Coming soon - Products will be approved before going live

One thing we’ve talked about is raising the bar in 2015. Our first task was the browse experience. Second is the quality of products on Tindie.

Today we started working on an approval process that will be deployed next week. Before a product can go live, it will be manually approved by Tindie HQ.

A few changes this includes:

• Each new product will be verified before going live
• After a product is edited, we’ll also manually approve it again
• Existing products may be pulled if the description or photos aren’t very good.

Ultimately we’re just trying to make listings better looking which should convert into more orders for you, the seller. We’re also trying to raise the overall quality so that the average visitor has a better experience. The riff-raff that isn’t selling doesn’t really help anyone so time to clean house!

Rather than playing ‘police’, I would suggest implementing a much more visible user rating system, and having products rank by popularity. It works for Amazon, New Egg, and eBay… It will likely work for Tindie.

I welcome the clean up and think having better photos and details will raise the quality of the user experience. We only have one product that has not sold on tindie for whatever reason. I’m wondering if you will pull that product given that our other 5 products do sell. What’s the criteria going to be for pulling products that don’t sell?

We have a ton of money into the product that is not selling. This was a big hard lesson for us since it was our first product. Perhaps a clearance section would help some of us seller move these items. At this point we would be happy to just recoup our cost.

My main concern to start are sellers that haven’t had a sale. Many times they throw a product up with the bare minimum description and images. While it is great to have approaching 1k sellers, we aren’t doing the poor sellers any service by letting those products stay up. At the same time, potential sellers don’t want their products next to junk so they are actively dissuading new sellers from the site.

+1 (and extra chars)

…hence rank by rating. Keep new stuff at the forefront with a timed value of ‘freshness’. Rank can be determined by comparing how new it is, with how often it is purchased, and subsequent ratings. If that kind of ‘head start’ isn’t capitalized on… It’s going to drop away from the front of the store.

(no offense to emile here)
Keep in mind that this thread is similar to a “seller versus platform” thread, as the goal of the main tindie page is to promote products that generate the most money to Tindie (with a good reason… business is business!.. hint: RLP).
This may end up in hiding new and interesting products, but in Tindie’s defense it can be hard to find metrics to promote them… which is why I agree with your user rating system idea.

Emile: keep in mind that you may win more in the long term by giving a shot to new projects that may come up on tindie.

100% agree - that was why it has been an open marketplace up till now. It’s incredibly hard to predict what will and won’t sell. However some we know for a fact won’t sell for a variety of reasons. Right now ~50% of products don’t sell. Can we lower that rate? I think so…

The sort we use now does hide these products very well (which is why most people don’t get into the depths of Tindie). I’m also not opposed to a user rating system - we have had one before. I’m sure we’ll have another one down the road.

It’s just clear there is a lot we can (and should do) to better the experience for customers and sellers alike.

(BTW this is totally a discussion we should have. Apologies if I sound like a scrooge - ate a bad burrito for lunch and have been paying the price this afternoon. Don’t go to the place near our office. )

I think there needs to be some sort of hierarchy of edits. You guys are going to get deluged otherwise. I regularly edit my products to reflect inventory levels on hand… are those going to fall under editorial purview too?

You’re probably right - we may just whitelist great sellers…

I don’t like the idea of waiting for approval after every edit. I edit products very often and this would be annoying. None of the other sites I’m selling on has any approval for new products or edits and they are doing quite well. Also one of the reason why some products are not selling may be that they are hidden very well in depths by your magic sort. Every time I visit Tindie home page I see always the same products. If other products don’t have a chance to show up there, no wonder they don’t sell.

There are items currently listed on Tindie that are products for resale by sellers that are “hail marrying” the price in hopes of catching an uninformed buyer. Example This oled screen is commonly for sale many other places on the net for $5-6 shipped. Or other products that I just shake my head at Example (It was first listed at twice that price.).

It seems better with the new categories but I would agree that the same 10 products were always listed on the front page with the previous system. This is why I used the “new tab”.

On another note, I’d like to offer a tidbit of advice for sellers using OSH Park boards. Take the minute to sand or file the “mouse bites” off the edges of the board in your product pictures. It makes a night and day difference as the boards look professional and it conveys that you’ve taken care assembling them. When I see boards as a buyer that are just snapped apart for product pictures I wonder how much care was put into designing and assembling them if the seller couldn’t be botherd to “finish” them for the pictures.

@femtocow we’re going to figure out a way to not have every product get approved every time. Hear you loud and clear…

Re sort: The ones that show up at the top are selling and handled by our algorithm. We can AB test this to further accelerate our decay so that it changes quicker. However those are showing up bc there is demand.

The ones not selling still show up in Google & Tindie search results - but aren’t converting into sales. That leads me to believe something is wrong with the listings or that there isn’t demand for the product. Tough to say, but at least we can work on the quality of the listings themselves.

@dirtyengineer

Re hail mary- good call and this would be another reason to incorporate the “user rating system”.

We could imagine a most sold items category as well…

I wish this were the case even though I have sold more, have more reviews and documentation a competitor that stole my designs and closed sourced** them is listed above me every time he sells a unit and I dont. I have tried to contact the seller and Emile about this but nothing ever comes of it. I am reluctant when I post updates to my designs/code because of this person clearly steals them and has no qualms about not giving credit and not following licensing. I don’t mind the competition but when its one sided with me having to make the designs for both of us I loose big time. At least have a filter where reviews, quality of docs and sales volumes speak out as well!

**the person didn’t even bother to change my poor comments in the code it was word for word copied, I cant see the designs files but yeah we can only imagine.

Did you know that Emile is a member of the oshwa board?

@sparkyswidgets I just searched my email for your emails but I can’t seem to find them regarding this competitor. Apologies if we did have a conversation about this and I can’t remember it. If you tell us the competitor, we can email them right now.

The normal course of action is to let us know, we contact the seller, and if they don’t act, pull the product. Pretty simple.

If you have told me about this seller in the past, please refresh my memory. It’s not because I don’t want to enforce a license but my lack of memory.

Passed it along to your email Emile not that anything was really private just seems more appropriate this way.

All good - just emailed the seller in question. Seems like a case of lost email/ lack of follow up. Sorry about that!