Improvements for Faithlife Books website
Here are a list of things that could be improved with regard to the functioning of the website:
- Fix unlocked=no command
- When you go to the next page it always takes you to the bottom so you have to go to the top or read up and then go back down to get to the next page because the advance page arrows are only at the bottom of the page.
- When you change the "sort by" selection the new page loads but the focus is still on the "sort by" selection box so if you hit the down arrow to go down and look at more books it changes the sort by selection again. The focus needs to change after reloading.
- Search function. It still doesn't work very well for finding something specific by name. When you are looking at a book page it allows you to click on the author's name to search for more books by that author. However, you get random whatever based on the words in their name. It always seems to prioritize their first name rather than searching for their whole name. It also doesn't know you're searching for a name so if the author's first name is Melody it will return books with Melody in the title first.
Thanks for your consideration in making it easier to buy books!
Comments
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Tom Reynolds said:
Here are a list of things that could be improved with regard to the functioning of the website:
- Fix unlocked=no command
- When you go to the next page it always takes you to the bottom so you have to go to the top or read up and then go back down to get to the next page because the advance page arrows are only at the bottom of the page.
- When you change the "sort by" selection the new page loads but the focus is still on the "sort by" selection box so if you hit the down arrow to go down and look at more books it changes the sort by selection again. The focus needs to change after reloading.
- Search function. It still doesn't work very well for finding something specific by name. When you are looking at a book page it allows you to click on the author's name to search for more books by that author. However, you get random whatever based on the words in their name. It always seems to prioritize their first name rather than searching for their whole name. It also doesn't know you're searching for a name so if the author's first name is Melody it will return books with Melody in the title first.
Thanks for your consideration in making it easier to buy books!
Agree!
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Tom Reynolds said:
Here are a list of things that could be improved with regard to the functioning of the website:
- Fix unlocked=no command
- When you go to the next page it always takes you to the bottom so you have to go to the top or read up and then go back down to get to the next page because the advance page arrows are only at the bottom of the page.
- When you change the "sort by" selection the new page loads but the focus is still on the "sort by" selection box so if you hit the down arrow to go down and look at more books it changes the sort by selection again. The focus needs to change after reloading.
- Search function. It still doesn't work very well for finding something specific by name. When you are looking at a book page it allows you to click on the author's name to search for more books by that author. However, you get random whatever based on the words in their name. It always seems to prioritize their first name rather than searching for their whole name. It also doesn't know you're searching for a name so if the author's first name is Melody it will return books with Melody in the title first.
Thanks for your consideration in making it easier to buy books!
Please rectify.
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The new site is an absolute disgrace, it has gone backwards in functionality and usability when compared to the previous Vyrso website.
I am bewildered how it was passed internally as an acceptable platform on which to launch a re-branding of Faithlife’s e-book business. This has to be one of the poorest on-line shopping websites I have ever had the displeasure of using. A great way to launch Faithlife e-books not!
Bring on the improvements.
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Tom Reynolds said:
Here are a list of things that could be improved with regard to the functioning of the website:
- Fix unlocked=no command
- When you go to the next page it always takes you to the bottom so you have to go to the top or read up and then go back down to get to the next page because the advance page arrows are only at the bottom of the page.
- When you change the "sort by" selection the new page loads but the focus is still on the "sort by" selection box so if you hit the down arrow to go down and look at more books it changes the sort by selection again. The focus needs to change after reloading.
- Search function. It still doesn't work very well for finding something specific by name. When you are looking at a book page it allows you to click on the author's name to search for more books by that author. However, you get random whatever based on the words in their name. It always seems to prioritize their first name rather than searching for their whole name. It also doesn't know you're searching for a name so if the author's first name is Melody it will return books with Melody in the title first.
Thanks for your consideration in making it easier to buy books!
Yes, please improve it[|-)]
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Very poor search function; please fix. And add the possibility of adding to wishlist.
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Couldnt agree more. Used to buy a ton of Vyrso books. Now I don't even like to go to the new site even for free books. lol. The conversion was a big time DOWNgrade. Not sure if that was the intended result or not, but it's not near as user friendly or productive as the old Vyrso site.
Please upgrade, Faithlife.
Myke Harbuck
Lead Pastor, www.ByronCity.Church
Adjunct Professor, Georgia Military College0 -
Myke Harbuck I agree with you 100%!
I always used to be checking VYRSO sometimes 2 or 3 times a day. But with Faithlife Ebooks, It goes weeks....I very rarely look for resources there anymore.
Vast and quick improvements need to be made ASAP!!!!
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Agreed, I feel the same. The new site is unusable.
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The search needs much improvement
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Thanks for the feedback, everyone. We completely agree that the current search experience is abysmal. And we're sorry we shipped Faithlife Ebooks prematurely on the new site without fully understanding its deficiencies or the timeline for addressing them. We've had multiple discussions internally to understand how this happened and how we can avoid things like this in the future.
We are actively working to improve the search engine that backs our new commerce platform. Unfortunately, it's a multi-month development effort. The good news is that as we make improvements to the search engine and other parts of the commerce platform, every site that's running on our new platform will benefit from it.
- https://tc.logos.com/
- https://sc.logos.com/
- https://kr.logos.com/
- https://pt.logos.com/
- https://de.logos.com/
- https://es.verbum.com/
- https://ebooks.noet.com/
- https://logoscloud.com/
- https://connect.faithlife.com/
- https://store.faithlifetv.com/
Logos.com, Verbum.com, Noet.com, and a few other sites are all running on independent versions of our older commerce platform (as was Vyrso.com), so fixing bugs and adding new functionality needs to happen on each site separately. This is unsustainable and results in different experiences across our various stores. We're in the process of moving all of our commerce sites to the new platform, but we'll make sure that it has all critical functionality you rely on before we move any additional sites.
Thanks for your patience and grace as we work to get the Faithlife Ebooks site working as you expect it to.
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Thanks for the thoughtful response, Phil!
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I think that Logos.com is your Gold Standard for ecommerce functionality - search, wish lists, etc. Even there, improvements in functionality are desirable. If you can deliver the full functionality of the current Logos.com, and implement the improvements often discussed elsewhere, that would be the ideal for all of us.
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If the searching feature is so bad, why don't you just roll back the old Vyrso site so that customers don't face frustrations when browsing the web? I mean it's not really not the first times where you guys roll something out and it came out super bad... really... I'm just reminding you guys... Don't you guys try this internally before publishing it? I mean ...it's been so bad for so long that you guys just completely abandoned the site and it ruined the image of the company.
I used to visit Vyrso so frequent to buy books... now that it's changed to faitflife ebook, I hardly visited the site because the navigation is sooo bad for so long.
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mike said:
If the searching feature is so bad, why don't you just roll back the old Vyrso site so that customers don't face frustrations when browsing the web?
Rolling back to the Vyrso site would entail also rolling back to the Vyrso brand. It would take several weeks to roll back, which would take time away from moving forward. There were also a number of longstanding problems and bugs with the Vyrso site, like regularly emptying users' shopping carts when they would try to add a book to their cart. We also gained a greatly improved mobile experience.
I can appreciate that even with the improvements over the old site that the transition was a net loss given the decline in search functionality. But rolling back would mean further delaying the improvements that all of our sites will need, including Logos.com when it comes over to the new platform later this year.
mike said:Don't you guys try this internally before publishing it?
Our teams did a full week of testing before shipping the site, but we were focused on all the new pages, rebranding, links, etc. and clearly didn't sufficiently test the search functionality, assuming it would work like the old site. That was obviously a faulty assumption, for which we're very sorry.
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Phil Gons (Faithlife) said:
The good news is that as we make improvements to the search engine and other parts of the commerce platform, every site that's running on our new platform will benefit from it.
As of this morning, the latest "improvements" appear to have disabled being able to see more than 15 books per search at both ebooks.noet.com and ebooks.faithlife.com.
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Roger Dittmar said:
As of this morning, the latest "improvements" appear to have disabled being able to see more than 15 books per search at both ebooks.noet.com and ebooks.faithlife.com.
The ebooks gig will not go to page 2 of recent arrivals.
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scooter said:
The ebooks gig will not go to page 2 of recent arrivals.
I'm having the same problem. If you change the end number to say page=2 it will load the second page. For example:
https://ebooks.faithlife.com/search?context=product&sortBy=price-low&limit=60&unlocked=no&page=2
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scooter said:
The ebooks gig will not go to page 2 of recent arrivals.
For searches or browsing you can add/change &limit=60 or limit=30 or 45 after the search term in the address bar. e.g.
https://ebooks.faithlife.com/search?query=kimberly&limit=60
https://ebooks.faithlife.com/search?context=product&sortBy=newest&limit=30&page=1
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Tom Reynolds said:scooter said:
The ebooks gig will not go to page 2 of recent arrivals.
For searches or browsing you can add/change &limit=60 or limit=30 or 45 after the search term in the address bar. e.g.
https://ebooks.faithlife.com/search?query=kimberly&limit=60
https://ebooks.faithlife.com/search?context=product&sortBy=newest&limit=30&page=1
Thank you, Tom, for sharing how to in your above 2 emails. Yet, I will wait till FL fixes the site, rather than adjust my search. Its their job to make my buying experience smooth, so I wait on the sidelines.
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Thanks for the heads up on these page issues! I've let our dev team know about this, and I'll keep you posted when I hear more.
Natalie
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Our team just made a fix and the page results should be working now. Let me know if this is still causing you trouble. Thanks!
Natalie
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Natalie Mills said:
Our team just made a fix and the page results should be working now. Let me know if this is still causing you trouble. Thanks!
Natalie
Changing the number of results per page works now, but the sort by function is still messed up. If I try to change the sort order to, say, price-low to high, then the results are blank.
Myke Harbuck
Lead Pastor, www.ByronCity.Church
Adjunct Professor, Georgia Military College0 -
Hm, weird. I'm unable to replicate that on my account, but I will pass it along to our developer team to have them look into it. Thanks for flagging that for us!
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Myke Harbuck said:
If I try to change the sort order to, say, price-low to high, then the results are blank.
+1 replicated (when signed in with Academic Pricing discount). Sorting works for Faithlife account without Academic Pricing.
Keep Smiling [:)]
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I asked about this and our developers are aware of the issue and working on a fix for it. Thanks!
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One more improvement suggestion => Show authors' names in commentaries sale pages and other monthly discount pages
Keep Smiling [:)]
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One more improvement suggestion => Show authors' names in commentaries sale pages and other monthly discount pages
Keep Smiling
I lean closer to my monitor, trying to see the author's name on the tiny picture, many time to no avail.
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Good news! The NEW search function has gone live! You can find your favorite author by searching their name, find a book by the title or ISBN, and use faceted search, on the left of the page, for a listing of books by genre, author, publisher, language, or use a combination of various facets. Use the Sort By dropdown, on the right, to find newest, sales, or price order titles.
We appreciate your patience over the last months as we worked on this and other upgrades to the site. Wish lists are operational now and a new, more robust product page is on the horizon.
Check it out! Let us know what you think. https://ebooks.faithlife.com/search?query=
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Deborah Keiser said:
Good news! The NEW search function has gone live! You can find your favorite author by searching their name, find a book by the title or ISBN, and use faceted search, on the left of the page, for a listing of books by genre, author, publisher, language, or use a combination of various facets. Use the Sort By dropdown, on the right, to find newest, sales, or price order titles.
We appreciate your patience over the last months as we worked on this and other upgrades to the site. Wish lists are operational now and a new, more robust product page is on the horizon.
Check it out! Let us know what you think. https://ebooks.faithlife.com/search?query=
This is wonderful news. Thanks for sharing. Just bought 6 books on Christmas.
Myke Harbuck
Lead Pastor, www.ByronCity.Church
Adjunct Professor, Georgia Military College0
said: