So for the past several weeks, going back to approx March 31st / April 1st. the main website has been broken in terms of displaying “popular items”. I have seen the same 4-5 items in there, since March, with the same “5 remaining in stock!” with the # of orders on those stores staying relatively the same since. This tells me that the main site is not updating properly to show which items truly are trending preventing popular items from ending up on the front page. Furthermore - if you try to sort by “popularity” or any of the “sort” options, none of them work. None of them. I noticed this all broke that last week of March and figured it would eventually get fixed, but here we are 3 months later with no fixes to it. I’m making this post in hopes that Tindie will look into this as i’m sure i’m not the only one to notice it. I have seen weekly views drop from the average of 2000-4000 prior to March 31st to dropping by almost 1000 views a week steadily since March when none of my items even show up in the top 10 under product search anymore.
One other thing to note: I have noticed (and was able to replicate) that people are able to “game” the restock system to trick the Tindie Bot into sending out twitter posts saying “NOW BACK IN STOCK” by setting an item inventory to 0… and then restocking, causing the tindie bot to announce the item on social media (X/Twitter) each time. I have a suspicion these same handful of stores that i constantly see being posted over and over on twitter, are using a script + the API to do this, as they are constantly showing “Only 4 left!” for weeks on end (with store sales still showing the same # of sales over that same period of weeks).