Many of you have noticed that we’ve put increased emphasis on ratings in the new search interface. Why? Well, we want the community to help us find and filter the best products from the zazzillions of products in the marketplace. Rating is just one extra piece of data that is used by the What’s Hot algorithm to determine what products to feature. It also means that we’re getting lots of accurate ratings from as many people as possible. Think of it as crowd-sourced merchandising!
Now you can easily rate a product from right inside a search/browse results page. Just move your mouse over the stars and they’ll turn yellow. Click to submit your rating.
You can also click the “rate it” link next to the stars.
This brings up an inline window that allows you to rate tons of products very quickly. After you rate one product, the next product from the results page will be shown automatically.
The old ratings system was pretty susceptible to spam because we didn’t require login and users could just come back and rate the same product over and over again. Login is now required to rate products and you won’t be allowed to rate a product multiple times.
I want to encourage everyone to continue creating great products and rate the stuff you like best. You can even rate down products that you think are showing up too high in the marketplace with a 1 or 2 star vote. It’s really a group effort to make sure the marketplace is featuring the best products.
Happy rating!
June 4, 2007 at 10:03 am
its not hot i think,,,,
June 5, 2007 at 6:41 am
Why don’t you rate what is hot by using sales numbers
June 5, 2007 at 2:59 pm
Hey Elke,
Actually, the single most important factor in the What’s Hot algorithm is recent sales. The purpose of the What’s Hot algorithm is to feature the products that have the highest potential to sell as well as what the community might find interesting. We look at a bunch of different factors to determine what has the highest potential to sell such as ratings, favorites, views, and conversion rates. We’re constantly tweaking the algorithm to create the best experience for buyers. Products that have high sales will definitely bubble up to the top.
June 5, 2007 at 7:36 pm
My products don’t sell, they suck. Definitely not hot.
June 6, 2007 at 12:40 pm
i’m sorry to hear that
June 9, 2007 at 8:34 am
Featuring products with high potential is a great idea, and I am glad that this “voting thing” alone is not affecting that much this potential as many factors indeed should play a role in deciding which product has possibilities. Going back to the ability to vote, it works great while surfing Zazzle, but it seems that people actually are still able to vote by going on MySpace.com for instance as long as they have one of the Zazzle’s Flash panel installed on their pages.
**Paul? Just because your products don’t sell do not mean they are not not great!
June 11, 2007 at 6:14 pm
Hey Nicole,
Thanks for pointing that users can still vote for products with the Flash panel. Because you don’t have to login when you rate through the panel, we don’t count those ratings as highly as ratings that take place from a logged in user. Eventually we want to build in login directly into the panel or for the short term we might remove ratings from the panel completely.
June 16, 2007 at 2:51 pm
I think the point of not using sales to show whats hot or not is see what the people like. Also I think you guys should build a facebook plugin that will put the products we create on our facebook frontpage.