Open Letter to Clips4Sale

I will start by saying that I love Clips4Sale. That does not however quell my growing dismay at frequent changes that drastically affect clip sales without obtaining feedback from store owners. I find it insulting to see constant changes that affect connectivity, load times and amount of traffic to my stores. I find it infuriating that these changes happen unannounced. It gives producers no time to prepare and forced a reactive culture where producers scramble to adapt to these unannounced changes.

I have worked in web development and software development for 30 years, 11 of those being in upper management and working closely with marketing departments. This type of roll-out process disrespectful to producers, error-prone and punishing to your customers.

First on the agenda is to address changes in a more proactive manner. Inform your producers that things will be changing and give them time to voice concerns about possible changes. It is a well-known industry mantra that the majority of feedback received is negative. That often leads to major changes being based on a few complaints and not representing a potentially larger group happy with the current service. Appeasing the few while angering a larger group is bad. Keep us informed. You help us make income. We help you make income. Springing major changes is poor business, and I have grown to expect more of you because of the respect that I have for Clips4Sale.

Next I want to address recent updates to the front page. My "DO" list hits have dropped drastically. This is in part due to the fetishes shown rotating. I can fully understand that lesser fetishes or fetishes not already on the list want more prominence. There are ways to accomplish this without unfairly representing sub-fetishes. I will break this down below:

1. Fetishes that drive less income should receive less prominence. As in any retail store, items that sell well go up front and items that sell poorly hide on the shelves. You can bring them out from time to time, but they can never overshadow key earners for too long. Weight fetishes by hits and/or income and then provide a minimum to ensure they show at show point if they weight too small.
2. Sub-fetishes dilute the front page. There are dozens upon dozens of categories and many of them earn little money. Giving them more prominence is good but not at the expense of fetishes that generate high amounts of money. Break your categories into major categories and sub-categories. Only major categories should go on the front page.

Systems that attempt to show a wide variety of categories have a need to weight how often these categories are shown to prevent over-representation. There is no reason that a category I have never seen on the top 50 clips overall should ever get as much exposure as a category that makes a large percentage of income for Clips4Sale.

My advice is to show more categories on the front page. Create two sections that represent both most popular fetishes and recently updated fetishes. It confuses the customer to show 12 categories that are the most recently updated and state that they are the most popular. It creates buyer confusion. A possible solution is to keep 12 images in a top section for the true most popular fetishes. Then create a link listing of 2 or 3 columns below that list up to 45-60 more fetishes. A second section below can be like it is now but properly listed as most recently updated categories. As with the first section a series of links will add to the number of stores getting exposure as recently updated.

I do not know your infrastructure and will never say the above is easy. The above is at least a step in a better direction in my mind. Regardless the information vacuum update policy should stop. I have been too loyal to Clips4Sale to be kept continually in the dark about things that affect my hits per month and also my monthly sales.

I appreciate all that Clips4Sale does for me, and I present the above as my opinion on how to make a great service greater. And yes I am available for contract web development and programming if you want me to put my money where my mouth is!

I will start by saying that I love Clips4Sale. That does not however quell my growing dismay at frequent changes that drastically affect clip sales without obtaining feedback from store owners. I find it insulting to see constant changes that affect connectivity, load times and amount of traffic to my stores. I find it infuriating that these changes happen unannounced. It gives producers no time to prepare and forced a reactive culture where producers scramble to adapt to these unannounced changes

I have worked in web development and software development for 30 years, 11 of those being in upper management and working closely with marketing departments. This type of roll-out process disrespectful to producers, error-prone and punishing to your customers.

First on the agenda is to discuss changes in a more proactive way. Inform your producers that things will be changing and give them time to voice concerns about possible changes. It is a well-known industry fact that most feedback received is negative. That often leads to major changes being based on a few complaints and not representing a potentially larger group happy with the current service. Appeasing the few while angering a larger group is bad. Keep us informed. You help us make income. We help you make income. Springing major changes is poor business, and I have grown to expect more of you because of the respect that I have for Clips4Sale.

Next I want to discuss recent updates to the front page. My "DO" list hits have dropped drastically. This is in part due to the fetishes shown rotating. I can fully understand that lesser fetishes or fetishes not already on the list want more prominence. There are ways to carry out this without unfairly representing sub-fetishes. I will break this down below:

• Fetishes that drive less income should receive less prominence. As in any retail store, items that sell well go up front and items that sell poorly hide on the shelves. You can bring them out from time to time, but they can never overshadow key earners for too long. Weight fetishes by hits and/or income and then offer a minimum to make sure they show at show point if they weight too small. 

• Sub-fetishes dilute the front page. There are dozens upon dozens of categories and many of them earn little money. Giving them more prominence is good but not at the cost of fetishes that generate high amounts of money. Break your categories into major categories and sub-categories. Only major categories should go on the front page.

Systems that attempt to show a variety of categories have a need to weight how often these categories appear to prevent over-representation. There is no reason that a category I have never seen on the top 50 clips overall should ever get as much exposure as a category that makes a large percentage of income for Clips4Sale.

My advice is to show more categories on the front page. Create two sections that represent both most popular fetishes and recently updated fetishes. It confuses the customer to show 12 categories that are the most recently updated and state that they are the most popular. It creates buyer confusion. A possible solution is to keep 12 images in a top section for the true most popular fetishes. Then create a link listing of 2 or 3 columns below that list up to 45-60 more fetishes. A second section below match the current section but properly listed as most recently updated categories. As with the first section a series of links will add to the number of stores getting exposure as recently updated.

I do not know your infrastructure and will never say the above is easy. The above is at least a step in a better direction in my mind. Regardless the information vacuum update policy should stop. I have been too loyal to Clips4Sale to be kept continually in the dark about things that affect my hits per month and my monthly sales.

I appreciate all that Clips4Sale does for me, and I present the above as my opinion on how to make a great service greater. I have seen many changes that I find value-added and appreciate all the hard work that goes into the system. I just feel that some changes do not represent the whole of producers and most certainly do not benefit all producers. And yes I am available for contract web development and programming if you want me to put my money where my mouth is!