Halloween, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas Elves, Christmas Jumpers – as we run into the end of 2019 I had a moment the other day where I wondered – where will it all stop?
Where will the commercialisation of everything actually stop? I can imagine a day in the not too distant future where there will be a major sales event attached to at least every day of the week.
I know in a good few countries it is almost possible to sometimes find local events tied to every day of the week – but I can see, due to the continued success of international events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, new sales events emerging that target every day of the week – all in an effort to close more sales and make more money.
As of today, December 10th, Creative Market increased the commission they take on each sale from 30% to 40% – yes that’s a 33% increase.
They announced this change to shop owners in an email a few weeks back and it created a lot of discussion on the Creative Market community forums amongst shop owners. As you can imagine – most were not happy at all.
This change from Creative Market comes on the back of a few different things they have been trying over the last while, one of which was the equally contentious Certified Products Badge they launched and are interestingly ending with this commission increase. Here is a short quote from the email on this:
Effective December 10th, Creative Market’s Commission will increase from 30% to 40%, and Certified products will no longer have a different Commission from non-Certified products. We’ve heard your concerns about Certified, and this change is the first step in improving the program. We know buyers love Certified, so in 2020 we will explore ways to maintain that trusted shopping experience for buyers, while ensuring Certified works for Shop Owners as well.
Now, to be clear, I have had a shop on Creative Market for a long time, I joined just after it launched in 2012 and released my first product in 2013 and even motivated my wife to start a shop of her own on Creative Market in 2015 (and she has seen the same impact on her store as what I describe below). I was a big fan of Creative Market and really believed that a marketplace that did the work to attract and build an audience in turn allowed shop owners to focus on what they were good at. But sadly, as of today, my opinion has changed.
Creative Market has always been a side project for me and as such I was more than happy to give 30% of my sales to Creative Market for the work they did in attracting customers to the marketplace who in turn found my products and bought them. Over the years I have had some months where my shop made really good money and then it ran on autopilot while maintaining a reasonably steady stream of sales.
However, then came 2019 and suddenly sales dropped – with no changes to the store or its products – sales just seemingly dropped overnight. Interestingly, when looking at the comments in the support forums around the commission increase – it appears my shop was not alone – many shop owners on Creative Market saw their sales have equally abrupt drops around the same time, and they have yet to recover.
You can see the sales below for 2019, steady growth in the first few months and then the cliff…with some slow recovery and then another cliff….
Interestingly, Creative Market launched a beta test of the Certified Product Badge in Mid Feb. What was also interesting was that in order to have your product certified you had to be willing to lose an additional 10% of your stores sales – so effectively the 40% they have now made standard in these changes – but now they doing away with that, and just making the 40% standard. 🤔
With all this said, as I mentioned earlier, fortunately our stores were not our main sources of revenue – it was just a fun side project – but for many other shop owners on Creative Market it was not. I always knew that ultimately, by selling on a marketplace, I was giving up a percentage of my sales and in so doing was also tied to the rules of the marketplace – but this change really hurts when it comes on the back of already decreasing sales.
In the future I will have second thoughts about using marketplaces and rather look to create my own site (after all I do work for WooCommerce now – lesson learnt) and rather use the 30% (or 40% in this case) of my sales to do my own marketing and build my own brand and customer base rather than rely on someone else to do this for me. Yes it will require more work and effort, but then at least I am not “renting” a place to sell my products and a customer base from someone else.
To give you an alternate view to mine you can also read this post from a fellow Creative Market shop owner.
We are currently getting feedback on some new designs (using Lookback – a great product if you have not tried it) as part of the cart and checkout redesign I am working on for WooCommerce. During the sessions, in the final step, we ask the person testing the prototype to view what the new checkout page (which they have just made changes to) would look like for their customers on ‘their’ live site. Simple enough right?
Well, considering this is a prototype of static design files (using Figma) – and the person testing it is not actually testing it on their live site – it’s obvious that they are not going to actually get to see what the new checkout literally looks like on their own site – so for the sake of the prototype and tests it would have been easiest to just insert a ‘generic’ logo in the header of the ‘prototype’ site and expect the person testing it to imagine they looking at their own site right? Maybe.
As we began the first session I thought – what if I tried to create a small moment of delight during the test (beyond the new designs obviously 😆 ), and take it from being ‘just another test’ to something a little different.
So, while the first test was running I quickly went to the url of the person’s existing site and copied their logo across to the prototype (which automatically updates, thanks Figma!) so by the time they got to the last step – when they opened the ‘live preview’ – the first thing they saw was their own logo – in the prototype. The very first comment as they opened that screen was:
Oh, there’s my logo!
Which was followed by a big smile. Win!
Needless to say, on every test thereafter it got nothing less than an immediate smile and in one case a series of questions on how did we actually manage to do that in a prototype and an acknowledgement of how something so seemingly small created a moment of delight for them.
So – don’t stop at good enough, push for moments of delight – even in your prototypes if possible.
I came across an article and related study via a few various places over the past week. If you have not seen it yet, or don’t want to click though – essentially, in February 2019, researchers at Princeton University analysed ~53k product pages from some of the most popular e-commerce sites online and discovered widespread use of “dark patterns” – so basically techniques employed to “manipulate” and “deceive” shoppers.
What was interesting to me was the fact that this list includes things like:
Activity Notifications
Countdown Timer s
High Demand Notifications
Limited Time Notifications
Low-Stock Notification
Pressured Selling
Now, most of the articles you will find on “growth techniques” or the more annoying “growth hacking” term will tend to include suggestions that using methods like these will help drive “growth” – but to me – seeing these listed out here as dark patterns makes me thing of my college Dave Martins post – Don’t Growth Hack – as he explains:
Growth for the sake of growth has never been a good LONG-TERM business strategy. Growth for the sake of growth may appear to work wonders in the short-term, but long-term it’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Long-term, growth should be centered around people not numbers or percentages.
I would argue that all of those items in the list above are short-term revenue growth drivers – and while they may make you more money in the short term they will do more damage to your brand and user experience in the long run.
As Dave says in his article too:
Instead of having your north star be growth, what if instead you focused on the success of your users as your primary objective?
I strongly believe that focusing on your users, and actually working to solve their needs will lead to sustainable long-term growth.
Working remotely for Automattic requires you to do a fair bit of travel each year – both for our annual Grand Meetup (in which the whole company comes together), for team meetups and then at times other meetups dependant on the area of the business or projects you are working on.
At the most I have done 11 transatlantic flights in a year 😱✈️ – not as many as other jobs, but more than most jobs I think! As a result of this – you get to spend more time than most looking at boarding passes, be they the printed kind or the mobile/digital kind.
Towards the end of last year – to kill time in the airport lounges and to learn a new design tool – I spent some time thinking about what I would do if I could design a mobile boarding pass from scratch – something that would suit the needs I had found I wanted from a boarding pass. For the sake of the ‘design challenge’, I used an existing mobile boarding pass I had for a Lufthansa flight. Below is the design concept I ended on:
In my design I aimed to group the various information into four main sections on the screen – here is some of my thinking on each section and the information contained in each:
What are my flight details again?
This shows all the primary information as you arrive at the airport or land at a connecting airport – so things like the flight number, gate and boarding time. The aim of this grouping is to allow you to quickly see where you need to be and when – getting you through the terminal faster.
When, where to and what’s the flight status?
This grouping covers where you flying from and where you flying to – complete with a flight status indicator – so a check symbol ✅ if all is okay or an exclamation ⚠️ if there was a delay or a cross mark ❎ if it was cancelled. A long press on the symbol would give you more information regarding the flight status in the case of a delayed or cancelled flight.
How long till boarding starts and how long to get there?
This grouping would make use of the time on your phone as well as your location settings to tell you how long you had till boarding started (a real-time countdown basically) and an indication of how far you were from the gate (how long it would take you to get there) based on your location within the terminal.
Let me onboard!
This grouping contains all the details you needed to get onboard the plane and ideally, this section would swop with the flight status module when boarding commenced – placing it more mid-screen and easier to scan as you go through the checkpoints.
Unfortunately, I don’t have access to the original Lufthansa boarding pass to compare it against anymore for this post 😞
