Billing system update

I’m pleased to announce that the billing / invoice system update went off smoothly during the (far too) early hours of this morning! :)

In an effort to simplify the billing process, we no longer allow under- or over-payments, and now associate each payment with a specific invoice. Whilst this does mean the system is slightly less flexible than before, the end result is that everyone’s billing summary and account standings are much simpler to understand and consequently far more useful.

Billing summary screen

At the end of each month we’ll gather up the fees displayed in the upper box, then generate and “issue” an invoice. Once issued you’ll have 14 days to pay an invoice before it becomes “overdue”. To settle an invoice, click on the “make payment” link and you’ll be taken to the invoice summary page. From there, it’s simply a case of clicking on the Paypal symbol and following their instructions.

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Happy 1st Birthday Coriandr

I can’t believe that only 12 months have passed since Coriandr opened it’s doors! It’s been a fantastic year watching the community grow, things take shape, and sales steadily build. Since our launch in Oct 2008, our 220,000 visitors (from all corners of the globe) have viewed over 1.3 million pages, and those numbers are growing (in bigger leaps) each day!

It’s been great fun designing, building and running the site, and getting to know everyone (I’ve learnt so much that I must have gone up at least 2 hat sizes!). For a bit of birthday fun I’ve stitched together a “quilt” made up of a selection of our 1st year’s worth of listings, hope you like it! :)

Listings Quilt 2008

Finally, a big thank you goes out to all the crafters, bloggers, friends and family that have supported and helped grow Coriandr over the last year; it wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. Don’t think we won’t be calling on you for another year running though, we’re all set to make some big waves during our “terrible twos”, and we’ll certainly need your help to do it!

Feature update – managing your items

The eagle-eyed sellers among you will have noticed a few slight changes to the wording in the item management section of your accounts. These changes weren’t unnecessary fluff, but aimed at making item management clearer and to pave the way for today’s update! And what an update it is; not only quick re-listing, but the ability to use an existing item as a template for a new listing. I’m gonna use the rest of this post to walk through the new features and cover the basics of the other item management features, if you’d prefer to get stuck in; go straight to the  re-list an item page.

Quick re-listing

Any sold items will appear on the re-list an item page, with a button beneath them. Simply click on the button below the item you want to relist, and you’ll be taken to a confirmation screen:

Tell us the quantity you’d like to re-list, click the “Re-list item” button and you’re done; the item is instantly re-listed and added back into your shop! We treat re-listings in the same way as standard listings, so the re-listing fee  is a 20p x quantity and a re-listing won’t expire until it is sold.
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Improving Coriandr’s search

Over the last week we’ve been working hard behind the scenes to improve Coriandr’s search. Our aim is simple enough;

“make it easier to find the right things, quicker.”

As a marketplace, our opportunity to provide a great shopping experience starts with the search. The idea that gangs of buyers could be roaming the vaults of Coriandr, lost and alone, unable to find the one item that would complete them, is a very sad thing indeed! So much depends on the search doing it’s job well.

So, what are the plans?

• Make it easier to search. We’re going to be making some alterations to the way the search page looks and behaves. None of the existing search criteria will go, but the ease with which you can search for keywords, add tags, and generally browse through all the items on offer will be vastly improved. › Continue reading

Working together to boost handmade sales

I wanted to blog about a few exciting happenings that are making a huge difference to visitor traffic and sales on Coriandr. Is it a brand new marketing campaign? Or some cunning web-wizardry that auto-submits a seller’s listings to every blog in existence? Have we invented a perpetual motion machine that also makes a perfect cup of tea?! Nope. The answer is much simpler than that, and Coriandr itself has absolutely nothing to do with it!

The beginning of May saw PiratePixieCrew get busy with promotion. She’s organised an excellent promotional idea which has since been dubbed “The Coriandr Express“. The basic idea is that sellers can sign-up to ride on the Coriandr Express, and once it has left the station they each take it in turn to be a VIP for a certain number of days. For those days, it’s the job of everyone else on the train to promote the VIP and their products in whatever way possible; Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, etc. The response has been great, as the first VIP Digtheearth has shown with a recent post. If you’re interested in joining the Coriandr Express then visit the blog or catch up on how the whole thing is developing on this forum thread.

The second development I wanted to share was a phenomenon that took me totally by suprise. Most of you may have seen the “share” button on right-hand side of item pages. This button is an easy way of sharing that item page using whatever method you fancy; email, Twitter, Stylehive, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, LinkedIn, MySpace, etc… Having shared items via Twitter and Facebook before now, I knew how good this button was at getting an (almost) instant boost to item views, but BlueFishHandmade got her timing spot-on the other day when she submitted her Black Lace Gloves to StumbleUpon.

In less than a day her listing had attracted 300 views! Compared to some of the more established craft marketplaces that may not seem huge, but given how young Coriandr is that number is massive, and really highlights how effective social media can be in promoting your creations. If you’ve not used the share button before, I strongly suggest you try it out!

The results of all these efforts is that Coriandr’s visitor traffic is up by over 42.5% on the same time last month, and climbing every day. So a big thank-you to everyone in the community who has been involved in recent promotional ideas, especially those behind the helm.

Summertime feature update

Hooray for friendly gremlins with spanners!

During the last few weeks we’ve been busy tinkering away with some of the “behind the scenes” code over here at Coriandr HQ. That’s all very well of course, but it’s not very exciting for everyone else out there,  so now (with the help of our friendly neighbourhood tech gremlins) we’re turning our attention onto some much more fun feature updates!

Something that has (in hindsight) been missing from Coriandr is it’s community features… We don’t give you any way of interacting with each other’s shops; of letting each other know how fantastic you think each other are; even of letting everyone know what your favourite items are! All that is due to change over the next month. There are two big dates coming up, the 8th May and the 1st June.

8th May (v1.1)

• Order communication. To make order communication easier, we’re adding both a convo shortcut and the email addresses of each user to the order details page. This information will only be visible to the two people involved in the sale, but will help massively when dealing with those last minute, but important, order questions.

• Favorites. Why, oh why wasn’t this here sooner?! You know how it works; if you like a item or a seller, add it to your favourites! You’ll also be able to share your favourites via email, and even use them to build a Coriandr Seedling!

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Plant a Seedling today!

A few weeks back we quietly launched a great new feature called “Coriandr Seedings”. These Seedlings are a promotional tool that builds a miniature version of a Coriandr shop, which can then be embedded into an external website or blog. It’s a really powerful way of promoting yourself, and driving traffic back to your shop.

Here’s a little video to explain things a bit more. Enjoy!

Turning promotion up to 11!

The last month has seen Coriandr gain some great ground traffic-wise. The release of the Coriandr Seedlings has seen some strong and consistant improvements in daily vistor traffic (over 60% higher on average), with this month’s average reaching almost as high as last month’s peaks!

Since Coriandr’s launch it has been very interesting to see how (and why) other competing marketplaces have developed in the way they have. Whereas other marketplaces marketed heavily from the start, here at Coriandr HQ we focused our intitial efforts very much on developing great shop management features and making sure the underlying technology was solid. Well, that focus is about to change! We’re determined to push those vistor and sales stats through the roof, so from here on in it’s all about marketing and promoting your beautiful creations!

With that in mind, please say hello to Toni Jones, the newest member of our little family! With many years of marketing experience and a real passion for the maverick handmade scene, Toni will be bringing a great deal of know-how to proceedings. She will be getting word out to the national press , building links with other craft networks and helping to co-ordinate Coriandr’s support of real-world craft shows and events.

Continuing in the promotional vein, the majority of our upcoming features and technical improvements are aimed at making it easy for everyone to promote themselves and their favourite shops to the rest of the world. From a long-awaited favourites system to a curation feature that lets you build your very own front page for the site! Check out the forum for more details.

Mat

Love is in the air…

….and we thought we’d share some of that love with our sellers! From February until the end of March we’re halving the sales commission Coriandr charges down to 2.5%! That’s right, selling a £10 item  will now only cost you 45p (inc 20p listing fee)! In exchange you’ll get your own web shop (complete with RSS feed) and easy to use selling tools to help keep things organised.  Yay!

Say hello to our new blog editors!

A big thank you to everyone who responded to Coriandr’s recent plea for blog editors. I’m really pleased to announce that we’ve got three new editors (and Coriandr sellers) joining us very soon; alibalijewellery, digtheearth, and Tiny Pretty Things! They’ll be injecting some much needed craftiness into this blog in the form of product spotlights, handmade discoveries, and current handmade events. I’m sure they’ll be along shortly to say a proper hello, so give them a warm welcome when they get here!