How much listening is too much?
Customer forums are always interesting, particularly for e-commerce sites. There is something about staying at home and being bored that ultimately leads people to “window shop” online, which leads them to socializing with other people who are doing the exact same thing. The range of personalities is wild and wildly interesting.
Four hundred and twenty eight posts ago, I started a thread on the Etsy forums. The thread was intended to have two purposes. One was to simply get a sense of the community and introduce myself to them. Second, I wanted to get some better intuition as to how sophisticated Etsy sellers (the majority of forum posters) are about running their business and the e-commerce business generally. So I asked a basic prioritization question - would you rather us make search better or fix a bug that would occasionally reset the page views counter on your item listing pages? (For those curious, the views system is stored entirely in a cache, and when the cache gets full and a record gets evicted, the page view number resets to 0. Clearly, the system was not engineered to be used in this manner.) My follow up was, if fixing the view system is not a priority, would you rather we get rid of it entirely or keep it broken.
The danger is to get lulled into an urgency to please. When hundreds of users are demanding a feature, you may feel compelled to acquiesce and build the requested feature. Before you do that, stop and consider Henry Ford: “If I did what people said they wanted, I would have built a faster horse.” (or something like that.) Customers are excellent gauges as when something is wrong, but can be extremely misleading about both what exactly is wrong and how it should be fixed. Furthermore, customers do not (or should not) have better visibility than you do into strategic goals, key business metrics, engineering resources, etc. They don’t have your long-term vision nor your understanding of complex dependencies. So don’t jump the gun. Listen, follow the comments to the source, and solve the root of the problem.
Sean said,
June 5, 2008 @ 5:24 am
I’m wondering if Etsy would benefit from a feedback management system similar to Salesforce Ideas’ DellIdeaStorm, to give the discussion a little more structure and allow the most popular ideas to bubble up to the top:
http://www.salesforce.com/products/ideas/
http://dellideastorm.com/
These forum threads can get unwieldy fast.
barney said,
July 16, 2008 @ 12:14 pm
WHy don’cha just fix em BotH?!?!?1!?sheeEEESh!
disappointed said,
July 16, 2008 @ 12:59 pm
I am an etsy seller and it’s very sad you would use your position as an etsy admin to experiment on. You presented yourself as someone who would be interested and wanting to help. When I saw your post, I was genuinely happy and thought highly of you as a person. Now I think less of you for having such blatant ulterior motives.
I guess you think all of us sellers are ‘unsophisticated’ and a bunch of rubes. That’s an old fashioned word you might want to look up. I’m just an uneducated etsy seller with no business sense - not as hip as you, I’m sure)
You might have a lot of experience with buzz words like ‘key business metrics’ and ‘complex dependencies’, but you are woefully short on empathy, honesty, forthrightness, and plain old niceness.
Etsy locked the thread immediately linking to this post, but enough people will have read it soon to know just what kind of man you are. Too bad, I thought you seemed very nice.
Aly said,
July 20, 2008 @ 7:29 pm
Better search helps buyers find items, but reliable statistics help sellers know which items are being seen, helping them find effective marketing strategies. Even though item views are pretty paltry as a “statistic”, they are, thus far, the only statistic sellers on Etsy have available to them. If you don’t see the importance in that for a seller, then you are as short-sighted as you think the sellers are. If we’d had better stats in the first place, so much might not be at stake in losing the view counters.
And believe me that very few sellers would have ever requested a spammy email referral system, and yet, here we are, eh?
*insert obligatory, conciliatory smiley*
noyb said,
August 11, 2008 @ 7:34 pm
For someone who throws around a lot of really fancy language, you have a pretty poor grasp of the ethical obligations that are considered industry standard for research of human subjects.
You might start here, for a brief overview of ways not to be an asshole when conducting research with human participants:
http://www.apa.org/ethics/code2002.html#8
Re: your condescending attitude toward the people who pay your salary through their participation in Etsy, though, I’m not sure how to help you. Maybe Etsy can “help” you by firing your smug ass.
Then you’ll have more time to devote to projects you obviously care about more than your day job — like this self-congratulatory little blog!