Hi All,
We’ve just finished our bi-annual Hack-Fort(night) where a few of us chose to work on a feature which allows authors to recommend other items to their customers. Authors are already designing their items to be compatible with other items or using other items in their preview so it makes sense that we create an easy way for authors to recommend these items while providing a consistent way for customers to view them.
This Hackfort project is purely aimed at testing author and customer usage.
Do authors want to recommend other items? How will they use the feature (e.g. by recommending compatible items, items used in the preview, their own items, etc)? And do customers actually want recommendations from authors?
How it works:
Create a Collection
In order to make some recommendations you’ll need to first create a Collection with the items you want to recommend. Collections is an existing feature that allows users to group items together for public or private consumption. For our purposes it won’t matter if it’s public or private. If you haven’t used Collections before then you should first read the help centre article.
We have made a small enhancement to Collections to allow users to add a short note/description to each individual item in the Collection. This is totally optional and will only be displayed to users when added through the new Collections field (below).
Add Collection to an Item
Now when you edit an item you can add a collection to it through a new section in Update Description. Just select the collection you want from the drop-down and save your changes.
Display Collection on Item page
Collections added to an item will be displayed on the Item page below the Item Description. Customers will now be able to view and add the recommended item to cart straight from the original item page creating a much better user experience (especially for items like photos and audio where there it is not as important to view the Item Details).
A maximum of three items will be displayed on the item page but customers will be able to click through to see all items in the Collection if there are more than three.
To provide clearer intent/purpose, initially the site will be used to determine what heading the related items are displayed under:
- “Here are some items I recommend” (PhotoDune, AudioJungle)
- “You know what goes well with this item?” (CodeCanyon, ThemeForest)
- “I used these items in my preview” (VideoHive, GraphicRiver, 3DOcean)
Here are just a few suggested uses:
- Cross-selling background music, footage, and placeholder photos used in your video template preview on VideoHive
- Cross-selling video templates that make use of your music track on AudioJungle
- Cross-selling other photos from the same location/photoshoot on PhotoDune
- Cross-selling compatible add-ons to your plugin on CodeCanyon
- Cross-selling HTML, Email Template, or other CMS version of your WordPress theme on ThemeForest
Test
As mentioned, we’re launching this as a test so any authors using the feature should subscribe to this forum post for updates. For example, while the current description on the Item page is quite specific (e.g. “items in my preview”) we may change the description at some point to make it more open-ended (e.g. “items I recommend”). That way we can get a better idea of how authors want to use it and what works best from a customer perspective. At this stage the feature will be around until the end of June where we’ll be much better placed to make a call on the future of it.
Feedback
As always we’d love to hear any thoughts you have or if you see anything fishy.
Thanks,
Andrew, Eric, Lorena, Manny, Paul, Pete, Shevaun and Steven