My treasury and thoughts on SEO, usability and opportunities
Like many other Etsians I was delighted to see Treasury East go into Beta yesterday. I’ve had my list ready for weeks but have been unable to snag a Treasury to post it until now. So while I created my first treasury, I also took the opportunity to jot down some thoughts on SEO, usability and opportunities the new treasury functionality has.
My treasury: We’re all monsters – hear us roaaaaaawwwrrrr!
From the green-eyed monster to the cute and toothy.
Monster themed craft
So what’s changed?
| Treasury | vs | Treasury East |
|---|---|---|
| Flash | HTML | |
| No image preview | User driven | |
| Short lived | HTML | |
| Limited amount of treasuries | No limit | |
Get the comments on the changes straight from the admins mouth in this thread on Etsy.
SEO
Like many websites Etsy had some SEO shortcomings especially in light of the Google Caffeine update. Which Etsy seems to be fixing now.
Treasury East addresses some of these problems effectively by:
- Providing social media/ bookmarking functionality which addresses the sufficiency concept.
- Moving away from Flash
- Fixes search engine crawler visibility problem
- Should reduce load times (a factor in Google Caffeine).
- Produce more internal site links. The recent keyword enhanced URL change makes the internal links more valuable.
Refer to Website Optimization Tips For Impending Google Caffeine Update: Case Study for more information.
Usability
As this functionality is in Beta, I am not going to comment much on negative aspects. They still have to plug it into the site navigation, where most of the usability issues currently lie.
- I like the preview of the first three images that gives a flavour of the treasury.
- Creating a treasury is easy as pie. It is still harder work than it should be, but they are working on copy and paste functionality for a list of items.
- Users are already complaining because links now open in the same window, instead of a new window like it used to in the Flash treasury. It will be interesting to see if Etsy goes with best practice and keep the change. Or change it back to conform to what users are used to.
- I am guessing that they will have some sort of filtering in the future i.e. by theme, location. Because this is going to become a monster of a list.
Community
Changes to the Treasury also seems to support the Etsy’s business goal of becoming a social-driven platform. I am curious to see how this will pan out.
Up until now Treasuries were elitist due to time and list limitations. But it also meant with a little luck, the right timing and some patience anyone could get a spot. And because there were only 333 lists it would theoretically have been easier for admins to select front page treasuries.
Sean11 touches on this subject in the thread post. He mentiones a few interesting points:
Hotness algorithm
I have to assume that the hotness algorithm will be based on a combination of views and comments. With the new open, long-lived treasuries networking, pushing treasury links through your blogs, twitter and facebook pages will become critical.
Game mechanics
This is an interesting turn of phrase and hints at some artificial intelligence implementation in how the individuals in the community behaves. Well that’s what I am hoping for. Even if it isn’t exactly this, hearing words like game mechanics makes me happy because it indicates that the Etsy team thinks about their website and users in the right way to set themselves up for success.
Treasuries will not be chosen based on hotness
This point just made me very curious on how Etsy’s back-office systems actually look like. (Rokali, Etsy’s founder and CEO, talked about this a little bit in EtsyBitch’s January interview.) It would be nice to get an update on how this works.
With lots of complaints on the forums regarding frontpage favouritism and repitition of featured products in emails, I wonder if this will be up to the expectations of Etsy’s seller community.
I should however add that an open treasury should theoretically help combat favouritsm.
Why do I say this? Because with the current system the 80/20 rule (Pareto principle) came to mind. I obviously don’t have the statistics to review whether my hunch is correct, but I would guess that 80% of the treasuries were made by 20% of the Etsy community (probably a lot less than 20%). So these Etsians could be considered super-users with regards to their influence on which items are featured.
Only the people on their favourites list would make it to frontpage treasuries. This effect would escalate even further if new admins use these treasuries when they familiarise themselves with the available products.
Even though the admins seem to try and work against this behaviour with attempts at getting new shops featured (like seen in this thread) it’s a difficult natural notion to work against. It would be really nice to get some information on how they manage selection.
The gist of it is, that the new treasury system:
- Will hopefully combat frontpage favouritsm
- Will set up Etsy to become a true international marketplace
- Probably means more work (and luck) to get noticed – but also makes the game more even
- A more sophisticated back-office system for Etsy staff
Opportunities
I am very interested in seeing how this will evolve. Community has been the main driving force in web businesses for the past 2 years (at least) and UGC (user-generated content) has become the norm.
With the sheer volume of lists that Treasury East will provide, some sort of content filtering must be on the cards. I envision this as either tagging your treasury with location or a theme. A smart algorithm would also consider other factors in addition to user-generated tags.
As the multi currency, multilingual and country specific sites roll out the changes to the Treasury could make it easier for international teams to look at treasuries in their marketplace i.e. country/ region specific. It would also allow themes, i.e. traditional jewellery, to emerge.
Credits: Treasury East screenshot
First row: Short-snouted greenback, johnwgolden/ Labyrinth necklace, ProteanJewelry/ Pterodactyl (wants a cracker) amberalexander / Classic monster Frankenstein tote bag, theboldbanana
Second row: The Monster Crew – Morton, cabbagesandkingsArt/ Willowcat’s creepy beasts, Willowcatstudio/ Contradiction nesting bowls, AlmaPottery/ Albino voodoo bunnies, Protean
Third row: Cassette monster t-shirt, darkcycle clothing/ Bluto original water colour painting, TysonBodnarchuk / Oregon dreaming, Berkley Illustration / Timid monster plush, TrisCzech
Fourth row: Slub, Kudulah/ Arthur the angry trilobite, AtomKid / Green-eyed monster earrings, Faeried Treasures / Fluffel, Mariska
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