What exactly is the 'sort by popularity' feature? It does not seem to be equivalent to views, votes, ratings, or sales. Would it be possible to put back sort by views? I use views to adjust my advertisement strategies and to judge which models people are interested in (well, views and sales), and have been keeping detailed notes of how different strategies effect that. This undefinable popularity metric does not allow me to do that.
Sort by popularity is a new feature that tries to combine a lot of factors that go into a model being popular. We will do a blog post explaining it soon. Views is indeed more transparent and we didn't want to interfere with your testing. But, we hope that this feature will let more people discover more interesting stuff on Shapeways.
Well, I'm all in favor of helping people discover new things, but wish the old 'views' mode was still an option. Would it be possible to have both?
Maybe it would be a nice feature to add some checkboxes to the user configuration which controls the calculation of the popularity view. If not checked the part of the formula is set to zero which gives the shop owner the complete control over what he wants to view. For example: Views: Yes Buys: Yes Favorites: No Stars: No 1 * ViewFormulaPart + 1 * BuyFormulaPart + 0 *FavoritesFormulaPart + 0 * StarFormulaPart = Popularty Woody64
Ok. Just thinking out loud here but is there a real need to be able to sort your shop galleries by your customers? Maybe it is an option to have you arrange your items as you see fit? Any thoughts on this?
I don't understand if I see your pint correctly, but my personal arrangement/ordering can be done in the default view. For me as shop owner it's very interesting to answer these questions: - how often was an item bought, viewed Also the current options (last week, month, all time) is interesting. Woody64
I can understand you want/need to know how your shop is doing. Could a report not be more effective? - Robert
A report would be great. Ideally, in a machine parseable format. Being able to track views as well as sales would be great. Ideally, knowing who ordered what (even if through an anonymous mechanism i.e. customer number but no personal information) would be a feature.
Yesterday during the Shapeways Live webcast we came to the conclusion that contact with buyers would also be a good idea. Someone suggested it would be a great idea to promote contact so people could get feedback on their products.