Release Notes: A rundown of what’s new for brands

To help you stay up-to-date on all the new tools and improvements we’re making to the Faire selling and discovery experience, we’ve built this handy running log of releases. Bookmark this page, and check back each month to see what’s new on Faire. Each digest is sorted into two buckets:

1. New tools to help you save time, deepen relationships and grow sales
2. New ways for retailers to discover your products

June and July

New tools to help you save time, deepen relationships and grow sales

Improvements to order writing in the brand app
Two new updates to the Faire app for brands will make it easier to write orders for your retailers on the go. Now, you can build out orders by scanning GTIN (e.g. UPC, EAN) barcodes or by scanning order forms – no manual entry required.  In this how-to video, find out how to quickly and securely write orders for your retailers using the app.

A more flexible promo code tool
Before, promo-code discounts had a 14-day max. window and could not be changed once published. Based on your feedback, we have now lifted the 14-day restriction, allowed you the ability to edit dates or cancel upcoming promotions, and given you the freedom to update the discount percentage and order minimum fields while the promo is active.

Create custom product tags
We know that managing your catalogues can be time-consuming. So, we built a custom tagging tool where you can label your products. Tags can be added via the single product editor for new and existing products. Use these product tags to filter and group products, as well as create collections – a better way to manage your catalogue on Faire.

New ways for retailers to discover your products

Better shipping estimates
When retailers shop on Faire, shipping costs are often top of mind. We’ve improved our methods for calculating shipping estimates for retailers, resulting in a better, more predictable ordering experience for them – and a better relationship for you.

Halloween and autumn shops – now live
Seems like autumn is in the air… or at least top of mind for our retailers. Insights from this summer’s Faire Market revealed that autumn and Halloween were top searches on Faire. To help your customers discover your products that meet that criteria, we’ve launched Halloween and autumn shops to retailers. To ensure your relevant products are considered for these new categories, make sure you add your full catalogue to Faire, focus on high-quality, high-resolution product imagery, and add relevant keywords to your products’ names and descriptions.

Faire Small Business Grant
In the United States, we’ve launched a new grant programme for new shop owners. Until 31 August, new shop owners can apply for a £5,000 grant from Faire to help stock up their shop and cover inventory expenses! We’ll be announcing our new shop winners in early September and are excited to continue investing in our mutual customer – the independent retailer.

May

New tools to help you save time, deepen relationships and grow sales

Expanded access to Faire Direct benefits
Building relationships takes time. Before, if you sent your Faire Direct link to a customer, they just had 7 days to claim their credit and place their first order to access Faire Direct benefits. Now, if a retailer clicks on your Faire Direct link or widget, they’ll get access to sign-up benefits at any time in the future – leading to more Faire Direct sales for brands like yours. 

Quickly discern between commercial and residential shipping addresses
Brands told us it was important to understand whether a shipping address was commercial or residential during your fulfilment process. So we added a clarifying tag on the Order Fulfilment page to bring that information front and centre. 

Easily identify first-time orders
You said it was important to differentiate whether customers were new or reordering during packing. So we added an extra label to the packing slip to help you easily identify first-time orders.

A simpler update system 
To help you focus, we’ve improved our updates system on your Faire dashboard. By better prioritising announcements and making them available to revisit in the future, we hope this change will simplify your experience.

New ways for retailers to discover your products

Amex Offers x Faire partnership 
For the next five months, Amex will promote Faire to its cardholders, offering 25% statement credit on first purchases up to $150 for new-to-Faire retailers. This special offer is featured in Amex Offers, a curated selection of partner deals that rewards Amex members, driving new retailers to the platform to shop Faire products. 

Surfacing GTIN codes for retailers
Some retailers on Faire expressed a need to see if a brand has added GTIN codes for their products before purchase. So we’ve added GTINs throughout the retailer experience to improve their shopping and ordering experience and to make reordering easier. If you haven’t already, you can assign a GTIN to your products using the Product Editor, the Bulk Editor, the bulk upload spreadsheet or an integration (e.g. our Shopify integration).

Improving the “Recently viewed” experience
The “Recently viewed” carousel displays recently viewed products chronologically for retailer shoppers. Previously, it would update around every 24 hours. Now, we’ve made backend improvements so that, if a retailer engages with your product, it will appear in the carousel within seconds!

April

New tools to help you save time, deepen relationships and grow sales

Simplified Faire Direct sign-up flow 
Now, when you add the Faire Direct widget to your website, it’s easier than ever for your customers to sign up for Faire Direct. We’ve halved the number of clicks required to get to Faire’s platform, driving an increase in the amount of retailers ordering through Faire Direct and the opportunities for brands to get 0% commission.

Listing title and description improvements
We’re using AI to recommend small changes to your product titles and descriptions so you can better optimise your listings’ performance. Recommendations are sent to brands for review and applied to all retailer-facing surfaces to help drive more traffic to and engagement with your listings.

New Faire Direct landing page redesign 
We are testing some changes to the design of brands’ Faire Direct landing pages to increase conversion and ultimately drive more orders for brands. For a period of time, brands will see two versions of the landing page live, and we will be rolling out the “winning” design over the next few months!

Custom-select and publish Shopify products to Faire 
Faire’s Shopify integration helps brands manage their catalogue seamlessly across platforms, and we’ve just added the ability to select individual products from Shopify and publish them to Faire with just a few clicks.

New ways for retailers to discover your products

AI-powered search improvements 
Our search algorithms are continuing to get better and smarter, which means even more assurance that your products will get in front of the right retailers when they are looking for them. We’ve seen a 5% increase in search conversion, which means more retailers are buying your products with these improvements.

Descriptive browser tab labelling
We’ve changed the labels on browser tabs from a generic “Faire” label to specific product and brand names. This helps retailers who tend to open up many tabs during their search process to navigate and evaluate products more efficiently, which promotes your brand and products through increased visibility.

February/March

New tools to help you save time, deepen relationships and grow sales

Better Ship with Faire rates
Did you know that Ship with Faire allows brands to purchase, generate and print labels directly on the order fulfilment page? We’ve simplified the process by integrating everything into the Faire admin and have actively negotiated rates with the top carriers to bring you better deals. Take a look at our new, reduced rates the next time you fulfil an order.

Product-image auto-cropping
In an effort to drive an increase in orders from brands like yours, we’re using a new AI-generated tool to recommend improvements to your product thumbnail images, such as highlighting product details and centreing the product in the frame. Once brands review these changes, we swap the improved photo crops in and render them across all retailer-facing surfaces, making sure retailers see cleaner, more informative photos when they shop your brand.

Ship with Faire comes to Australia! 
Brands in Australia can now purchase, generate and print shipping labels directly through Faire during order fulfilment. Faire negotiates on your behalf with Sendle (domestic) and FedEx (international) to get you affordable carrier rates for your business. 

New inventory tracking tools
You can now more reliably track and manage your stock levels in your brand portal – by differentiating between on-hand inventory, committed inventory and available inventory. As part of this update, you can also see how many retailers have requested to be notified when a product is back in stock.

Geo-restriction controls for brands
You can now set self-serve country restrictions from your Shop Settings, including state and province restrictions, ensuring you accept only orders in the regions where you ship to reduce cancellations.

New ways for retailers to discover your products

Evergreen gift categories
We’ve categorised products into all-year-round gift categories to give retailers new ways to discover your giftable products based on their customers’ unique interests and demographics.

New brand tag filters
Faire offers six brand-identity tags: Veteran-owned, Asian-owned, Black-owned, Indigenous-owned, Latino-owned, and LGBTQ+-owned. As of this month, retailers can now filter by all of these tags when they shop, helping them better align their values with their shopping behaviour and identify like-minded brands.

December 2023/January 2024

New tools to help you save time, deepen relationships and grow sales

The Faire app for brands is now available on iPad.
In response to requests from brands, we launched an iPad version of the Faire mobile app on iOS, just in time for trade show season.

QR codes on packing slips to solicit more reviews.  
We’ve added a new footer to brands’ packing slips that includes a QR code for retailers to easily leave a review. The new feature is available to brands globally – turn it on in settings to try it now.

New ways for retailers to discover your products

“Now on Faire” nudges. 
For retailers who searched for brands before they joined Faire, we now send an email & push notification informing them that the brand they were looking for is Now on Faire, helping brands close critical early orders and drive sales.

New eco-friendly category pages (Europe only)
To meet the demand for eco-friendly products among European retailers, we’ve launched a series of new eco-friendly category pages throughout the site and more visibly highlighted green product attributes, using an AI-powered scoring system to help determine which products to feature.

More merchandising on your product pages. 
You’ll now find product carousels at the bottom of your product detail pages. These carousels let retailers explore more products from your brand, including recommendations for “Frequently bought together” and “Similar products”.

Search improvements. 
We’ve added “machine learning-based retrieval” – a fancy way of saying that we used machine learning to improve search matching and relevance, ensuring your products show up in as many retailer searches as possible.

Open with Faire Academy. 
We’re rolling out a comprehensive set of content guides to help brand-new retailers get their shops set up and first orders placed. Offering education and best practices helps get more retailers launched in their community and purchasing through Faire.

November 2023

New tools to help you save time, deepen relationships and grow sales

Increase reorders and build customer loyalty with Exclusivity
We’re testing a new Exclusivity programme to help you get more out of the retailer relationships you’ve worked hard to establish on Faire. Once we open the programme to retailers, your customers can commit to meeting your required annual spend and get Exclusivity on your entire catalogue in their local area. You decide if and when you’d like to offer Exclusivity by setting the yearly spend amount that makes sense for you. 

Self-serve messaging for customer support
We’ve built a new support flow for brands that helps you more easily answer questions or troubleshoot issues directly with your customers. The new self-serve messaging tool prompts you to start a conversation with a retailer directly, which can often lead to quicker resolution time. We’re also pre-populating these messages with key order info to help save you time.

Improved campaign analytics
We’re giving you even more data on how your campaigns are performing. In addition to engagement and order info, you’ll now get a clearer picture of email deliverability. This breakdown includes how, why and what it means for an email to be “undelivered”, so you can manage your customer lists better and retarget your campaigns more effectively.

New brand page filters
We’ve rolled out new filters to help retailers browse and shop your catalogue more easily. New filters include broad categories like scent, material and style, as well as vertical-specific filters such as aesthetic and occasion (for apparel brands) and shelf life and diet (for food & beverage brands). 

More syncing features for Shopify integration
When your Faire orders are synced with Shopify, and order syncing is enabled, any order you cancel on Shopify will now sync to your orders on Faire, and vice versa. Also, North American brands who are charged payment-processing fees will now find payment-processing fee information in the order details passed through to Shopify. 

New ways for retailers to discover your products

Improved shop type selector
Today, lots of retailers skip through the shop-type section by choosing “Other”, even when their shop type is listed. We’re now categorising shop types into broader categories with complementary images to help retailers find their shop type, so they get a better, more personalised experience when they start on Faire (and start shopping faster too).

Faster retailer verification
We’ve simplified our verification forms on the retailer side to ensure more retailers are verified more quickly. This means more high-quality retailers shopping in general, and a better onboarding flow for your Faire Direct contacts.

Internal linking to brand tags. New internal brand tag links help match your products to logged-in retailers who share your values – like “eco-friendly” or “not on Amazon”. Make sure you update your brand tags today to take advantage of the new feature.

Multi-brand checkout. We’ve enabled new, multi-brand actions in bag so retailers can check out from multiple brands at the same time, simplifying their checkout flow and ensuring they convert faster.

Team member tools for retailers. We’re making it easier for retailers with bigger teams to buy on Faire with a bundle of new reminders and notifications for team members to onboard. We’ve also added the ability to share product and brand pages among team members, so teams can more easily collaborate while shopping.

October 2023

New tools to help you save time, deepen relationships and grow sales

A new way to measure product performance
Get deeper insights into how your products are performing, plan your inventory, and find out which products your customers love with new product-level analytics. You can view analytics like page views, number of orders, and units sold.

Send more effective emails with purchase history filters 
We’ve added the ability to filter customers based on purchase history and create audiences and campaigns based on this data. You can then use these audience segments to craft messages that encourage new purchases while calling back to a retailer’s past history with your brand.

Improve the accuracy of your shipping estimates at checkout
There’s a helpful new field in the product editor: “Selling method and measurements”. This new field – which asks for information about your product weights, dimensions, and selling method – gives retailers increased confidence when ordering from your brand by offering them a more accurate prediction of their calculated shipping rates at checkout.

A new and improved Shopify integration We announced a new partnership with Shopify that brings new functionality to our previous integration, and will help to attract thousands of new retailers to Faire from the Shopify merchant community. The new seller app includes new features like fulfilment and cancellation syncing, with more still to come.

New ways for retailers to discover your products

Inspiring new retailers to join Faire
We’ve made it even more compelling for new retailers to join Faire by personalising landing pages to specific buyer interests (e.g., home decor), as well as for non-traditional retailers, like spas and cafes, that still value stocking unique wholesale items. 

A better product search experience
We’ve rolled out a number of improvements to product search, so that retailers are better positioned to find the best fits for their shop. These include:

• Finetuning our retrieval algorithm, which is fancy way of saying we’ve improved the relevance of products that show up in search results
• Diversifying the range of brands a retailer sees on the search results page
• Decluttering and simplifying results pages, so your products have more space to shine
• Machine learning-powered spellcheck, so retailers can find the right products faster
  we’ve made text matching better

Sorting your products to match retailer interests
To help retailers complete bags and place orders, products on your brand page will now rank based on the viewing retailer’s background and behaviour, e.g. geolocation or whether the retailer has ordered from your brand previously.

Help retailers discover your products with new attribute tags
We’ve introduced more descriptive product tags across additional categories on Faire, including Home, Paper & Novelty, Pets, Apparel, Accessories, Footwear, and Kids and Baby. Highlight what makes your products distinct with tags like pink skirt, bohemian throw pillow, paperback book, organic pet food, and more. This additional information improves product discoverability in search and filtered results, and helps retailers make a purchase with confidence.

New brand filters help retailers navigate your shop
We’ve also rolled out new filters to help retailers more easily browse and shop your catalogue. These new filters include broad categories like scent, material and style as well as vertical-specific filters such as aesthetic and occasion (for apparel brands) and shelf life and diet (for food & beverage brands). The combination of new tags AND new filters help retailers more easily navigate to what they are looking for, which translates to better customer/product matching and more sales for you!

September 2023

New tools to help you save time, deepen relationships and grow sales

Offer Collections-specific promotions
We recently introduced a highly requested feature to our Collections tool – the ability to offer a percent-off discount on an entire collection. These promotions can be created either from your Collections tab or from your Promotions tab.

A simpler way to filter your contacts
We’ve improved our CRM tool to make it less visually cluttered and easier to navigate. Now, when you click “filter” in your Customers tab, a new, dedicated sidebar will appear where you can see an organised list of filters, from “Order history” to “Amount in bag”. This update is the beginning of several improvements we’ll be making in the coming months to make it easier to send targeted email marketing campaigns that convert. 

Save time with the improved bulk editor
We’ve updated your bulk editing tool to make it easier and more effective to use. Quickly create compelling listings that convert to sales by updating categories and attributes to multiple products at once. You can also save time and make updates faster by sorting and searching the editor.

New ways for retailers to discover your products

Data-driven bestseller tags
Bestseller tags help steer retailers toward products that will perform well in their shops and help brands convert more sales on popular products. Now, we’re making the process of labelling bestsellers less manual and more seamless. Our new automated bestseller tags will be assigned to the top % of your products with the highest repeat sales on Faire. We expect this change will increase the number of impressions on your brand page.

Revamped apparel categorisation   
We’ve introduced more specific categories for apparel products to help retailers better discover new brands. You can now tag your products using a clearer, more comprehensive list of product types organised under new and improved subcategories, such as Loungewear, Matching Sets, Costumes and Uniforms, and more. 

Logged-out search experience
Logged-out visitors to faire.com now see real-time product rankings on search and category pages, just like logged-in retailers do. That means it’s more likely these new retailers will find what they’re looking for, sign up for Faire, and shop for that product.

Better SEO on your brand page
We’ve improved how the links on your brand page are surfaced to search engines. This improves the odds a new retailer will discover your Faire shop when searching for products like yours.

Improved product tile design
The product tile is the key building block for the retailer shopping experience. We’ve improved the sizing and layout of key product information to increase the ease of finding the product that’s “just right” for them.

Better surfacing of your brand
Retailers search for both brands and products, but previously we treated all searches as a product search. Now if a retailer searches your brand name, we’ll showcase a carousel highlighting just your products ahead of any other results.

More convenient checkout options
We’ve made it easier for retailers to explore, fill a bag with a variety of products, and then order from your brand when it’s most convenient.

• Instead of having to check out from all brands in their bag (or just one brand), retailers can simply choose which brands they want to purchase and leave the rest for later.
• Retailers with multiple buyers can now securely access a shared payment method.