags would be better than categories or stores
For whom? 80 years old lady? This is Internet. We have been interacting with people behind avatars and nicknames since always.
@emilepetrone I’ve been meaning to ask - how is the order on the home page and categories currently determined? I was pleasantly surprised that newbie products like my own could make it to the home page. Hopefully such luck won’t go away with manual curation. 
Also, do customers tend to buy fully assembled products over DIY kits? I like kits myself but am begining to think that the average customer might be too intimidated by them. Price point is also a mystery. I’d like to offer a good value without seeming “cheap”. I’d be very intereseted in any info you can provide about what sells and at what cost.
@gzip \o/ our algorithm is specifically tuned for that to happen. glad its working!
It’s based on (pageviews/orders) / time. Meaning if something sells well with little traffic, we want to bump it up the queue so more people see it.
In regards to what sells well, we should do a data dump on this (adding to my todo). Generally speaking, higher priced items do better than cheaper. Ex bare pcb’s as a whole do very poorly. Kits do very well (Ex. Airpi, $90 weather station kit, was our top seller for a long time). Over time, I think more assembled projects will take off.
But over the holiday I can do some queries on this data to find out more.
Here’s my $0.2. ubld.it (pronounce “you build it” is a company not an individual. We actually have a team of people working on our products. I feel we are better represented by our brand and our products. I understand your logic and think you have good intentions. However, I don’t wish to have my face on Tindie and I think the same is true for most of our team members as well. I would have to discuss it with my partners but requiring a personal photo of one of us could possibly be a deal breaker.
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@ubldit Thanks for your $.02. Every business has someone that runs it, a “store owner.” That is who we’d like to display as the face behind a product. However another idea, a team photo? Something to show people vs a graphic. Fundamentally we are about supporting the people behind a project so that is another option (as opposed to the store owner).
The idea is to enlarge the part about the inventor(s) on product & store page. We’ll also use this info to better word emails/actions around the site. Ex “Phil will ship your order.” “Phil shipped your order!”
Right now we know for a fact that many customers are confused. They see a product and think “Well this is a normal store.” I think many would be shocked at how many support tickets come in around this - anything from “When are you shipping my order?” to “I’m interested in XXXXX. Can you tell me if it does XYZ?” There are a variety of cases that emerge because visitors don’t fundamentally understand they are interacting with an inventor(s).
Since we haven’t pushed this before, I think we should see how this impacts sales as we test it in the new year. My hypothesis is that it will create a better experience and sales will increase. If Ubld.it’s sales increase, then I’d bet the team would support it. I hear you and thank you for your opinion, but IMO a bit premature to call it a deal breaker. At the end of the day, we are trying to act in everyone’s best interest.
Doing business with my name might compromise limited liability protection of the LLC I just formed a few days ago. I have to pay a laywer to find out.
You mention one purpose of this change is to reduce confused buyers contacting support@tindie instead of the seller.
This is symptomatic of a human factors problem. Buyers should find it painfully obvious how to contact sellers and also extremely convenient. Neither is true.
First, on the store page, a “Contact buyer” button near the name of the store would be significantly more obvious than the existing “Message” tab.
Second, the “My Purchases” page listing prior purchases should have “Contact Seller” buttons for every listing. Don’t make people drill down to be able to contact the seller.
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To add to what bot_thougths said… I have received a few messages from people through this discussion forum that simply say “I’m just wondering when my order will ship”. The problem here is that the messages usually include a username such as “002cab00a” which means nothing to me and the body of the message doesn’t contain their order number.
The way I handle this is to reply back asking for their order number. Usually the customer will reply and provide the number. However, the last time this happened the customer never replied. So I’m stuck worrying about the customer.
It would be nice if an order number was required when contacting us.
@bot_thoughts showing the name of the store owner & their photo wouldn’t compromise your LLC.
A pull request is up for review that overhauls the store page to match the sidebar on product pages. This will greatly things on both of those pages. Ex-
Great idea on add ‘Contact seller’ button to My Purchases. Creating a ticket now. Another pull request is up to change the order page for customers to make it more apparent on how to contact a seller:
@ubldit 100% behind this one. Another seller mentioned this to me last night and it’s on our list. Great point
Depending on how the info is displayed, it could work.
I’d like the option of displaying either, JUST the store owner (fine for individuals) or BOTH the store owner (LLC/Corp name) and store manager (person running the store). Like this:
Photo
Store Manager = Some Person
Store Owner = Some Company LLC
or
Photo
Store Owner = Some Person
Would you agree to that? That would solve my concerns.
I’m sure there are other LLCs selling here. I wished they’d speak up.
Not that either of us are lawyers 
, but in Colorado, there’s established legal precedent for a 3-prong test that has been used to pierce the corporate veil of LLCs in the past. The first determines whether the LLC is merely an “alter ego” for the single-member. That’s the main source of my concern. If the LLC owns the store and gets the money, then it should be shown as the owner. Sure, put my name/photo up, but make it clear that the LLC is, really and truly, acting as a separate legal entity from me.
It would be the same if a tindie store were owned by Joe using his paypal account but Bob runs the store. Bob isn’t the store owner. Joe is. So show Joe (or LLC) as the store owner but show Bob’s name and pic as the manager.
Or if Joe owns and runs the store, show joe’s pic and name as the store owner.
PS: implementation is super simple. Three form fields more or less like this:
- Enter the name of the store owner
- Enter the name of the person running the store?
- Enter photo of the store manager
It’s an easy compromise. You get what you want with little effort and I get what I want (and maybe so do other LLCs and Companies)
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