2015 has started with a bang – last month we had 150k visits from over 100k visitors!Last week we hosted our first meetup. Thanks to all of the sellers that showed up!
William of FriedCircuits showing off his gadgets
The community is growing and we want to ensure all Tindarians have a great experience. This week we will introduce 3 new changes to further raise the bar and ensure every visit to Tindie is a fantastic one.
1. Removing Backorders
For the last few weeks, we’ve been working with a data scientist at Stanford. We learned quite a bit. We’ll be sharing those lessons over the next few weeks. Today we posted the first blog post in that series.
One of the most shocking discoveries was the impact – or lack there of – from backorders. After backorders were turned on by products, very few backorders actually come in. So few that it we believe a product would have better results by being sold out and just using our waitlist. Once a sold out product comes back in stock, we email everyone on the waitlist the product is available.
Many of you are probably scratching your head at this. From a seller’s perspective, backorders are a great signal of customer demand. However from a customer’s standpoint, they really don’t like to buy via backorder. So interestingly, it is actually a very poor indicator of demand. Because of how few backorders come in, we’re going to test phasing them out and see what happens. This is a tough one to AB test, but looking at the data now, it’s hard to see how this can’t help long term sales.
2. Manually Removing Poor Products
For the last 2.5 years, one stat has held pretty stable – 50% of products never will sell. Rather than leaving them up, we will begin pulling them down and, if we think it has potential, giving the seller feedback on how to improve them. Distracting customers with junk is just a bad experience. These products also take up space from the great products that do sell. Look for this change to be a gradual one over the next few weeks.
Overall
Overall Tindie is thriving! January traffic was up over 30% from December – our previous record. Over the weekend, we had record amounts of traffic and orders. February is off to our strongest monthly start. Together we’ve built an incredible community, and this year we want to make sure we show the best of what we can accomplish as a community. Building tools & features that the entire community can use to bring new ideas to life.
Here’s to 2015!
#yearofthetindie
