This seems like web design 101 stuff. Where’s the search bar on the front page? There’s actually not even a link to the marketplace at all. Consumers coming straight to the main page have literally nowhere to go. The only way to get a search bar is to click something on the menu and then a menu item and go to that page. Looking at the front page you’d think this site just does commercial printing and doesn’t actually sell anything.
That's really not good enough - and that's only at smaller responsive size. Like OP said, this is web design 101 stuff. The search bar should just be there on the home page, very prominently, with zero clicks required to reveal it. You guys have thousands upon thousands of products on offer, but are hiding the chief method of product discovery. It's crazy. You are holding back sales for marketplace sellers and for yourselves with this decision. Are you actively trying to suppress marketplace sales? Because this design choice makes it seem so.
On the marketplace the search button is easily accessible: It's just on the mobile version the search function needs an additional click. Thank you for your feedback however, we'll explore ways to improve this!.
Hi Mitchell, the point is most websites that want to sell stuff to customers have the search box right there on the home page, ready for buyers to type whatever they are looking for and hit "go". The home page has a "Marketplace" tab header on it, but you need to click it before you get to a page with a search box, almost as if (the cynical might say) Shapeways is intentionally trying to hide the marketplace in the hope it will go away. Or, SW hires idiots to design its pages?...
A user should be able to go to shapeways.com (the home page) immediately start typing into a search box. Any steps beyond that add "friction", and friction decreases conversions (sales). This isn't a fully apples-to-apples comparison, but imagine if you went to amazon.com and the home page just displayed a bunch of marketing about Prime Video, and you had to click "Shop" in the nav to get to a page that lets you search for products to buy. Silly, right? That's essentially what Shapeways has right now. Here's a quick 10-minute concept of including marketplace search on the home page:
Thank you all for sharing your feedback and thoughts! I do like your concept Robots78 I'll make sure to ping the team responsible for the website and company strategy to see if this is something we can do for the homepage.