Upcoming changes

[iCraft Admin]

We are planning to introduce a few new changes in April. Please read this carefully and give us your thoughts and feedback.

• Time limit for “On Hold” products
If 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.

• Email Reminders to update your Exhibit
If 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.

• Limit on Tags
It’s important that you choose appropriate tags to describe your products. Our internal search engine, as well as the external search 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.

• Limit on Product Titles
Product 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!  

[thefinickystitcher]

I think these are all great ideas especially emails about updating exhibits more regularly. It will give buyers more confidence that the site overall is kept current which is important when shopping online, well at least to me it is  :wink:

I will check my items to see if my tags and titles are correct over the next few days. I'm  looking forward to the flash widget.

[GalleriaLinda]

I agree with all of this too! I know I am wordy in my titles and tags. Now that I have a structure, I can work with it.

Artfire has a 70 character limit to the title and I often find it too short. But you will do 64 characters? I think that 70 is what Google will show in a search result.

The on hold items we were told can be rotated when we have a smaller shop. If you hold, then make them live, then hold again - does that start the clock ticking again?

You put a lot of thought into all of this!

[iCraft Admin]

Hi Linda,

I'll try to explain why 64 characters were chosen for the Product Title.
A while ago I posted "A few Simple Rules for Writing Effective Web Content" #page has been deleted#
According to my research at that time, properly written and scannable page headings like "Product Titles" should have 8 words or less. Each word on average could have 4 to 8 characters, making the maximum number of characters 64 ( 8 x 8 )

64 turned out to be a magic number for our flash widgets as well. We have them on our homepage and let you use them on the Resource page for promotional purposes.
Anything longer than that overpowers small thumbnails and decreases text scannability.

Also, we did some testing with re-writing Products Titles to see if 64 characters would be enough to convey what product is all about. So far that worked. However, this is not an exact science, so we are open for changes and refinements, if needed.

As for the "On Hold" items - we'll count the total "uninterrupted" amount of time any item has been on hold, regardless if it was on hold, then live, then on hold again. Hope this explanation makes sense.  :roll:

[iCraft Admin]

FYI. The deadline for Title and Tag limits has been extended to June 1st. Please take some time to review all your products and make changes according to our new rules. Thanks!

[GalleriaLinda]

I am almost done with mine!

I am "editing" a few a day so it is not such an overwhelming task.