We are planning to introduce a few new changes in April. Please read this carefully and give us your thoughts and feedback.
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Time limit for “On Hold” productsIf you place your products “On Hold” – we are going to keep them for 6 months and then delete them from our system. You will receive an email notification about that two weeks in advance.
Currently, we have a lot of products in our system that are “On Hold” and we don’t know for how long people intend to keep them like that on our site. Keeping them means we have to back them up regularly and keep the disc space available for them. We think it’s fair if we hold on to those products for 6-months to make it easy for you to come back and re-open your store.
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Email Reminders to update your ExhibitIf you don’t update your Creator Exhibit for more than 3 months – we’ll start sending you email notifications asking you to update your products. Email reminder will go out every 3 months until you reach 1 year of inactivity. If your Exhibit will not be updated for more than a year, we’ll assume that you’ve lost interest in using our services and deactivate your account. It will be permanently removed from our system, if you had no sales, or it will be archived for the sales history if you had, at least, one sale.
Providing great shopping experience is one of our main objectives. So this measure is needed in order to protect buyers from making a purchase from inactive stores or enquiring about a product that doesn’t even exist anymore.
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Limit on Tags It’s important that you choose appropriate tags to describe your products. Our internal replacement engine, as well as the external replacement engines like Google, rely on them.
From what we've seen so far, people put either too many tags and completely clutter the page, or choose the tags that don’t even remotely describe their products.
To make our tags a bit more focused and accurate, we’ve decided to limit them to 25 words. Tags under “Materials” will be limited to 10 words.
We are asking everyone to review their tag choices and adjust them appropriately. We plan to implement this change any time after May 1st, so we are giving you a few weeks to do this. If there will be too many words in the “Tags” or the “Materials” fields after May 1st, we’ll show only 25 of the tags on your Product page.
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Limit on Product TitlesProduct Titles suffer from the same problem. Since there is no limit on how many words you can put in the Product Title, some people put too many words or inappropriate words in it. After May 1st Product Titles will be limited by 64 characters. Please review them before this deadline.
This change has been implemented already:
• If Creator has not paid our invoice for the past month for more than 7 days, their account will be temporary placed on hold with the message “This account is temporary on hold”. It will be automatically activated as soon as they pay their outstanding invoice(s).
We are sending an email to all Creators soon to notify them of all these changes.
To finish this post on a more cheerful note, I am happy to inform you that we are days away from releasing our Flash widget that will let you advertise your products on the external sites. So stay tuned!