Case Tindie: pitfalls when creating an eCommerce site [part 1]

Two years ago, Emil Petron published an innocent question on reddit.com/r/arduino: “Do you support the Arduino-marketplace or am I completely at the wrong address?”. Exploring the market for some time, he discovered the need to create a large store in which one could buy home-made hardware and software.

Many supported this idea, and Petron set about creating it. Five months later, he quit his job and spent $ 500,000 to turn Tindie.com into an e-commerce platform to sell similar products. Now this site attracts customers from all over the world, including companies such as SpaceX, Google and Intel, when they cannot find the product they are interested in from other vendors.
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However, another momentous event occurred at the first stages of work in Tindie: Julia Grace joined the company as a chief engineer, after gaining experience in firms such as IBM and VigLink. Today, as a technical director, she is at the head of a team of employees engaged in expanding the client audience and increasing sales, and in this work design plays a huge role. In this exclusive interview, she shares the experience she gained in the process of transforming a company from an unorganized small company into a major supplier of goods, and also tells about methods that will help give an eCommerce-start-up company a good impetus for development in the early stages.

Built-in search helps to explore your audience.

When Tindie began selling independent hardware for the first time, they could only select products from the categories offered on their website. Search functionality on the site has not been implemented. “If you are just starting a business and your company is small, you shouldn’t rush to create a site search system,” Grace says. - If your product catalog is still small and people do not know what exactly they want to find, then the best option would be to implement the function of selecting categories of goods. The worst thing you can do is prematurely organize a search on the site. ”

According to Grace, at the first stage of creating an eCommerce site you need to focus on systematizing and classifying your products. In the future, it will help you to provide high-quality customer service, and you can do it without burdening yourself with the intricacies of organizing a site search. “When you go to Macy’s website, you expect to see two types of products: clothing and household supplies,” Grace says. - Then you are given the opportunity to explore the goods in more detail, looking at the various options for products. This allows the company to better understand the preferences of its customers and how customers find and select products. A start-up company can organize the same system. ”

To do this, Tindie focused on developing a detailed product classification to simplify the search for products, as well as analyze how customers are looking for the products they need. This requires careful research of products, during which goods can be moved several times from one category to another. Experimenting and trying different approaches, they found that the best way to select product categories is to use images of prospective customers.

“We tried to segment the site based on customer profiles,” says Grace. - For example, “I am interested in electronic devices” or “I am a professional electrical engineer” or “I am a DJ, and I take my equipment very seriously.” Such images set the foundation for the formation of our client base. ”

Before coming to this decision, company employees tried to apply a multi-level category system according to which users were divided into “beginners”, “experienced” and “advanced”, but it was not as effective.

“Very soon we realized that people usually do not belong to such categories,” Grace says. “We realized that we had analyzed the behavior of people on the site incorrectly.”

It turned out that the line between "experienced" and "advanced" users is very vague. This was a key point: how you classify users is very often not the way they classify themselves. For a while, we planned to leave only the categories of “advanced” and “novice” users, but this made the selection of products for the latter category extremely difficult, since a very large number of products fit this description.

Tindie also took very seriously the organization of feedback from customers, carefully studying how customers use and evaluate the navigation on the site.

“When you provide users with more opportunities to contact you, you can assess how interested they are in your products - you can determine their level of activity as part of your customer audience,” she says. - For example, if the user just liked any product - this is a low level of activity. Posting a comment is an average activity level. But if they did not take the time to send you a message or to offer new categories of goods, then it is immediately clear that you are loyal customers. Now, when someone writes a review that he is unhappy with the current segmentation of the site, I ask him what categories of products he would like to see. It is important for us that customers feel that they are participants in the activities of our company. ”

"Give users the opportunity to modify the site navigation, but carefully choose who to listen to."

Whatever the effective and advanced product selection system by category, one day comes the day when thousands or millions of products are sold on your site, and you need to organize a site search system that will be useful when searching for goods that the user has selected in advance.

Site search system must be extremely effective

When implementing a site search system, you have two alternatives. The first will allow you to do everything quickly and effortlessly: you can add a search service by simply using a third-party API that helps you find the product and match it with the record in the database. In a specific case, this will help save your time and money. “There are several companies that can create a search engine for your site,” says Grace. “This option is suitable if you do not have enough power, you do not have the necessary specialists or the capacity to fully support the back-end and analytics and design the interface.”

The second option is to create your own search tool. Tindie followed this path by creating a simple text-based site search system that finds objects by keywords in the names of products or their descriptions.

“At first, we used Google Analytics and attached UTM tags to each search results: this way we could track where the traffic was coming from, but very soon we started having difficulties - especially in cases when users shared links with their friends. We could not determine if any queries came from the search box on our site or from another location, ”Grace says.

It is extremely important to consider how the search engine can affect SEO - especially if you want to build a brand, she says. - First, Tindie generated unique URLs for displaying search results and product cards in accordance with the search parameters specified by users (for example, by price range, etc.).

This led to the conclusion of inaccurate search results, which negatively affected the company's position in Google rankings. “If you are going to implement a search system, you certainly need to think about its functionality, but you also need to think about the URL structure from a business perspective in the long term, and try not to“ fill ”Google’s search results with links to unnecessary pages on your site. The latter can have a very negative impact on the position of the site in the ratings, which will directly affect the status of your brand. ”

The best way to implement such a strategy requires tremendous efforts, but it is worth it - you need to carefully monitor any actions with the addresses of pages on your site.

“If you change something, do it right. If you are moving the page to a new URL, set up a redirect. Use the correct HTTP status codes to signal to Google search engines what is happening on your site. Do not forget to redirect traffic and try to exclude the appearance of pages with the status code 404. We should not allow inaccuracies. ”

“Knowing which link users choose among the search results is important, but your main task should always be to ensure that the list of results includes links to relevant pages.”

“Do users get 100 search results or 50? Maybe they meant something else? Or are they trying to find general information, and get too specific answers? - explains Grace. “These are nuances that need to be taken into account, and therefore, if your company does not have sufficient resources to do this, you should involve outside experts in organizing the search system.”

To improve the accuracy of work, Grace recommends applying faceted search - a method of finding information that is organized in accordance with a specific classification system. It provides users with access to a variety of search results, through the selection of specific categories from the proposed set of options.

“You often find faceted search on airline websites or shopping sites where products are classified by gender, age, and price range.”

Given the above, care should be taken when applying this approach.

“Although a faceted search is able to provide you with preliminary valuable information regarding user preferences, there is a big temptation to cross the border and create too many categories. We had this experience, and the more categories we added (for example, from which country the hardware supplier, etc.), the less people used them. They quickly became unnecessary. Therefore, choose carefully.

After you have selected categories, it is most important to determine the criteria by which users search for products. “If you run an eCommerce site like Etsy, which sells a lot of similar products, then users are likely to be more selective about things like price,” Grace says. “On the other hand, if your site sells special products, such as Tindie, then buyers may be less demanding on prices.” Customers of stores selling exclusive goods mainly want to find what they need, and they don’t bother them how much they have to pay for it. ”

[ Continuation of the Tindie case ]

With the experience of Audiomania in creating your own IT solutions can be found here:

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• Translation trade from offline to online
• Practices to improve customer experience