by One of the challenges with any marketplace is determining how best to showcase the range of great products or services. For us it’s a balancing act, as we strive to meet three objectives:
- Make it easy for buyers to find great people to work with.
- Reward Service Providers who do great work and behave professionally.
- Provide opportunities for new Services and Service Providers.
With that in mind, we have started to make some (initially small) changes to how we rank services on category pages. It is important you understand how this works, why we are making the changes, and what you can do to maximise your visibility.
Previously the default order on category pages was Jobs Done (with the Service with the highest number of completed sales at the top). Users could then change the sort order to be ranked by Recommended, Favorited, Newest, High Price or Low Price.
Using Jobs Done as the default sort order was problematic for two reasons.
- While the number of Jobs Done is certainly one useful indicator, there is a range of factors equally important in finding an awesome Service Provider – such as quality of work, responsiveness and turnaround times.
- It disadvantages new Services or Service Providers and gives them less opportunity to get jobs.
As such, the new default sort order takes into account a range of things, each with various weightings applied. This includes:
- Jobs Done: This is certainly still important, but is not the only factor.
- Recommendations: Both the volume and percentage of buyer recommendations
- Buyer rating – Communication and Quality: This is based on the 5-star rating submitted by your buyers
- Turnaround time: The buyers’ rating for turnaround time.
- Enquiry response rate: Promptly responding to all enquiries is critical, and now plays a veryimportant part in the algorithm. Ignore enquiries at your own risk!
- Job acceptance rate: Similarly, we will be penalizing those who constantly reject jobs. A reminder, if you have too many jobs in play, you can always set a job limit.
- Disputes: Disputes happen, however we will be taking note of those who frequently end up in dispute or who we feel are not doing the right thing.
- Freshness: We will start including new Services too.
Again, the weighting for each of these will vary, and we will likely tweak the algorithm as we strive to meet our three objectives.
So, as a Service Provider, what do you need to do to ensure you appear as high as possible? Put simply, all you need to do is continue to produce great work that delights your clients – taking into account the range of things that buyers expect (eg: responding to enquiries, fast turnaround etc).