Homepage Tabs - All Marketplaces - Discussion Encouraged!

Hi Everyone,

I’ve been seeing a couple discussions in sporadic threads about the notion of adding new tabs to the marketplace homepages. I’m an author for ThemeForest (with a few GR items), but I’ve also been tracking the issue on some of the other boards as well and I think a lot of people (both buyers and sellers) would probably want to weigh in on the topic in one spot.

I certainly hope this thread isn’t redundant, but bear with me and respond here if you’ve already posted your opinion elsewhere.

So, here’s the proposals:

1. “Updates” tab: This tab, on the homepage next to the Popular tab, would show all major updates to individual products that have been made recently. Whether or not an update is deemed major would be at the prompting of the author, and must be approved by the reviewer to prevent “update spam”. The purpose of this tab is to draw attention to those existing products that have been recently updated and may include significantly greater quality and/or features. Authors spend a lot of time on these updates, and giving them some attention on the homepage (or somewhere else) is warranted.

2. “Extras” tab: This tab, on the homepage next to the Popular tab, would show all products in each marketplace that are outside of the scope of the core products. I’ll give an example: On ThemeForest, some authors are concerned that all new products are pushed off of the homepage very quickly by a high volume of PHP and JS code snippets that don’t compare with full WP Themes. As one user (Phoenix_Zero ) put it, the site is “ThemeForest”, not CodeCave. This goes for the other marketplaces as well.

Historically, most Wordpress themes could reasonably expect to see about 5-8 days on the homepage – that’s been shortened to 3-5 days now that the PHP /JS snippets are available. This is very, very valuable time as the homepage is what generates the most initial sales and can make or break a product’s lifespan. At the other marketplaces, it’s my understanding that similar things are happening as well. In short – the big core products are being pushed off the homepage more quickly by small rapid-release products.

Pros: (as I see them) – More homepage time for the core products, regardless of how many rapid-release products are approved in a given time period.

Cons: Less exposure for the rapid release products if users have to click a tab to see them – these small products represent a significant draw for buyers, and should not be ignored.

Another con is that it can lead to “tab bloat” – too many options leave users overwhelmed and they click away from the site rather than digging in.

The final topic worth discussion is obvious: dev time – are these features worth the developers valuable time? It’s been said by a few of the site admins that there is a redesign somewhere on the horizon, and that even if features aren’t included in the current site, the site admins are always listening for great ideas for the redesign.

Rules for discussion: It should be obvious, but as might be a heated topic (any topic related to sales can get heated), I’d like to remind everyone that we’re all pretty much here for the same reason, to see the marketplace (and our products) succeed.

Ok – discuss away

Thanks for the initial responses everyone – good thoughts so far!

I’ll play a little devil’s advocate here and just point to one of the caveats that I made in the original post:

“Cons: Less exposure for the rapid release products if users have to click a tab to see them – these small products represent a significant draw for buyers, and should not be ignored.

I’m certainly not trying to pull the rug out from under the feet of the authors of these rapid release products – I’ve bought lots of them myself and they are NOT trivial releases in most cases. They are awesome, useful, and high quality. My question is just whether they deserve the same prominence as the core products of each marketplace, which can often take 10x as much time to assemble and test.

Agree with the previous post. Updates should be encouraged, absolutely.

As for the extra’s tab, I think that this is a band-aid solution to a problem of product context. I don’t think they should be called “extra’s”. Semantically this is not meaningful and does nothing but hide them away, it provides little context to a buyer and just simply makes no sense.

I think the problem is that TABS are not useful for showcasing products or product updates. I think that there should be a big melting pot type of listing of products, but I also think that there should be more of the homepage used for multiple lists of the main categories. I also think a random selection of files should be displayed as well.

Interesting – Esp the “band-aid” comment, which may very well be the case here. If the problem is higher up on the user experience structure, making a small addition such as a new tab may just open up Pandora’s box of “hack solutions” rather than address the actual issue that is more related to scaling than it is to the homepage proper.

Still, if this thread only serves to bring up that discussion, I think it stands to improve the community and let the admins know our thoughts. I’m quite certain this is on their minds too – in fact they’ve probably thought about it quite a bit more than any of us and have metrics to backup any decision they make, so I’m interested in hearing their thoughts too.