Feature Requests and the Seller Community

[Helen]

Here in the Community, we get a lot of feedback about what’s working well—in addition to things we could improve. It is incredibly insightful for us to hear firsthand what’s not working for you and how we can fix it.

When we receive feature requests in the Seller Community, a few different things happen behind the scenes. We thought we’d pull back the curtain and share some of our processes with you. That brings us to…

The Life of a Feature Request

1. Customer Advocacy — The first thing we do internally is share your request with the people building our products. From data-centric approaches like tracking the request in our internal databases, to more qualitative methods like the community moderators talking directly with the appropriate product team, we make sure your feedback and ideas get to the right person.
   
   
2. Look for an Alternative — We always try to provide a workaround when it makes sense. Even if our products don’t do exactly what you need them to, we want to help you get closer to your goal. Many times, we’ve heard the request before and have an alternative solution in mind. When we don’t know of a great workaround, we turn to the community to get advice from other sellers.
   
   
3. Share a Resolution — The best days for us (and we hope for you, too!) are when we get to share with the community that a feature request has been built into the product. We’ve been able to do that several times. If you’re interested in seeing a resolution, make sure to subscribe to the thread for updates.
   
   

But what if there isn’t a resolution?

Even the best feature requests take time for our team to build. Our Product Managers take a lot of things into consideration when developing new features and addressing limitations of current features. Customer feedback is one huge piece of the puzzle that impacts prioritization, but it’s not the only piece.

In cases where a resolution is not yet available, we continue to take our jobs as customer advocates seriously. We’ll keep sharing your stories internally and funneling your feedback to our developers. If we can’t prioritize a feature, we also give feedback to our Partnerships team so they can look for great opportunities to partner with other companies who specialize in the features you need.

If you would like to get involved in a deeper level with the feedback process, be sure to join our Beta Community — a space where you get access to newly designed features before everyone else!

Sometimes we don’t have an update for weeks or months. In those cases, thank you for bearing with us. We know it can be frustrating, but we are continuing to work on your behalf. As soon as we have an update, we’ll post to let everyone know.

Thanks again for sharing your feedback with us!

P.S. If you'd like to share a new feature request, please visit our Feature Request board to start a new thread!

[EandI]

Can you tell us how long it takes for a feature request to be visible to the community?

[JJ_]

Hey there @EandI 

This is a great question! At this time, Feature Requests go through a series of phases. When a Seller submits a request it is placed in the "New" This is followed by the "Reviewed" phase in which a Seller Community Moderator will review and determine if the request has all the information needed by our Product Team (use case and valid request). During this same phase, our team starts gathering and measuring the Seller interest of other Sellers on the same feature as well as sharing features with our Product Teams. Once we share with the relevant product team, they will let us know if this is a feature that is contemplated, in the roadmap, looking for beta testers or not planned at this time. 

I know this was a lot to read but also hope this information is helpful and answers your question!