Your Top 2.5 Most Voted Features... Now Online

This evening we managed to get in a pretty big batch of features online, including a couple of your most voted on favorites. Most of these new features came with help sections, but I'll run over each briefly to get you acquainted.

Customized Item Order in Booths: A Tantalizing Treat for Subscribers

This one was a big winner on the Next Up List, so we made it a point to get it online in beta as quickly as possible. Here is the full help documentation describing how it works. And here it is in action in my booth, featuring my fine belt buckles before the ancient SNES games. If you visit my booth and it isn't ordered by "Seller's Picks" items, it's probably because your browser has remembered that your buying preferences are to browse by some other criteria. If you close and re-open your browser (or if you were browsing to the site for your first time), "Seller's Picks" will automatically be the default for booths like mine that have it enabled. This seemed like the perfect feature that might tempt a couple more folks to join us as subscribing members -- while the feature is by no means essential to being able to sell successfully, it is pretty darned cool! Our hope is that if it tempts a couple more people to join as subscribers this month, we can get the funds necessary add a third server to the site before our surging traffic gets the better of our two existing servers (which are approaching their limits). Here's the link to subscribe if you can be so tempted... remember, if you subscribe for a year as a plus member, it amounts to only about $8/month. And it's healthier for you than Rocky Road ice cream.

Shipping Insurance, Shipping Profiles

As sofyblu is well aware, it has taken me quite awhile to get shipping insurance online. One of the main challenges to it was that I needed a way to make it available without adding any more clutter to the new item form. After some contemplation, I came up with the solution: shipping profiles. A shipping profile is basically a pre-configured set of default shipping options that you can apply to any item. And you can create as many of them as you want. So if I sold hamsters in my booth, and hamsters always ship for $5, with $5 shipping insurance required (we've had too many bad experiences shipping hamsters without insurance), I could create a shipping profile in "Sell" -> "Advanced Options" -> "Create Shipping Profile" that specifies these defaults. Then I can select this set of defaults in my item, and voila! In one click, I have set my shipping insurance and my standard shipping price. I could then customize other shipping options if I please. Of course, like everything, shipping insurance can also be set with the batch editor. Here is the full documentation on how shipping profiles work.

Slightly Better Searching

In addition to the above, we had some really good intentions to get the "Next Up" item for better searching online. But what we discovered is that our current search engine isn't quite up to the task of doing things like searching for phrases. Apparently, in its next release it will be improved, so we're going to wait for that. But in the meantime, we did at least manage to get negation online, so if you're searching for apple the fruit instead of apple the computer, you could search for "apple -computer" and the search would exclude results with the word "computer" in them. So that's something!

And That's That.

With all these new changes (plus the fact that I've been sleeping four hours per night with a stubborn cold that won't quit), chances are that there will probably be some rough edges tomorrow to polish. Apologies if that happens to be the case. We'll probably have a handful of polish updates for these new features on Thursday. Oh, and I'm making good on my promise to explain what the heck a widget is, with this new help page. Bon appetit!