Searching For A Quality User Experience
To preface, I am an occasional crafter that, dare I say it, wouldn’t mind profiting from peddling some wares from time to time. My crafting does not necessarily define me since I’m by no means devout, but I do enjoy extended stints of constructing new jewelry pieces, sewing a new skirt, or playing with some yarn. And certainly, I have an appreciation for others who have talents beyond mind who are willing to share their goods online.
Enter Etsy. A wonderful handmade community where you can purchase and sell pretty much anything that has an artisan connection. To be a buying member, it’s free; to be a selling member, the costs are minimal. In fact, I venture to say that Etsy still remains the cheapest online marketplace.
But one major thing I’m sacrificing due to my lack of discipline for crafting and slight frugality (because let’s face it, Etsy does have competition with other online marketplaces, but they come at a cost) is user experience. See, since joining Etsy in January of ’07, so far as I can tell, no upgrades have been made to the site. From the surface, the interface appears to act like any other online community akin to Flickr, Vimeo, Ravelry, etc. But once you get into the site and starting adding items to your store, the nuances become cumbersome.
1) You can only delete items when they are active in the shop. For instance, my Etsy shop had no listings a few weeks ago because everything expired while we were moving. I simply wanted to clean out my listings and start from scratch; however, I couldn’t delete any of these past items because they weren’t active—they were more or less in limbo on Etsy’s servers. In order for me to be able to delete them, I needed to renew THEN delete. Basically, I would be paying to delete my items.
FYI, listings cost $0.20 per item and last for 4 months. If they expire, you must renew the listing at another $0.20. No big deal generally…
2)…BUT, you cannot look at all the details (tags, description, photos) of each listing until you renew! Another frustrating example is that I wanted to click on a particular item to make sure it was the same one I still had in stock and hadn’t sold at the DIY Trunk Show. (Some of my pieces vary in color.) But I cannot discern in the tiny thumbnail what color the beads are. I would have to renew (paying the $0.20), look at the details of the item, and if anything was incorrect, then amend the photography and/or copy. Or if it was completely wrong, just delete the entry entirely, but not after I incurred the $0.20.
3) Then there’s the matter of “inactive listings.” The initial confusion of this category happened while I was in the middle of adding an item to my store, and somehow I had navigated away from the series of steps. Not sure where my item went or if I had lost all the data I attached to it, I frantically started clicking on links in the left nav of the dashboard, where I stumbled upon “inactive listings.” Whew! At least I found the item I started adding to the store.
My biggest question is, why can’t all of the items be managed on one single page? The categories of “currently for sale,” “sold,” “renew items,” “expired listings,” and “inactive listings” all hang out in separate links. If I’m doing account maintenance on my store, I want to be able to see everything at a glance; or if I so choose, view each category in detail. Each category could be differentiated on one page via color code or subheadings. And if I want to delete inactive or expired listings, I should be able to do so from this page. But the bottom line is I should be able to delete any entry I want, no matter what category it’s in, whether it’s active and for sale, expired or inactive.
Even just talking about all this is making my head hurt.
(PS – I just deleted a bunch of inactive listings, but only after I reactivated them and added them back to the store. The difference between inactive and expired listings is the fee. I already paid the fee, wanted to make some changes, but hadn’t finished up, so they were transferred to inactive. From there I can activate without extra cost.)
There are smaller issues within the function of adding new items that could be simplified in my opinion, but now I’m just getting nit-picky particularly after sites like Flickr make it so easy.
Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate immensely what Etsy has done for the crafting/artisan/DIY communities, and clearly they are doing many things right. But there is always room for improvement.