Instant Offer Price, Taller Thumbnails Now Live!

Well that didn't take long, now did it?

We now have Instant Offer Price (as previously described by the illustrious Mr. Berg and implemented by the handsome Mr. Phillips) online as an experimental feature for the sellers that want to begin using it. 

We also launched a second improvement this evening, this one aimed at improving the graphical quality of our search results.  Last week, we updated our image across-the-board, so that pictures would be clear & crisp to the eXtreme.  This was a worthwhile step in the right direction, but we've continued to be bothered by how many pictures get cut off in the categories where items are, by in large, more tall than wide. 

Categories, like, say "women's jeans":

Where are the people's heads?  What is the shape of the jeans?  

The items as pictured require a great creativity on the part of the buyer to imagine what they actually look like  So how's about something more like:

Now that's more like it!

So what do you need to do to have your items show up in their taller form?  Nothing!  We have already run through all of the images in our Fashion category and picked the picture from the listing that best matches the new, taller dimensions.  

Q&A time!

Q:  I don't like the picture your computer picked to represent my item.  What do I do?

A:  No problem!  Just visit the new item form and notice to the left of your images there is a link to "choose the tall image you want to use" (present only if the item is in a fashion category), which then let's you click on the image that you want to be used as your tall thumbnail.  You may have to wait a few minutes for your new selection to show up in search (due to caching).

Q:  How does the computer pick the picture that it will use to show in search?

A:  It chooses the first picture that you've uploaded that is more tall than wide. 

Q:  Is my image going to be cropped if it is more wide than tall?

A:  Nope.  By default, all tall images include the entire picture inside of them.  If your image is more wide than tall, you'll just have some extra whitespace on the top & bottom omf it.

Q:  Why just make this change for fashion?

A:  Because it was a category we could start with where we were confident that a vast majority of the items would look better with tall thumbnails (especially once our sellers start taking their pictures with that in mind, rather than trying to work around the limitations of our old system).  As we find other categories where the items are all tall, we may include those as well.

Q:  I'm looking at search now and the pictures are not tall.  What gives?

A:  We only show the tall images if you are filtered on a fashion category.  We don't want there to be a hetrogenous mix of tall and wide images interpersed in a search result, that would be weird.

Q:  Does this affect how items look in my booth?

A:  Nope.  Booths still get the standard thumbnail picture size.

Do let us know if you have any questions, complaints or especially compliments with either the tall images or the instant offer price.  :)