We recently made changes to the Marketplace that had some results that our community was not expecting. So we want to clear up confusion about the Marketplace and go over our current and upcoming changes.  

Recently we made a change to the default sort for merchant stores to "newest first" instead of "relevance." This was done to prevent old or outdated products from being the first thing shoppers see when visiting a merchant store, and we have seen increased sales across the Marketplace as a result. 

This is just one of the tweaks we have made to the Marketplace and we have plans for further updates in the near future that we hope will continue to improve the Marketplace experience for both shoppers and creators. 

To clear up some of the confusion around how the Marketplace works and give more insight on how to best use the Marketplace, we have put together some answers to frequently asked questions. 

When using product search 

Your product may not be appearing in the same position as it used to in relevance sort for product search for a number of reasons.

1. Titles matter. The title of your product needs to contain the search terms that have been entered into search.
2. How well it sells matters. This looks at the number of sales over a given period of time. 
3. Keywords included in the product listing. Keywords need to contain the search terms that have been entered into search. 
4. What features you have matters. Features need to contain the search terms that have been entered into search. 

We have adjusted the weighting of each of these factors with the last search upgrade. This is something we actively monitor and adjust and your product may have ranked higher in relevance under the previous weighting. 

When viewing a merchant store

Relevance sort requires a search term to really function in the way it is intended. When viewing a Marketplace store page or the product search with relevance sort enabled and no search term, you will get unexpected results. 

Prior to the Marketplace search upgrade, when viewing a merchant store with no search term, relevance sort used to take into account the number of sales of your items over periods of time. So high selling items used to sort to the top even if there was no search term applied. Now when viewing a merchant store with no search term the relevance sort will function the same as best selling sort (not the best selling merchant report). Since best selling only indexes the top 50k best selling items across the entire Marketplace, best selling sort will only look up data from that index. If your items do not fall into the top 50k they will all be ranked the same. This is why your best selling sort may not match your best selling reports. In short, your items will only have a sales rank if they fall into the top 50k. Best selling sort has always functioned this way and has not changed. 

With that in mind, we are currently working on a change to allow best selling to now index each merchant’s store individually instead of just the top 50k items. This will allow shoppers to see any creator’s best selling items when viewing a store page. We hope this will be a better long-term solution than the previous relevance sort and clearly communicate to shoppers what are the most popular products in a creator’s store. 

As always, we are also continuing maintenance and have a planned release Monday April 10th to fix a bug impacting merchant product listing enhancements. 

We have seen good sales results with our current changes and are very excited for our upcoming improvements. As is the industry standard for online marketplaces we will continue to improve and make changes based on our own internal data and community feedback. Our top priority is the best experience for our Marketplace creators and shoppers and we hope these changes will bring us closer to that goal. As always, if you find that Marketplace isn’t working the way you’d expect, please let us know!

Happy shopping and selling!