We have update the site on the 3rd of Janaury 2011. Exciting times!
Albeit there wasn’t as much of a change from this release to the next, there are quite a few noticeable changes on the site.
Search has been reworked. We now feature the option of either grid view (the new default) or row view. We found that this was a feature already very common on most other webstores and we thought we should have this to give our users a similar experience as they might enjoy on other sites. – But we know there is still a long way to go.
Another, maybe more important, search related feature has also been released: the option to order the search results by relevance, price Up & Down or just see the latest. This is not a feature that works with the category search results pages.
The application back end related tasks that we worked on:
- We tried to make sure that all links are now generated in the same format throughout the site
- We now record what users are searching for, thus allowing us to see what items are popular from what search
- Some users experienced difficulties logging in, we fixed that
- The search and other forms are now safe from injection attacks
- We are blocking robots from the dev site
- We added a feature to have a no navigation pages
- Emails were sending out outdated links
But the admin section of BadgerComp is getting a bit better too: we can now modify product details on the fly and exchange featured products on the department pages very swiftly. The admin section works a lot more dynamically.
As far as the overall road-map is concerned, I think that we still very much in the Beta phase of the website. The biggest development we are working on at the moment is for customers to sell their own products, in a sort of classified system. The products should be purchasable through our online store and listing them should, at least initally, be completely free. Because we don’t earn commission, we should technically not carry any liability for problems with our users transactions, but we will of course give as much good advise as possible for those who are just getting started with online sales.
Another development that we wish to concentrate on is implementing affiliate merchants. Ideally you should be able to find all your known high-street merchants alongside our and your own products. What makes it even more interesting for us to look at affiliate publishing is that we will want to display vouchers as well as merchant ratings on our sites, giving you the option to review aspects of your purchase. So the future releases will include more and more features for the sale of user products, as well as getting more affiliate publishing features on the site.
I wish we could tell you a bit more about new Products and Merchants coming on board, but it’s unlikely that this will happen within the next release period as the admin part that controls the feeds will be reworked.