3 Month Battle Plan!
Our number one goal here at Zibbet is to provide you with the best venue to sell your creative goods on the planet.
To reach this goal we need to do 2 main things:
1. Attract buyers to Zibbet so that our sellers sell more of their products.
2. Keep enhancing the Zibbet site by adding more and more helpful buyer and seller tools.
As the title of this post suggests, this is a 3 month battle plan to keep you informed of what features and improvements you can expect to see around Zibbet in the coming months. In our battle plans we will mainly focus on point number 2, however we’re always thinking about point number 1 since it’s our core objective.
In no particular order, here are the enhancements you can expect to see over the next few months (note that this is purely an estimate. We could miss the mark or blitz it and do even more. Web development can be unpredictable sometimes!):
COMMUNITY LAUNCH:
Currently sitting at www.zibbet.ning.com, we’re planning to fully integrate this community site into Zibbet very soon. It will look exactly like the main site and will be able to be accessed from the top navigation bar. Community is a big part of any venue like ours and we’re excited about the increased interaction between our members.
HOMEPAGE REDESIGN:
We’re looking to get our current homepage redesigned. The main purpose of the redesign is to make it more attractive to buyers and encourage them to delve further into Zibbet. We will also be giving all Premium Sellers homepage exposure, with a new set of Premium items appearing with every page refresh.
IMPROVED SEARCH:
As with any e-commerce site it’s important that a buyer can easily find their way around and drill down into the site to find exactly what they’re looking for. Improved search will certainly be in stages, however in this stage we plan to make search a lot more intuitive. It will use stemming and the user can use operators such as ‘and’ ‘or’ ‘not’ to refine or broaden their search.
We will also be simplifying search on the homepage and have the ability to search by sellers name from the homepage too.
Image source: Modernl.com (not taken from Zibbet)
IMPROVEMENTS TO CHECKOUT PROCESS:
This will include general changes to make the checkout process an even smoother process. Extensive testing will be carried out to see if buyers are getting ’stuck’ on any particular page. It’s all about optimization to ensure a high conversion rate. We’ll also be fixing issues we currently have post sale with items not formatting the way they should for multiple item transactions.
GOOGLE ANALYTICS (PREMIUM):
Our Premium members will soon be able to track advanced statistics regarding their Zibbet shops. Google Analytics is extremely advanced, yet so easy to use. It will allow you to see information such as, where your visitor came from, what pages they visited, how long they stayed in your shop, how they found your shop etc.
AUTO UPLOAD OF ITEMS INTO GOOGLE BASE:
We’re excited about implementing this one as it will no doubt increase traffic to your shops and bring you more sales. For those that don’t know, doing this will make your items appear in Google’s ‘Shopping’ search engine.
We’ve got one other ‘bigger’ feature that we haven’t listed here as we want to keep in a surprise. Many of you are going to LOVE it!! 
We’ll also be making smaller changes and improvements along the way. Remember, you can follow all our development related updates by following @ZibbetScoop on Twitter.
We’re looking forward to hearing your comments on the proposed plan. We listen carefully to our members, which is how we developed the above plan. If there’s anything else you’re dying to see in here, please let us know!
Image credit: Night Owl on Black T-shirt, by BHBKidStyle
Tags: 3 month battle plan, battle plan, changes, features, improvements, plan, popular posts, proposed plan, upcoming features
great! I’m looking forward to all this. i was really hoping that the search function would have been on the top of the list though.
Tantalizing, That’s my favorite on the list, too. He said they were “in no particular order,” so maybe that one will actually be first.
But whatever order, this is all wonderful news.
Thanks for all you do Jonathan!
Judy
FANTASTIC! Thanks so much for always keeping us informed! : )
It’s so exciting to see the “battle plan” and to watch and enjoy the changes as they begin to be implemented. Thanks so much for sharing this with us. Move over other venues, here comes Zibbet!!!
It sounds really great!…thank you so much!
I love that a photo from one of our own fellow zibbeters was used in this article.
Really looking forward to the changes since I haven’t had much luck with my shop here on Zibbet. I hope more people will be coming to Zibbet
All the improvements are fabulous!! My favorite is the addition of Google Analytics - that is a great resource.
Thanks for keeping us posted!
I’m so glad I got into Zibbet early, I knew there were great things to come! I love Zibbet, you guys are great!
Thanks for the updates, they are very much appreciated. I have only seen marginal speed increased in my neck of the woods in Southern California. Still not good down here. And I too hope the search algorithms are improved up on quickly. That is what can make or break a sale, being found in the first place!! Once I learned how the search actually works now, I’ve redone many tags and am being found much better, but still not getting the sale. Economy and competition and all.
phyllis
BeadWizzard
Awesome! I love this site and looking forward to growing with it!
Thanks, Jonathan for the updates!
Great news all round!
I´m really excited about the search improvement - at the moment it doesn´t work for me at all - and REALLY-REALLY excited about the uploads to google base!!!
And thank you so much for the exposure!
Nice to have a battle plan! Thank you.
very exciting news. I look forward to adding more items to my shop son. Thanks for all of your hard work on the improvements.
I’m very excited about all these upcoming changes. Love the integration of the community site with the regular Zibbet site. Love Google Analytics and use it often for my other shops and I’m excited to see the new home page as well. Change is exciting and I can’t wait!
Sue Dixon
I’m excited about the change to the homepage. I want to do the switch from Etsy to Zibbet really badly and really soon, but the green colour puts me off. I know this sounds picky, but I think the homepage sets to tone.
Thanks so much for all your work!!
This is all sounding so good!! The improved search is what I most look forward to, but all of the above will be most welcomed by me.
I am looking forward to Zibbets future! I will be there to watch and cheer on every new development. Keep up the hard work, I personally am looking forward to an item importing tool. With over 100 items I would really rather use a short cut if possible!
COOL!
Exciting news! Looking forward to the battle plan!!
This all sounds terrific! Thank you so much for the heads up and wonderful updates. It’s great to be able to see what’s going on behind the scenes. *Smile*
Yay! This is the most important thing to me right now:
“We’ll also be fixing issues we currently have post sale with items not formatting the way they should for multiple item transactions.”
Google Analytics………yay……..can’t wait
I can’t wait to see the new home page. I’m sure it will be awesome!
I love the idea of using Google Analytics for tracking my store. I use it for my website and it is a lot of fun to see where in the world people are visiting from as well as the very useful data which helps me determine where I need to focus a little more time on.
As usual, you guys rock!
Wanitta
All sounds brilliant!
I would like to see (in addition to all these excellent developments - not that I’m demanding or anything! ;-D) bigger text boxes on the listing page, for both the item description box - so that I can format my descriptions more easily, and see everything that I’ve written - and the tags box - so that I don’t have to keep scrolling backwards and forwards to see what tags I’ve used and how many I have left.
This is mentioned in Vicki’s most recent Zibbet blog post on tagging. Vicki gives a couple of suggestions as to how to get around it, which is great.
So glad to hear of all thats planned and dearly hoping it will boost sales. Like Lamsears, I am also looking forward to the time when item imports comes into play.
Looking forward to the implementation of the search engine, thanks for the hard work you do to help us make sales. Keep up uhr great work.
Yay!! great news & looking forward to all the new stuff - what I’d really like is to be able to relist items instead of the copy function - but, Hey… I must learn to be patient…
Thanks for having a plan to make Zibbet even better for all of us! Looking forward to the additional changes!!
Great news! Hooray & thanks!
I like everything I see, and I can’t wait for this big surprise.
Very exciting! And so good to hear.
The planned improvement of the search function to make it more forgiving and all-encompassing, will be fantastic. Major kudos for the Google analytics. This site really needs to be discovered. Many thanks!
excellent news! I look forward to seeing my meerkats selling on here and being able to kiss goodbye to my old shops!
Thanks for keeping us informed - I’m looking forward to seeing it all come to fruition.
Awesome! Looking forward to being discovered here! And love the site so far!
Some great things coming! Already love the look of my Zibbet and looking forward to these improvements.
Alison @ Blue Forest Jewellery
So glad that Zibbet’s Staffs are zealous about “making it work!” Look forward to have a fantastic site that housed a passionate community selling cool stuffs!
So great to see all the positive feedback and excitement from you all.
We’re really excited about not just the next 3 months, but the next 6, 9, 12 months and beyond! We’ll never stop growing and making Zibbet better and better.
As mentioned, the above list is in no particular order. We’ll certainly be listening to you all and prioritizing based on your wants and needs. We’re just putting the finishing touches on the community and improving search and adding Google Analytics is high on the agenda.
Through the 3 months, no doubt you’ll see other ’smaller’ tasks and improvements made that are not listed above as well.
Thank you all for your continued support!
Jonathan Peacock
CEO, Zibbet.com
Terrific news and so glad for the upgrades. Thank you all for the hard work and we all need to have patience when working on a new site. I will be watching for the new changes.
Babette
Thank you for the updates. Sounds terrific! Great news about Google Base for us all!
sounds great~ especially looking forward to analytics and new home page design! thanks for all you are doing!
Good news about Google analytics and the upload to Google shopping search. Both of these are critical to wide web exposure and increased traffic. Thanks for putting these on the fast-track!
Sounds great guys! I’m looking forward to the changes. I think the search should definitely be a priority right now.
I love surprises but I hate waiting for them!!
this sounds great, looking forward to all the wonderful changes and surprises
Great sounding battle plan and just in time for Christmas shopping, too.
LOVE all the new changes - especially being included in the Google Shopping search results. You are all doing a FANTASTIC job. I just LOVE Zibbet. Linda
Thanks for these new features that you have listed, they are very much needed to be able to spread ourself and gain exposure.
Hope by the year end I should be selling ….
I’m glad to see the automatic Google loading, as I find it brings in a lot of buyers to me Artfire studio. I’m really looking forward to another site doing extremely well in the near future. I tied myself to both Artfire and Zibbet at the beginning of each, and haven’t regretted it at all so far.
Great news! I glad that you are continually making changes and new features. Thanks!
As I have been window shopping just now I ran across this text in a listing:
“Please specify which of our 56 stock colors and finish (Matte or Gloss) you would like in the “Message to Seller” box when ordering.”
Many sellers use this wording because they have copied their listings from other venues.
Therefore I’d like to suggest we get a “message to seller” box available for the checkout process.
Ultimate, but probably crazy, would be options when listing an item, whereby the customer could just choose color, size, etc, when checking out and would not have to leave a message at all.
Crazy? Impossible?
For now, a “message to seller box” would be awesome.
Thanks for all the great work you do Zibbet!
Fabulous changes coming, Yay!
I also would LOVE to see an import tool. I have almost 1000 items that I could then transfer to Zibbet
Keep up the great work!
Google analytics would be great, but I really wish you’d sort out the post sales stuff. The feedback feature could be improved as my last customer gave up with trying and I never got any feedback for that sale because she had too many problems. I’d also like my sales to reflect the amount of items I’ve sold as it doesn’t at the moment - it’s wrong.
I hope the bigger feature is something to do with currency!
Just read portable graffitti’s comment and would love this option too. It’d be great for customers to be able to specify certain requirements during the order process rather than having to email me after placing their order.
@PortableGraffitiGraphics: Nothing is ever impossible. We’d just have to figure out the best way to do it. A ‘message to seller’ box will be part of the ‘checkout improvements’.
@Milomade: We’ve certainly allowed room for bug fixing within these 3 months and fixing the post sales formatting and adding some other general improvements is on the list (and fairly high up).
Great to see so many comments here! Inspiring!
This is brilliant, especially uploading listings to google- a certain other site hasn’t done that for us yet, and since we’re watching to see waht happens to our basic shop to decide whether to open a premium one, this might be the thing that makes it.
Well done guys
What is this ‘AUTO UPLOAD OF ITEMS INTO GOOGLE BASE’ - am I missing out on something vital as I have no idea what this is and whether I should be doing it. Can someone send me a message and explain as I don’t want to hijack the commments here. Thanks.
Thanks for constant updates, etc. Good luck.
Google Base is now called Google Merchant. Jonathan is referring to changes to the structure of the Zibbet site so that listings will automatically be uploaded to Google Merchant. With the old Google Base, you could manually enter items. However, it is my understanding that the only way currently to have items uploaded to GM is by an automatic feed. The best thing to be doing while we wait is to be making sure our item titles and descriptions are as SEO friendly as possible. Even though our items will eventually be automatically uploaded, they will still be in competition with others for making it to the top of a page of search results in Google Merchant and therefore the words you use and how you use them is no less important. Hope this helps. Vicki
Sounds like a great battle plan. Thanks for the update. Sissy
Ditto to ALL of the above………..We’re ready to ride the wave…..
Grandmother Carolyn
Yes!! This ALL sounds great! Can’t wait to start using some of these new features!
On the community side of things is it possible to add a ‘latest discussion’ functionality so that it’s quick and easy to see all the latest threads tht have been added or commented on?
Goggle Analytics is great…I use that in my AF shop. Will look forward to seeing the new features.
So Thrilled to be a Premium member here at Zibbet! I know that it will soon be the #1 Handcraft selling venue online! Can’t wait to see and try the new features.
Yeah! Who doesn’t LOVE new features to help us out?! Woohoo! Can’t wait!
The battleplan sounds fantastic! I am particularly excited about Google Base/Merchant - especially the fact that it will be automatic! Otherwise all of us sellers would have to put every one of our items into a spreadsheet with every variable in a separate cell - a nightmare! An automatic feed will be heaven and will really increase our buyer traffic. Thanks for all your hard work, Jonathan and the Zibbet crew! <3
New`But`Looking`For`Lots`Of`Sales!
This is great hope to get my first sale
I’m excited by the addition of Google search!! That’s what we need to compete with the Big Boys in sales.