Tom,
I wonder if other artists with established stores and steady sales are seeing a drop in activity with the new menu style? It would be great to hear from them too. I wish I could help I don't see a change for my stats but I don't have that much to go on yet.  
 
I want to add another frustrating observation also. In some cases even when you are specific your category 'branch' is too obscure.
 I am calling for a single 'Military to/from' category in the Fathers Day page. Right now the only one showing is From deployed military, the 'to deployed' is buried in Occupation specific. I would think there would be more cards 'going to' those overseas than 'from' and yet no-one is going to find them if they look on the Fathers Day page. They will open the' from deployed' cards and think we don't have cards to send 'to' those overseas! I am harping on this a bit but Father's Day is coming fast and it needs attention.
 
I wish I had a constructive solution to add here but this all makes my head spin.
Pamela
 
 

Quote from Jeff_135713 on May 15^th, 2009, 7:52am:

 
Yes, it could be just a fluke, and not all big stores might be seeing a drop, but the main point was to consider a better way to do browsing than what has been implemented, as it likely is involved in what I'm experiencing.
 
As I sit here today, I've had 1 store visit vs. a 90-day running average of 30/day, and the day is nearly half over.

I'll chime in, although I nowhere near the "Big Leagues" with y'all. I had almost always had, at the very least, double-digit visits and a nice little run of sales every day. Then, BOOM, single-digit visits and there went my run of sales.    I'm sure, I hope I'm sure, please let me be sure, that it will come back, but, not holding my breath, either. Oh well, life is full of ups and downs.
Kathy

Quote from Pamela_135500 on May 15^th, 2009, 5:24am:

 
We will be moving the From Military Service / Deployed under Occupation specific to be consistent.

Mindy
I am so sorry and I certainly appreciate your help on combining the two categories but I feel kind of like I have shot myself in the foot. My cards are already coming through with the notification they are being moved but now I feel we have buried them forever, lost in an obscure category. Whilst it is logical to have them under occupation specific I feel they will not be found. If I was a shopper looking at the Father's Day page I would have no idea we had anything for the Military and move one. The separate category was great, obvious and would have been just great with both to/from military in there.
 
Pamela

Tom, your chart brings up several interesting things.
 
1. I think the ALL category covers the cards in the lower categories also. (This is not always the case which must be confusing to the customer, I know it is for me)
 
2. As it is presented here it looks like it works much better for the customers, they can zoom to what they want if they are looking for more specific.
 
I think one of the places GCU succeeds is in providing cards no one else has, this looks highlights that strength.
 
Perhaps what needs to happen is to move cards in the ALL or GENERAL areas that belong in a sub-category to correct areas. Those huge mega groups of cards seem to never get browsed past the first page or so. This, as you were talking about a week or so back, keeps the newer quality cards from ever being seen. The customer just gets overwhelmed and never gets to the middle pages to see the cards.
 
-Whisper-

Yes Jeff, I realize the wedding area surged early this year but, interestingly, dropped a lot in April.  Bridesmaid cards sold were far less, in total, to Pro Admin and Nurse's Day cards sold in April.  I luckily did well with these Holidays.
 
The sales "curve" I've shown a few times does show a lot of lumpiness month-to-month, so that's normal, but the store visits have always been solid even with slower sales.  This tells me that the recent drop in store visits is mostly due to this menu change.
 
On my percentages shown above, I did subtract out the specialty cards from the ALL number in calculating the percentages, so that should be correct.
 
It turns out 80% or so of GCU cards are not relationship,  age, or name  specific,  so it doesn't make sense to create lower level categories for them unless there were another type of segregation allowed, such as by style (humor, serious, photography, painting,  …), but that would take a ton of work. I don't see any movement in that direction, sadly, because that would help the shopper narrow in on a choice. A case and point is the Bridesmaid non-relationship specific ALL category with nearly 2000 general cards.  Most shopper see the first few browse pages there, usually sorted by popularity, and pick one.  The ones deeper back collect dust.  It sure would be nice for the shopper to, within the category, sort or search by style, keywords, or keyword tag cloud, to at least give them a subset closer in appeal to what they are looking for.   This needs to happen!
 
So here we are - artists are now stuck.  We can focus on highly specialized cards which account for only 1 in 5 cards sold traditionally, or we can make general cards only to have them stuck in FAT general categories where they will soon be lost.  I honestly have hundreds of great, funny, general category cards that are now deeply buried, and even though they have been “out there” for months, they have not even been clicked once!   That is very discouraging!!
 
That is partially why I am fighting to maintain or grow our store visits.  If we can get a costumer in our own stores, we have a better chance for a sale since they can more easily browse or search our cards than they can the towering mountain of GCU cards, especially with this new (*bleeped*) menu system.  
 
Thanks for your words and insights.