I have become a contributor for Graphicleftovers for 3 months now. Uploaded 155 vectors there, and I have made 6 sales with a total $18.72. You can set your own pricing for your items. Graphicleftovers pays you 52% of the sales made. This is a very good deal. Furthermore, the uploading process is one the easiest.
There are many great comments about Graphicleftovers if you search over the Internet. But to be honest, I think this site needs some improvements. I wonder why the team in Graphicleftovers has never thought of doing something simple to improve the overall sales performance of the site.
I got a huge number of views (over 1000) in the first 10 days when I uploaded my vectors to Graphicleftovers. Then, in the next 3 months, I only have about a thousand views. There is no longer sales in my vectors and there are reasons why this happened.
Graphicleftovers does not have a good search engine. Period. I do not know for sure how the default search works, but basically, you can only filter your search by
Vectors/Images
GL Collection/GL Personalities
Vector Price ($1 - $20)
Where is the search for:
Relevency
Newest
Most Popular
Most View
Most Download
These are some very basic features a search engine must have, and Graphicleftovers only program some useless database query. This is the very reason why your images hardly get exposures even if they are good. Of course, they do have this GL Collection where your vector is handpicked by the inspectors, but who are them to judge whether a vector is good or bad? Beauty is in the eyes of the buyers. A good vector means more downloads/view/popular and those are the necessary key elements of how to sort your search results.
More annoyingly, the search result page only returns you with 20 results per page. This is undoubtedly difficult to navigate the search results. Graphicleftovers should show at least 100 results per page. Apart from that, they should show the search results in full screen, and not in a stingy 960 pixel width division. We are in the modern era where most of the people already have a big screen. Take a look at all those successful sites like Shutterstock, IStockPhoto, Dreamstime, and Fotolia. They all have full screen in their search result page. This is not rocket scientist, and every web designers can design a liquid layout.
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| Stingy 960px width and only 20 search results per page. |
All and all, I am pretty upset with Graphicleftovers as they do not even have the two most fundamentals feature in their site. I must say that although Crestock sales is as bad, but at least they have push the site features to a very high standard one.
I hope Graphicleftovers read my blog, and they can pay attention to the two features I mentioned above - Search Filters + A Liquid Web Design.
Hi Leremy,
ReplyDeleteI appreciate your input on how to improve our site. To address your concerns, we are in the process of developing a new version of the site. The next release of GL will be the third redesign of the site in the past 3 years.
The huge number of views you received was a bug which skewed the views because the site would count visits by search engine bots. This has been fixed and that is why the number of views over the past few months has decreased. The views are accurate counts now.
As far as search goes, we don't use a "simple database query," but instead a number of factors that are factored into the search results. If your images are good and they receive a lot of downloads, they will show up higher in the search results. We also mix in newer images on the site so new submitters will have a chance to sell their images. That way, the search will not be dominated by older items that have sold more than recently uploaded images.
Also, we did have the exact filters that you mentioned earlier, but most buyers didn't find them useful so we removed them. They were used mostly by sellers to compare metrics with their portfolios on other sites. If buyers suggest they want the filters back, we can add them again.
We are adding functionality to display more results in a search, but as far as the 960 pixel layout goes, this has been a standard for a number of years that you can find more about at http://960.gs/ and design blogs like http://smashingmagazine.com. No matter how modern a fluid layout is for user with big screens compared to a grid based layout, the majority of buyers do not have a large screen like you may have. However, a "fluid" layout like you suggested is a definite possibility with the new site design.
Although it's not rocket science, there is absolutely some science involved designing a good e-commerce site. We are aware of the issues you mention and are taking approaches to fix the concerns you have with the new design. I hope you will be satisfied by the improvements when the new design is released. Thanks again for your input.
Hi Danoph,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the reply. Yes, I am looking forward to a better GraphicLeftovers soon. Keep us informed :)