Discussion on Product Pages
A feature in testing right now adds discussion threads to product pages - a more conversational way for fans to discuss your products.
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| Threaded discussion coming soon to your product pages |
We will be adding an option under your publisher settings tool page where you can elect to receive an email whenever customers post a new discussion topic on one of your products (similar to the current email notices when you make a sale or receive a new review). We will announce when this is released and ready for you to opt-in to those emails (or not).
Site Redesign
Our site has changed a lot over the years.
Last year was no different. We rolled out a new header/footer/left column and search bar look to our marketplaces. Late last year we released redesigned cart and wishlist pages.
Last year was no different. We rolled out a new header/footer/left column and search bar look to our marketplaces. Late last year we released redesigned cart and wishlist pages.
Already this year we have rolled out all new checkout pages. User testing is indicating the new checkout pages are doing their job of making it easier for customers to buy your titles.
Later this year we will be circling back to the main sections of the homepages. These sections have not really been overhauled for many years.
Our basic plan for the homepage is to do away with the current center and right columns and replace them with horizontal cover thumbnail strips similar to what you see on sites like Netflix.
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| An early RPG mock-up we did - so crude that our web dev folks will curse me for posting it. |
We will make this change incrementally to the home page and to other category browsing pages, testing the changes with customers as we go along.
This approach to the homepage will allow greater opportunity to showcase the covers of all of the hottest selling titles, titles exclusive to our marketplaces, and titles curated to each customer’s tastes. We can for example run a strip of Hottest Small Press titles and show the covers of all such titles vs. the vertical list of title names we now use in the left column of the site. We can show customer A and customer B different mixes of titles based on their prior history.
We know the user interface on many of the publisher tool pages leaves much to be desired. In ten years of coding tool pages to give you maximum control and visibility over your titles and connection to customers, we’ve organically grown the publisher menu into a rather daunting array of options that are highly functional but not always easy to use. Most of the publisher tool pages weren’t designed with the best modern day user interface practices in mind. We will be overhauling them.
Our focus right now, though, remains completing the redesign of our customer-facing pages. We hope to finish the bulk of that redesign work by the end of this year or the end of the 1st quarter 2014. We can then increasingly turn our attention to making your publisher tool pages friendlier for you to use.
Product Activation
We are making some changes to how products are activated for sale.
Last week we rolled out the first code changes that are part of a multi-step rollout that will give you more control over how your titles are delivered to customers.
Previously, if you wanted to sell a title through our print program, you also needed to have a digital download option available for the title. This week’s changes allow you to activate a title for print sale without requiring a digital option. For example, you can now offer printed cards without also offering a print-and-play version of the cards.
For those of you only offering digital titles not much has changed. Continue to activate titles as normal where you upload the files that customers will download.
Until we finish the rest of the coding on this project, there is an interim period here where a few site functions are suspended (e.g. using Batch Edit tool to make lots of products active or inactive at once) until we update those functions. Please bear with us.
There are a few other related changes coming in the next few months.
Terminology
Soon our on-site tools will change from the “active/inactive” word pairing to a “public/private” dichotomy. We think public or private is a clearer way to communicate what we mean when we say a product is active or inactive.
Different Files for Different Formats
You will soon be able to upload several digital files and then determine which of those files get delivered when a customer purchases different product options: download, print, etc.
For example, you might want to sell a card game as both a downloadable print-and-play file and as a printed card deck. You will be able to upload the print-and-play PDF file and also rulebook PDF file to the product. You could then select for both of these files to be delivered to customers who purchase the digital download option and select only the rulebook file to be delivered to customers who buy the printed card deck option.
To be clear, the “Add-On” option to purchase a digital download + printed book combination will remain, as it exists on site now. The new function will just give you the flexibility to choose which files are delivered to customers based on which product option(s) they choose to purchase.
Mandatory Download Test
We currently require that a publisher order a single proof copy for all print products before we will activate the title for sale. Similarly, publishers will soon be required to perform a “test download” of a title’s file(s) before you can enable that product for sale via digital download.
Our #1 customer complaint occurs because publishers enter a new product but do not test the file download themselves before activating the title for sale. Customers then find out the new release does not download properly.
Usually this problem occurs because the publisher has not followed our recommended PDF specifications, so the PDF does not play nicely with our watermarking process. We will also be making changes to our watermarking process to minimize these problems, but the ultimate safeguard to keeping your customers happy is to test the download yourself before making it public.
Apps
Why don’t we have an iPad app?
For the past many years there’s been a debate about the future of apps vs. HTML5 webpages.
We’ve been squarely in the HTML5 camp, believing that the functionality coming to webpages will allow phones and tablets to do everything we would want an app to do.
An HTML5 approach allows us to create and maintain one website that can be optimized for different screen form factors, but not have to code and maintain apps for iOS, Android or other operating systems.
This year we will be looking at how far we can push the code on our download pages and library pages to see if we can now make the experience rich enough for customers that an app seems moot.
If we don’t feel we can push the experience far enough then we will finally give in and look at doing some apps using the emerging hybrid approach of wrapping HTML5 into an app package. Services like Trigger.io offer this sort of approach.
Cards
Our card print program has been functional for a couple months now. We have been improving many aspects of it – nuts and bolts stuff like getting ship confirmation emails flowing between our print partner (ODT) and ourselves. With more of that now in place we are beginning to market the DriveThruCards site this week with a Grand Opening event.
Being able to print high-quality cards as single decks (or single cards!) to meet a customer’s order in real-time is just the beginning of what we intend to offer through our cards platform. In the months and years ahead we plan to offer a range of tools to publisher which you can use to publish card games in ways never before possible. Some of what we will offer will only be usable by publishers who create games with these capabilities in mind, so this is a long term project for us and for the publishers who choose to use the tools we build out.
One example is building a tool which will allow your fans to create their own cards compatible with your game. A fan creates the expansion card online, agrees to a click-thru and submits the card design for approval. Once you approve the card, it then goes up for sale as a single (perhaps as an “unofficial” card). Now your game is getting crowd-created.
Perhaps the fan gets an auto-pay royalty when their card design sells? Now your fans have several reasons to virally market their cards to each other. Those types of features are some time away for us yet, but we’ll get there with your input along the way.
Your Turn
Comments, suggestions, and questions are welcomed below.Steve
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