Coming soon - New Categories and more

[iCraft Admin]

Just a quick update on what changes you can expect to see on the site. We'll provide more details soo, so check Message Board often.

New Product Categories
We are adding 3 more main Categories: Bath and Body, Home Decor, Toys
Furniture will be now listed under "Home Decor" Category.
This will shorten a bit our Crafts category and make those three new categories more visible to the site users.

Audience-based Navigation
We are going to introduce new way for people to navigate products. Rereplacement shows that very often people buy presents for someone specific - a baby, mother, sister, teacher etc. We want to make it easy for them to find products for those specific groups of people.

Shop by Holiday/Occasion
Similar to buying for Audience, shoppers are influenced by upcoming Holidays and Life Events.
We are working on redesign of our “Buy Handmade” section to make it easier for them to see products that are ideal for those special occasions.

All this means that soon we will ask you to specify Audience and Holiday/Occasion for all your products, where appropriate. We will try to help you with this task and map some of the products to the new categories ourselves.

You will also start seeing soon changes to our Homepage and Top Navigation. This redesign will incorporate many SEO recommendations that should result in the improved traffic and will make iCraftGifts.com more buyer-friendly.
Stay tuned! 

[Fairy Cardmaker]

Oooo sounds interesting!

[iCraft Admin]

Just to add a few more things to the list above:

We are also widening the site
Since we are going to apply changes to the site gradually, you will probably see some inconsistencies in design from page to page at the time when we will be applying changes. Though we'll try to minimize that.
We are not quite ready to roll out big design changes just yet, but we thought we should let you guys know that a lot of things will be happening on the site soon, so you won't be surprised.

Improvements to Products Order function
You will be able to change order of products in your stores much easier, compared to what you have to do now. (well, basically using a work-around and updating a time stamp on products listing to move them up and down) 

Creating Collections
This feature was requested before by some people who wanted to organize their product listings based on the "Collection“ of similar products. Well, this feature is coming soon.
We'll also open this up for creating Collections of products posted on the site, so you could include yours and someone else's products in your Collections. That would another way for buyers to explore products posted on iCraft.

Stay tuned! 

[GalleriaLinda]

Very nice update! So glad to see newsletters - keeps me engaged in iCraft. Can't wait for the new things to come about. Thanks for all your planning for us!

And, welcome DragonKaty (although I have seen you in the forum for months....)!

Linda

[iCraft Admin]

We got this question through email today and I wanted to answer it here, as others might have the same question.

I hope your intentions for upgrading your classifications includes:

-  how to reach a particular area of the global map
-  specifically get an audience in my own area

Why would someone pay for an item and then have it shipped to them.  It won' t be happening except for a few items.
Can the site let buyers zero in on a geographic they live in?

Thanks, and good luck.

It's a great question!
I think reaching your local market is a very important goal.
We plan to roll out sometime this year Google Maps tool allowing buyers to replacement for products using a Map. Basically by entering their Postal/Zip code or exact location, people will be able to find specific products within certain radius. We know some sellers work from home and wouldn't want to disclose their exact location. So we'll never show your exact address on the map, only an approximate area in relation to the location, specified by the buyer.
We started working on this tool last year and then had to put it on hold due to site redesign etc.

Speaking of geographic replacement, do any of you use Google Places? Do you sell at local shops?
Google Places http://www.google.com/places/ helps you to be found on Google when people from your geographic area replacement for similar businesses.
It requires exact location. So if you don’t want to disclose your exact address, use address of the store where you sell or mention an approximate area.
We’d love to know how many of you sell offline at local boutiques. It would be helpful if you specified that information in your profiles as well. We can add a function for you to list all the places where you sell. That would definitely increase your changes for being discovered by local buyers.

[BagsPlusMore]

 :)The coming changes are great to hear.  It's wonderful to see this site updated.  I'm glad I came back.

[Beajoux]

Shop by Holiday/Occasion
Similar to buying for Audience, shoppers are influenced by upcoming Holidays and Life Events.
We are working on redesign of our “Buy Handmade” section to make it easier for them to see products that are ideal for those special occasions.

All this means that soon we will ask you to specify Audience and Holiday/Occasion for all your products, where appropriate. We will try to help you with this task and map some of the products to the new categories ourselves.

Has this been implemented? I was checking my listings to see if there was an option anywhere, but I didn't see one. I had read a previous thread about posting items for prom for it to be included in the newsletter, but did you mean to simply tag my listing with "prom"?

Thanks,
Ainsley

[iCraft Admin]

Hi Ainsley,

No, we didn't release these changes yet. We are actually adding a field for "Occasion/Event", so later you'd have to choose "Prom" from the drop-down, instead of tagging your products with "Prom". But for now please tag your products with "Prom", so we can find them. Thanks!

[iCraft Admin]

Hello iCrafters!

It took us a bit longer than we expected to redo our database and to restructure our product categories, but we are finally getting ready to release some of those changes to the site. We are planning to have a "Scheduled Site Maintenance” tomorrow between 10:00 pm and 1:00 am EST. You will not be able to use the site during that time.

What you will notice after this update is that we now have 3 new top-level product categories: Home Décor, Bath & Body and Toys & Games.

Other changes you will notice is on the “Edit Product” page under “My Account” area:

• We’ve added a few sub-categories for each top-level product category
• You will also see Major Holidays, Occasions, Special Days and Target Groups, as part of the product page
  
• We are now allowing you to list same products in more than one product category and associate to more than one Target Group at no extra charge
  

For the most part, site replacement will operate the same way it was before, as new fields won’t be replacementeable for the next few weeks.

However, we want to use this time to re-organize all products using new categories and sub-categories.
Please start using new fields to update all your products, as soon as those fields become available.
We will be updating a lot of products on the site too, in an effort to speed up the conversion to the new product structure. If we update any of your products, you will receive and email from us informing you which of your products were updated with some comments from our Admins.

Please note: even though we are now allowing you to list your products in more than one product category for greater product exposure, we will be monitoring this process and removing products from categories where we fill they don’t belong. So please make an effort to associate your products only with the categories, holidays, occasions and target groups that best fit your products.

Once you make changes to your products, make sure you check under which main category your products appear on the site and report any problems you notice. Also, if you have comments or suggestions for the new sub-categories etc., please let us know that too. We are testing the new system right now and will appreciate any feedback.

More instructions will be posted soon.
A lot more is coming in a couple weeks and months, including new page design, so stay tuned! 

[GalleriaLinda]

Can't wait! I know this was a lot of work but will be so useful. 

[Spotted Paw Creations]

Looking forward to all of changes! 

[Fairy Cardmaker]

Sounds good!

[Fairy Cardmaker]

The new categories are awesome!  LOTS of choice in the drop down boxes = lots of ways to be found in replacementes!

I listed something new and I got an error when I submitting.  I hit the back button but all my data was lost.  I clicked on my shop just to see if it went through, and it did!  (PHEW!)  But - it says "updated" instead of "new" on my listing.

#page has been deleted#

[iCraft Admin]

Hi Fairy Cardmaker,

Glad you like our new categories. Yes, the idea is to give products more exposure in replacementes and navigation through different product facets, like Audience, Occasion etc.

The error was fixed today. Thanks for reporting! 

[iCraft Admin]

So, who updated all their products with the new sub-categories yet? 
We want to hear if you have any questions or do you find them pretty straight-forward?

Btw, the next big feature that we are working on is the image manipulation tool.
We plan to have all product images resized to the standard thumbnail size, for which we need some kind of a tool that allows you guys to position, crop and adjust all your product images for the sizes that we need. More updates on that later, but right now we are focusing on tagging all products properly.

Please let us know if we can help you with this update.

[GalleriaLinda]

I haven't updated existing listings yet. I did list quite a few things this weekend and have a feel for how the categories work.

But I found it confusing because many seller's items are good for a bunch of those categories, events, audiences, etc... Should we just make sure that each item is in something?

[iCraft Admin]

Hi Linda,

Yes, the same product may fit into multiple categories and that's ok.

That's because the same product could be described differently, depending who you ask.
For example, the same pillow could be described as a "Throw pillow" or as a "Decorative pillow", or as a "Zebra pillow". Those are actual terms that people use when they replacement for pillows on Google. So if we had only one category for all "Pillows", those who are replacementing for very specific pillows would not land on our pages, because the term "Pillows" is too generic (and it's harder to rank for those terms). Plus, users who are looking for Zebra pillows might not find our pages relevant for their replacement.

So the goal is to specify all that apply and to be as specific as possible. Hope this helps.

[Fairy Cardmaker]

Hi.  Could you please add "paper" to the media dropdown?
Thanks

[iCraft Admin]

Done! Thanks for suggesting

[iCraft Admin]

We still have a lot of products in the system not wired to new Product Categories or have no mention of the Intended Audience or the Occasion. So I was wondering if you guys have any particular questions about those new fields and what would help in terms of training.
I am putting some additional instructions together, but any feedback and suggestions are appreciated. Thanks!

[Northern Girl Jewelry]

I don't know what others think, but I find the new product categories problematic.  In the jewelry category, the choices of sub-categories seem pretty random and often don't fit my jewelry, so I end up defaulting to "necklaces for women", "earrings for women", etc. 

The sub-categories are a mish-mash of types - some are styles, some are materials, some are colours, some are audience but none of these are complete.  So my style of necklace may not be there, or my material, or my technique, etc.  I actually find trying to select these to be pretty frustrating and I'm not sure how useful this will be for shoppers with such a random selection. 

As for Occasion, I don't make items that are for a particular occasion, so I'm not using that section at all.  Could one of my items be a gift for Christmas, an engagement, a birthday, Valentine's Day, etc?  Of course.  But it's not specifically for that (like a birthday card, or a Christmas tree sweater or something), so I don't think it's appropriate for me to use this feature.

[iCraft Admin]

Thank you for your feedback, Northern Girl Jewelry! Those are excellent questions.

Sub-categories seem pretty random, because they are based on the users' random replacement behaviour. Those are the exact terms that people use on Google when they replacement for your kind of products. Sometimes materials are included as part of the replacement phrase and sometime colours or audience. We only picked phrases that have a relatively high volume of replacementes behind them. That's why the list is not complete. However, those phrases that we chose are the phrases we want to optimize our product pages for. The terms will be useful to users, as those are the exact terms that will bring them to our site in the first place.

As for the Occasion, choose only things that truly apply to your products. If nothing applies, then don't select anything.
However, I think you could select "Casual wear" and "Dress for Office" for a lot of your products.

I know choosing precise terms that describe your product is a hard work. 
But the right terms will bring the right traffic to your store and give your products right exposure on our site. Hope this helps. Thanks!

[Fairy Cardmaker]

Sometimes the categories make me feel like I'm pigeon-holing my product.  I might make a blank snowflake card.  Yes, it might serve as a holiday card or Christmas card, but it might just be a winter hello card.  So then I don't want to pick an occasion.

[Ahkriti]

After a break of 2 and a half months coming back to icraftgifts.com and viewing the changes was lovely! Congratulations!
 I was quite stoked with the category that you guys put in for the Indian ethnic wear.
My views are this. Regarding the categories that you have outlined for the product - am not sure whether my products will be found should I put it in shall we say in the "gold jewelry section. Because when I am describing my jewelry I would rather somebody  find the indian necklace first and not specifically a gold necklace.

Well, what I am doing now is trying to specifically put some in the category specified else I just leave it.

But you guys are doing an awesome job! So happy that things are going for the better here!

[The Knitting Lady]

As I understand the new categories are like broccoli and carrots - we don't always like them, but they are good for us. 

[Ahkriti]

Okay! I think under the jewelry category, can a subcategory of ethnic jewelry/ethnic jewellery be added?