Quote from Kathy_131728 on Apr 10^th, 2008, 7:18am:

 
I agree with Kathy and not just because of the bulk sales, but as a shopper and an artist, I love to browse all types of cards.  If I see one that I am crazy about and there is an occasion to give it to someone, I might buy it.  
 
I am wondering why my card clicks are down?  I noticed individual card clicks down noticeably in the past week or so and don't know of any good reason why I can recall many many times, that almost as soon as I would put a card up the clicks began appearing on them.  Now I go down my list of cards and see no clicks on card after card..What is the reason for this?  I am not talking about store visits and card clicks under store report.  I am talking about under manage store, as you scroll down you can see the card clicks and the sales, the card clicks have dropped dramatically.
 
I'll take my answer on the air!  Hopefully from Mindy or Shaun, thank you!
 
Cara

Hi Mindy,
I didn't realize that the newest view had all the cards.  I can certainly see why you would want to make it smaller.  I like your idea of having a days worth of cards there.   I actually would look at a day's worth of newest cards, if I were a shopper, to get a feel for the kinds of cards the site has, but I may not be typical since I just love to look at art!  I also think that this might be a good way to get bulk sales too.  Again, just my opinions.  I am sure you know more what shoppers want, and that is what this is all about--happy shoppers make happy artists too!
Kathy

LOL Ernestine!  You made me laugh big time....I was just thinking that I needed to get a life!!!! ROFLMAO!

Yup, 25 pages.  
 
Very few sales come from this page to answer Ernestine's question.

I think the  timely cards for the holiday coming up should be the ones shown in prominence.   a month before a holiday or seasonal event feature the cards in random order.  this could be done by category and give fair exposure to everyone.  
 
making the searches and navigation simple and quick for the customer  will keep them from being frustrated and going somewhere else.  after all part of what we are trying to be is  - convenient for the busy world to still take time and send cards.  
 
 i do not like the popular card views at all.  i think it gives an unintentional boost to those certain  cards by keeping them in the forefront.  being the humans we are sometimes we look at stuff like that, most popular, most trendy etc.  it may cause some to think these are the best quality cards on the site and whether or not that is true.. and i doubt that it is in all cases, we gravitate to that which is easiest and most visible.

thanks rosanne. about my comment "it may cause some to think these are the best quality cards on the site and whether or not that is true.. and i doubt that it is in all cases"
 
 i do want to say i am not commenting or putting down anyone else's artwork.  i have not even gone all the way through the most popular, gcu picks, favorites  etc.  i think that there are lovely cards all throughout gcu and many may be in these spotlighted places but a great deal are hidden away in places that they may not be seen.  many  are just as lovely, but may even be more appropriate to cover some occasions,etc.  we need to give everyone a fair showing.
 
i understand wanting to show the new cards.  but putting any artists work above another by showing the most popular or what gcu deems best unintentionally puts others at a disadvantage or in a backhanded way says you are not as talented.  
 
i think we all pour our hearts into our cards, we won't work any harder by comparing, or ranking our work.  random views, random slideshows, will be the most fair.  if there has to be a featured artist spot, randomly choose through the artists and spotlight our bio and a few cards for a day, change to a new artist each day until everyone gets to be in the featured spot.  then start over.

Note taken on your comments to fairness and widespread exposure.
 
Please keep in mind that the Newest and Most Popular Cards pages are lightly traveled and that most of our shoppers are coming from search engines.  They don't even make it to these pages nor our home page.
 
As for GCU Picks, we try to give broad and representative showing for a wide variety of art styles and artists.  We choose upcoming seasonal cards show the breadth of our offering (photo, different relations, humor, animals, new cards, older cards, etc) in hopes to catch the shopper's eye.
 
Additionally, we typically bring the upcoming holiday to the top of our categories page in 2 ways.  First a promotional banner if appropriate.  Second featuring the specific holiday and listing all of the subcategories and card counts.
 
See here where Mom's day promotion is front and center and just below it Mother's Day holiday listing:
http://www.greetingcarduniverse.com/community/default.asp
 
The Newest pages have such a high turnover rate (nearly hourly) it's really not a page to belabor over.
 
Although a random sort sounds like a nice and fair approach, we feel strongly that the shopping pages should use a most likely to be purchased logic, which is the "most popular" formula.  To balance this we provided shoppers with the "Newest" page sort option.
 
As the site develops we will likely come up with new pages/features with the opportunity to feature randomly rotating cards.  Certainly the home page would be ideal for this but again since most traffic doesn't go there yet, it's not a priority.