Faire’s search engine uses machine learning to provide a customized shopping experience to our retailers which enables them to easily find products for their stores. This ensures that our brands get seen by the retailers who are a good match for their products.
Ultimately, the goal of Faire’s search and ranking algorithm is to help retailers find relevant products and increase sales for our brands. We consider over 100 factors to determine how we rank search results. This helps us produce a list of products that is personalized and unique to each retailer. This means that if you search for your own brand or products, your search results will not match what retailers will see when they make the same search. All search results are highly customized and vary a lot for each retailer. For more details, visit Why can’t I find my products on Faire’s search results.
What factors determine how my products are ranked?
In this article, we will explore some of the key factors that contribute to your brand’s ranking and provide some tips on how to improve your visibility in the marketplace.
Also, please note that we’re constantly working to improve our ranking model to ensure we are able to increase our brand’s order volume as well as provide our retailers with recommendations for their next best sellers. In that spirit, we frequently experiment with adding new features, and your product ranking may change. We will keep this article up to date so you have a good reference for any future updates.
There are three categories that contribute to ranking:
- Product names, descriptions, and categories
- Retailers’ prior activity and engagement
- Brand performance
Product names, descriptions, and categories
We first match the search terms that retailers use with words used in your product title, description, product type, and category. Exact matches will automatically be prioritized in the ranking, and synonyms or relevant items will be included after exact matches. After identifying the relevant products in the query, we further rank the products based on the following two general categories.
Retailer’s prior activity and engagement
Our goal is to help retailers find products that are perfect for their stores. To do this, we leverage historical information about our retailers’ activity and engagement on Faire. We consider the retailers’ previous search and purchase history, answers to preference quizzes, navigation behaviors on the site, and even products that similar retailers have purchased.
The more likely we think a product is to be added to the retailers’ cart, the higher we’ll rank it. The search results and recommended items will appear differently to each retailer because their behaviors are unique.
Brand performance
We want retailers to have a positive experience when purchasing products on Faire, so we elevate products from brands that have quality products, a proven track record of responsiveness and great customer support.
There are several factors that contribute to a brand’s overall performance, but some of the key things we consider include:
- Product conversion: When retailers find your products, they often purchase them
- Review rating: Great reviews are submitted by retailers
- Return rate: Most of the retailers are happy with what they receive and don’t return your products
- Order cancellations: You fulfill order requests timely and rarely cancel a few from time to time
- Order fulfillment timing: You often get orders fulfilled quickly with just the occasional delay
This being said, we understand that the occasional bad review, order cancellation, or product return is going to happen, and is a normal part of doing business, so a few negative actions have very little impact on your ranking. For these actions, we’re weighting ranking based on broad patterns over weeks and months, not on individual actions.
How can I improve my ranking?
Here are some tips on how you can improve your product ranking on Faire. You'll notice that most of these tips are focused on increasing your products’ sell-through and conversion rates. This is because how your products perform on Faire is the most important factor in determining your product ranking. Please keep this in mind while you explore these tips!
Opportunities to improve your product and brand ranking
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Use concise and detailed product titles as well as accurate product types that describe your products. Include any unique characteristics of the product.- For example, French Vanilla Votive Candles is a better title than Vanilla Candles
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Provide a detailed description of the product that includes all of the relevant information that you think a retailer would want to know before purchasing. Include key descriptive words and characteristics that you would like to highlight.
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Maintain high-quality pictures that are high resolution and accurately depict your products. This will lead to higher conversion rates, which ultimately contribute to higher ranking.
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Optimize your pricing and run specials to drive more interest in your products.
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Maintain low minimums, bearing in mind two factors:
- Your profit margin
- The shipping costs your retailers may get charged
Retailers will often filter search results by minimum prices, we recommend keeping minimums at $150 or lower for your local customers to ensure your products get the most visibility
For international customers, we recommend setting minimums considering factors such as shipping distance and shipping cost to ensure the best value and experience for retailers.
You can set specific order minimums for different countries, by ticking Set specific minimums for countries in your shop settings.
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Adopt Faire Direct tools by utilizing the widget on your website or by sharing your link with existing retail partners. This can increase your sales and conversion on Faire, which can boost your ranking.
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Ensure that your complete catalog of products is listed on Faire. This contributes to a positive retailer experience and can increase your conversion rate, which can boost your ranking.
- Offer high-quality customer service to your Faire retailers by getting back to customer inquiries quickly in the Faire Messenger, keeping lead times and delivery times down, working with retailers to resolve negative reviews, keeping order cancellations down, and delivering quality products that arrive as expected.
Want to read more about how you can improve your ranking? View our blog post SEO checklist for Faire brands.
Do returns impact my ranking?
Faire offers returns as a value proposition for our retailers to encourage them to try new products and extend their business to new brands risk-free. We understand that brands may have concerns about how these returns impact their overall product ranking in search results. While we do consider historical return rates in our ranking system, this is only one of over 100 factors that we consider in ranking search results. That said, having a few returns will not have a substantial impact on your ranking. Even if a brand's return rate is really high, there’s no guarantee their ranking will drop if other factors improve or make up for it. Generally speaking, having well-performing products that sell well will have the most impact on product ranking.
Do missing or damaged items impact my ranking?
We understand that missing and damaged items are sometimes caused by forces outside of the brands' control, and so while we do consider missing and damaged items in our ranking algorithm, we’re weighting the ranking based on broad patterns over weeks and months. A few reports of missing or damaged items will not have a substantial impact on your ranking.
Do order cancellations impact my ranking?
Yes, we do consider order cancellation rates in our ranking system. We understand that cancellations are necessary sometimes, so we weigh this factor in our ranking based on broad patterns over weeks and months, not on individual cancellations.
Note that your cancellation rate doesn’t include orders that are canceled by retailers; however, it does include cancellations that we initiate for brands. This means that if a brand contacts our team and would like us to cancel an order on their behalf, it will impact this metric.
How does my review rating impact my ranking?
Reviews are a great way for you to build your credibility on Faire and attract new retailers to your brand. Our search algorithm rewards brands that maintain a positive review rating, but receiving the occasional bad review won’t significantly hurt your ranking.
If you receive a negative review, we encourage you to reach out to the retailer via Faire Messenger with any questions you may have about their experience. If an understanding is reached, the retailer may edit or remove their review, which may help your ranking. Alternatively, you may respond publicly to the review. While doing so won’t directly impact your ranking, it gives you the opportunity to provide more context on any issues or negative information that is being reported by a retailer. This will help inform future potential customers and may help reduce any doubts they have as well as improve their perception of your brand.
We also recommend that you follow up with retailers after an order is fulfilled, to request that they leave you a review. This can help boost your review rating, especially if you target retailers that order from you often.
For more information about review ratings, visit Building a positive reputation through reviews.
Why don’t I see my products when I navigate to their corresponding category?
When a retailer selects a category, we fetch the top 1000 products within that category, based on text relevance and the retailers’ historical activity and engagement on Faire. This means that all brands may not be listed in the category results, especially for common categories like women where there are more than 1000 products in the category. This doesn’t mean that your brand’s products are excluded from the category nor are they excluded from all category navigation results. Category navigation results, similar to search results, are highly customized and vary depending on the retailer.
Note that the same ranking logic is applied to both search results and category navigation results, this means that the tips for improving ranking apply to both. We do recommend that you be as granular as possible when you assign categories to your products by utilizing subcategories, this will help your products get more visibility when retailers search within subcategories.
Do backorders impact my ranking?
No, not directly, however, backorders may indirectly impact your ranking if they lead to negative retailer reviews or lower product conversion rates. We encourage brands to keep their inventory up-to-date to prevent backorders.
How does fulfillment timing impact ranking?
We want to ensure positive shopping experiences for our retailers, so order fulfillment timing is considered as a factor in our ranking system. We encourage our brands to quickly fulfill orders when they are able to; however, we know this is not always possible and so a few delayed orders will not have a significant impact on your ranking.