What makes a product successful on Tindie?

Originally published at: http://blog.tindie.com/2015/02/makes-product-successful-tindie/
Hi! My name is Lauren, and I’m a data scientist. Tindie came to me with a plethora of questions about their platform, and I’m here to share the insights I’ve gleaned from their database with the Tindie community. Most importantly, we wanted to know what makes a product successful on Tindie. Here’s the TL;DR version……

I’m curious if being more active on this forum makes sellers products sell better.

Also, how about the activity of social media sites like Twitter. Perhaps comparing seller tweets to items sold could shed some light. I know some people have no problem posting 10 tweets a day whereas we typically only post one tweet when something changes or a new product is launched. This is more like 1 tweet every few months.

Also, when a product is tweeted on the Tindie feed do sales go up for that product?

@ubldit good points - we definitely need to dig further into that as well. This first round of analysis was just into factors that impact a product’s potential to sell.

More work definitely needs to go into external marketing/ results. As a simple rule, the more links to a product, the higher chance of selling. The top selling products have tens if not hundreds of links to them - from twitter, fb, blogs, forums, press, etc. That may be a symptom of a great project, but it is a clear indicator of future success.

I’d like to share my experience so far…
All of my traffic/sales has come from 1).my website (Google searches; meaning, have the right meta data!) 2) Through Tindie 3) most important was a Blog Forum (DIYAudio) based on word-of-mouth from my first customer. He shared his experience on the forum, and that drove customers to Tindie.

I have had NO SALES Tweeting or from Instagram posts. Perhaps it is because my product is specialized (ultrasonic cleaners). Any interest has been passive from Twitter, Instagram, Google+ and Pintrest. YouTube has been very helpful in showing my product, how it works, and it’s development, and sending people to my website and here to Tindie.
-Louis

From our data we have noticed that our customers will visit our website several times before making the purchase. So the first time they may find us on a google search. The next time may be a direct hit to our homepage and the third time they buy.

What can be characterized about the products that do not sell? We can learn a lot both from what works, your article does a great job of doing that, with what hasn’t worked?

Good question - I’m sure we can write a longer post with the data on it but here are the things that come to mind. In the data, we found a few interesting things:

• Videos don’t improve a product’s chance of selling. This may be a shocker for many, but my guess is that because the videos most use aren’t very high quality. Because of the low quality, they actually hurt a product’s chances of selling more than if they just had photos. I have a pull request up right now to move the videos to the bottom of descriptions for this reason. By putting videos front and center, it isn’t helping anyone.

• Technical product names sell poorly. Rule of thumb, shorter title/more consumer friendly does better.

• Cheap products do poorly. The more expensive a product, the higher chance it has of selling. I believe that is for a couple of reasons. Potentially those are products that are easy to manufacture so many people manufacture variations and therefore more competition. Another idea is that they are resold components and again can be found elsewhere.

  The more expensive products are more likely to be unique and higher quality. Therefore less competition and higher chance of selling.

Thank you for the fast response. I was also thinking. If a product sells does it start selling more in subsequent months? I would assume (perhaps naively) this is word of mouth. And then I start wondering how much is based on superior support. Providing superior support is extremely expensive - spanning anything from fast turn around on complaints from customers, handling flame mails, testing a sold product that might have a part not within specifications (could be because of the soldering, what have you), replacing product, etc. Both time and money are expensive.

So the question to you. How does superior support improve sales? And are the sales word of mouth (attributed to the superior support)?

Your conclusions on a video make sense. Making even an acceptable video takes a skill set including script writing. story boarding, lighting, camera/filming, audio, editing. If this is farmed out, I estimate at least $40K. On the other hand, quality images by the inventor are well within our reach. THis also points out (makes sense) the emphasis on the description.

The challenge then is to be a good writer and editor :-).

Can you give some more examples of “superior support” as opposed to “support?”

So, how’s the improved Google Analytics integration going, so we can draw some conclusions ourselves about why stuff sells?

@arachnidlabs good question. We pushed changes late last year to start gathering more data on orders - the user’s initial referrer, the most recent referral, etc. We need to look at that data to see what is there.