Handmade Code: Tag Finder Tool from Craftweasel.com

redrowstudio

Story by redrowstudio

Published on Sept 04, 2009 in Seller Handbook

Photo by Craftweasel.com

As part of our Handmade Code series, we’re bringing you news and how-to’s about the innovations emerging from the Etsy Developer Community. Located at developer.etsy.com, the Etsy Developer Community serves as a hub for third-party software developers who are making neat and helpful programs for Etsy shoppers and sellers. In this edition, Martin Jones tells us all about his Tag Finder tool, just one of the applications he’s developed for his website Craftweasel.com.

Photography has been a hobby of mine for a while, and at the start of this year I set up an Etsy shop called redrowstudio for my photographic prints.  At the same time, I was taking the photos for my partner’s shop, thedoghouse. My day job is in computational biology, and I do a lot of programming, so straight away I started thinking of ways to use the data from Etsy’s API to make useful tools. The first thing I built was the Personal Shopper tool — I’ve been interested for a while in recommendation systems, and I thought that Etsy Favorites might be a good starting point. I put up the craftweasel.com website, posted a link in the Forums, and got lots of good feedback. I wrote the Tag Finder tool to see if it could help me with my own tags, then realized by reading the Forums that others might find it useful, so I added it to the website, and straight away it became the most popular tool.

 


What’s the basic idea of the Tag Finder tool? What need does it fill?
A lot of sellers (myself included!) find that one of the most difficult jobs is deciding on tags for our items — if you search the Etsy Forums on any given day you can pretty much guarantee that someone will be asking for help with their tags. Sometimes you can’t think of enough tags for a particular item, and sometimes you can think of too many and can’t decide which to use!

The idea behind the Tag Finder tool is to help with both of these problems. You give Tag Finder a couple of tags to start with, then it gives you a list of suggested tags that are associated with your original tags. (This bit works like the Google and Yahoo keyword tools).

It also lets you see the average number of views per day of each suggested tag. (It’s a bit more complicated than that; see the website help page for more info). This is very useful if you’re a seller, because you can choose tags that generate high numbers of views.

Very Important Editorial Note from our Etsy Support Team: Please remember to only use tags that are accurate and relevant to your specific item listing to best help shoppers find your items on Etsy. Inaccurate tags may be flagged by other members for review and removed from your listing by Etsy, without notice. Also, remember to consider appropriate tags that function as subcategories within your item’s category. Check out the Selling FAQ for more info about using tags properly.

Who is it for? How many people are using it right now?
The Tag Finder tool is for Etsy sellers who want to optimize their tags. Of course, you can also use it for market research — to see what color of hats get the most views, for instance. We’ve had about 5,000 visitors who have used the Tag Finder tool, and they’ve searched using about 7,000 different sets of starting tags.

Where do we go to find it? What’s the URL, etc?
Go to http://craftweasel.com, and click to go to Tag Finder from the menu bar at the top of any page on craftweasel.com. Or go directly to this link: http://craftweasel.com/TagToolQuery.do

How do you use it?
The Tag Finder page is very simple — just a single box! You type in some tags that describe your item (for example, wool scarf) and click the button. You might have to wait a while for the results to load,
because the application has to go and retrieve a bunch of data from Etsy.

The results page consists of a few graphs and a table. The first two graphs show the distribution of price and average number of views per day for items that match your input tags. For instance, for “wool
scarf” we see that most items cost between $20 and $40, and that most items get fewer than 10 views per day.

The next three graphs show some suggested tags, with views/day on the up-down axis and price on the left-right axis. From the first graph, two suggested tags stand out as getting high numbers of views —
“‘woman” and “organic.” So if these tags are suitable for your item they would be good to include in your tags.

Right down at the bottom of the results page is a big table that shows all the suggested tags and for each one the average views/day, price, and the number of items that were found. You can click on the column
headers to sort by that column. The table shows all tags that are associated with “wool scarf” so it can be useful for market research. For instance, imagine that we are trying to decide what color scarf we should make next. If we look in the table for color words, we can take a note of the views/day for each color:

red 3.10
blue 2.75
green 2.61
silver 3.31
gray 6.68

Gray wool scarves seem to get more views than the other colors, so we might decide to make our next scarf a gray one.

Are there any costs or further opportunities/ways to get involved?
All the tools on craftweasel.com, including the Tag Finder, are free to use — the website is supported by advertising through Project Wonderful. I’d love to hear any feedback, and I’m always interested in ideas for new tools — contact me using the details below. I’d also love to hear if you’ve come up with an interesting way to use the Tag Finder; I’d like to put more examples on the craftweasel blog.

What should one do if there’s a bug or a problem? Who should one contact?
I’ve tried to make it easy for users of the tool to report problems or give suggestions, etc. You can:

Email me: martin@redrowstudio.com
Convo me: my Etsy username is redrowstudio
Leave a comment on the craftweasel blog: http://craftweasel.blogspot.com
Message me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/craftweasel

If you do encounter a problem, please let me know what tags you were searching for, as that will help me track down the problem. There are a couple of known issues: the Tag Finder tool won’t work when Etsy is
down for site maintenance, and the site can be slow when a lot of people are using it. Hopefully I will be able to move craftweasel.com to a faster server in the future, which should speed things up.

What’s one surprising/fun/amazing story you’ve heard about someone using your app? Or what is your favorite part about the app?
My favorite thing about the app has been the response from the Etsy community — lots of people have given feedback, and helped out with bug reports and feature suggestions. I also love the way that people have come up with creative ways to use the tool. For instance, because top-level categories are also tags in Etsy, the Tag Finder can be used to choose which category to list an item in when it could fit in more than one (“knitting” and “accessories,” for example).

Anything else you’d like to add?
I’d like to say a big thank you to everyone who helped with craftweasel.com by reporting problems and making suggestions. I chose the Related Items below from some of the shops of sellers who have helped. Particular thanks go out to my partner Jane (thedoghouse) who came up with the name and color scheme for the website.

Also, there are a few other tools on craftweasel.com that might be useful. They are:

  • Shop Stats tool: Summarizes a bunch of information about your shop, prices and tags.
  • Personal Shopper tool: Finds recently listed items for you based on your Favorites.
  • Similar Items tool: Enter a few items and it will try to find similar items that have been recently listed.

 

Post in the comments below if you love the Tag Finder!

Read More Posts about Etsy Addiction | Handmade Code Posts

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