Website Wishlist 2015


Website Feedback


Here is my wishlist for paizo.com website fixes I would like to see.

1.) Shipping
a.“Paizo will pay the first $10 in shipping and handling for any shipment of products totaling $100 or more”. That’s pretty cool & all, but why isn’t shipping free? I found when I make physical orders I have to pay an arm & a leg for shipping. A few months back I had an order for a bunch of your posters it cost me almost $50 dollars in shipping after the 10 dollars you took off. I appreciate the $10 dollar savings don’t get me wrong, but with a lot of online retailers now a days shipping is usually free all together.

2.) Third Party Products
a. Looking at the home page on the right hand side it’s hard to find the 3rd party stuff. There should be an entire section for 3rd party. Doesn’t have to be a cascaded breakdown like you have your own Paizo products. Just something clear and understandable. Example Main Category 3rd Party. Sub Categories Campaigns, Campaign Settings,Companion Books, Accessories, Core Books.

3.) My Account
a. Order History. There should be some kind of sort button for oldest, newest, pending. It gives me a royal headache when trying to look up my pending orders cause there is no way to sort for it.
b. Messageboard Settings. I would like to be able to add my city and state (or the appropriate information depending on where you live) and would like to be able to display that info if I selected to. Some of us are proud of where we live and want to show it off.

4.) Shopping Cart
a. When adding pdfs it seems to crawl to a snails pace when trying to add more than 30+ pdfs to the shopping cart. Also website browsing also seems to slow way down when I have bunches of items in my shopping cart.
b. Half the time I get a receipt half the time I don’t for purchasing stuff online sent to my email. I should always get an email confirmation 100% of the time.

5.) Home Page for Paizo.com
a. It’s way to “busy” on the Home Page, feels like it’s cramp. I like all the information that’s available to me. I just wish there was a better way to display it where it doesn’t feel like the text gods spewed all over my screen. And every other thing is hyperlinked (sometimes a good thing sometimes a bad thing)

6.) Messageboards
a. I believe they need a complete overhaul. It’s 2015 folks. The “how to format your text” feature of hardcoding like making things bold or adding in a link is completely archaic. I get it was probably cheaper do it this way, but it’s 2015 now and you guys have been in business a while now. Give the message boards some much needed love.
b. There’s too many threads! Condense them down and make sub threads. And when a topic gets closed move it to an archive of some kind so people don’t have to scroll for miles looking at dead closed threads. If they want to look at inactive stuff they can go to the archive folder or whatever storage house you want for it.


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Pexx wrote:

1.) Shipping

a.“Paizo will pay the first $10 in shipping and handling for any shipment of products totaling $100 or more”. That’s pretty cool & all, but why isn’t shipping free?

Because UPS and the Postal Service charge Paizo to ship things? Sites offering free shipping either are large enough businesses that they have sweetheart deals with their shippers, or they add the cost of shipping to the cost of the product, or a little of both.

That $60 you paid for shipping? If you don't pay it, Paizo pays it. Either they lay people off, or they raise the MSRP of their products.

Pexx wrote:

3.) My Account

b. Messageboard Settings. I would like to be able to add my city and state (or the appropriate information depending on where you live) and would like to be able to display that info if I selected to. Some of us are proud of where we live and want to show it off.

You have a Profile. Click to create a profile and you can enter your location and anything else you want to make public.

Pexx wrote:

6.) Messageboards

b. There’s too many threads! Condense them down and make sub threads. And when a topic gets closed move it to an archive of some kind so people don’t have to scroll for miles looking at dead closed threads. If they want to look at inactive stuff they can go to the archive folder or whatever storage house you want for it.

Vehemently disagree. I find other sites with nested threads difficult to navigate.

Interestingly, threads used to archive when they hadn't had recent activity, and they did a major forum overhaul several years back so they didn't anymore. I assume they had a reason for doing so.

EDIT: Here is the explanation of removal of archiving. When threads fell into the archives, they were no longer searchable from the main forums; you had to search active threads and archives separately.

As to why anyone would want old threads, people are still running Rise of the Runelords and other old Paizo adventures. Threads in which questions are answered and suggestions are offered are no less relevant because they're several years old. One of the best things about the Paizo messageboards is the wealth of information and ideas GMs share with one another.


.@Joana

1.A I don't have to pay an arm and a leg for netflix dvds comes with my subscription. I pay amazon 60 dollars a year for "free" shipping. What I am getting at is there are other avenues/models to go down than kicking the shipping cost direct to the consumer i.e. you and me.

3.B Yes, it's stored there, but what I was getting at as I would like it to display below my the avatar pic on our postings.

6.B I will agree to disagree with you. Nesting Threads so they open up when you go into them is much more clean. If I want to see threads on Player Companion books I go there.

These 3 forums are 10x better looking than what we have here currently:
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm
http://community.wizards.com/forums/61981
http://forum.rpg.net/forum.php?s=e0b2e78d1e535aea99cb2475ae185fb2

I dunno if they had a reason or not. Probably did the best they could with the resouces and knowledge they had at the time.


Pexx wrote:
3.B Yes, it's stored there, but what I was getting at as I would like it to display the avatar pic on our postings.

It's not stored there; it can be displayed there. Right now, you have no profile because you have not created one.

If you want your location to show on every post you make in the boards, you can use the Race, Class Levels, and/or Gender fields to type in anything you want to display below your name.

Pexx wrote:
Nesting Threads so they open up when you go into them is much more clean. If I want to see threads on Player Companion books I go there.

You realize you can click on the triangles on the left side of the messageboards to open/close the relevant subforums? Then you can just have your list of, say, Player Companions, Campaign Setting, Modules, whatever on the main page and click on them to enter the subforums and see the actual list of threads. They're only open by default.


3.B So you are correct. It displays when I go to my account, but not when I click on myself on the forums. Good catch dunno how I missed that.

6.B Yep, but it's still annoying. It's not clean at all as it should be.

Silver Crusade

Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber
Pexx wrote:


1.A I don't have to pay an arm and a leg for netflix dvds comes with my subscription. I pay amazon 60 dollars a year for "free" shipping. What I am getting at is there are other avenues/models to go down than kicking the shipping cost direct to the consumer i.e. you and me.

Netflix and Amazon operate on volumes of product and business models which are incomparable with a medium-sized company like Paizo. That's apples and oranges there. Amazon actually sells stuff, complete with shipping, at a near-loss and makes up with the sheer insane amount of things they shove out the door every second. I believe Netflix is quite similar.

Sure, there are other avenues:

- stealth the shipping cost into the MSRP. You're still the one who's paying, except you're feeling a little better about yourself now.
- switch the postal company. Oh, wait, United States, you have only one. Tee hee! But hey, you have a Postmaster General, that's a cool name.
- dunno, you got anything?

Scarab Sages

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Pexx wrote:
There’s too many threads! Condense them down and make sub threads. And when a topic gets closed move it to an archive of some kind so people don’t have to scroll for miles looking at dead closed threads. If they want to look at inactive stuff they can go to the archive folder or whatever storage house you want for it.

I remember the last time a special little snowflake made a recommendation like this. It spawned a thread that reached such a large number posts, it almost broke the site. So they shut that thread down and we started a sequel. Eventually, they had to shut that one down as well. Same with the third, fourth, fifth, and....crap, I can't remember which sequel number we're on now. But so far the latest is at over 100,000 posts.


Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber; Pathfinder Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber
Aberzombie wrote:
Pexx wrote:
There’s too many threads! Condense them down and make sub threads. And when a topic gets closed move it to an archive of some kind so people don’t have to scroll for miles looking at dead closed threads. If they want to look at inactive stuff they can go to the archive folder or whatever storage house you want for it.
I remember the last time a special little snowflake made a recommendation like this. It spawned a thread that reached such a large number posts, it almost broke the site. So they shut that thread down and we started a sequel. Eventually, they had to shut that one down as well. Same with the third, fourth, fifth, and....crap, I can't remember which sequel number we're on now. But so far the latest is at over 100,000 posts.

I am pretty sure we screwed up the site several times with those threads! :D


I concur the forums are way too long!


Down with the patriarchy!

Whoa! Sorry folks! Wrong thread.

Sczarni

Pexx wrote:

.@Joana

1.A I don't have to pay an arm and a leg for netflix dvds comes with my subscription. I pay amazon 60 dollars a year for "free" shipping. What I am getting at is there are other avenues/models to go down than kicking the shipping cost direct to the consumer i.e. you and me.

Netflix Buys a DVD for $8, charges someone 15/month, and you can get at most 5 dvds during that time, and they pay about 50 cents each way for mailing. So you are paying at least 1/4 of the DVD. They rent them out between 10 and 20 times, making about 400%, and then send the DVDs used for $5. For a final profit of about 450% per Dvd. There is a plus or minus for Dvds that get damaged, or when someone gets a dvd they don't really care about and has it for a month before watching it, giving netflix a 200% profit on that one viewer.

400% profit with a $4 shipping loss for netflix vs 45%-120% profit per item and anywhere from $4 to $12 shipping loss per product for paizo, its not a valid comparison.

your other comparison:

Amanzon Prime has lost Millions of dollars with amazon prime every quarter. According to one article they lost over 170 million dollars due to amazon prime during the last christmas season, and 125 million this quarter. Paizo doesn't have the other revenue streams to suck up a loss like that. The most recent estimate I've seen is that Amanzon looses $11 per amazon prime membership they sell annually. Amanzon currently makes all of its money by its third party selling, and its app store... and amazon's 3rd party selling shipping is more expensive than paizo's.

Paizo Glitterati Robot

I can only really respond on the messageboards front, so here we go: not every forum solution fits all. Our messageboards are actually more tightly integrated into certain parts of our website than you'd be lead to believe. We have some pretty great ideas floating around on how to improve the UX lately, but very likely not in the same direction as the forums linked above. The direction we take is going to be very unique to Paizo and address some of the years of backlog requests we've aggregated (including looking at BBCode and posting behavior and how we present threads). If you have some more specific ideas, we'd like to hear them!


Why yes, Chris Lambertz I do =)

6.C Being able to go back and edit my post before it is offically locked down and can't edit after x mins have past. Forgive me I don't know the exact time, but I do know it happens after x mins have past.

6.D Being able to have a signature (image or quote would be snazzy) or tagline if we select to.

6.E Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down voting would be nice fluff, but should probably be a last thing to do.

6.F Another Fluff item a post count under our avatar pics Like displaying how many posts we have made.

6.G We have titles right now next to or under our names. Some of them are just walls of text cause people have done so much. Maybe a forum badge/image setup so when you hover over them it tells you what that particular badge/image is suppose to represent.

6.H Another Fluff item but being able to change the color of name or be rewarded for for contributing to the forums. I like the reward method better personally.

6.I Forum Polls


7. Chat Support (Phone Support has always been stellar much love for you guys and gals)

8. Product Filter
a.) I wish their was a way to hide what I already own both in digital and tangible product filters.
b.) Would like some more filter options on the download section. Show Paizo products, hide all free stuff are a couple examples.

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