kirksan

I asked several questions on behalf of my wife in another post. Here's one for me.

I heard you guys were looking at MongoDB for some stuff. I've experimented with MongoDB at a very large site and it was a dismal failure. If you have looked into it what's your opinion?

Greetings, and thanks for doing this.

I’m an OPs guy myself, I’ve worked at many sites you’d recognize. My wife is an Etsy seller with a very successful store, around $500,000+ in annual revenue. As you can imagine, whenever my wife runs into problems on the site she thinks I should be able to fix it, so I’m here for help.

I have a few questions…

1) Convos seem to be a recurring problem. I know you’ve recently switched to a new system and I don’t know the backend you’re using, of-course. One problem is that from time to time my wife won’t receive any convos for several days. At first I thought this was just a slow period, but looking at the number and regularity of convos she receives (there’s a lot) I think there’s a chance something is broken. Does this sound like a possibility? If it does, will the new system fix it?

2) My wife would really like the ability to search convos. Any chance of adding that?

3) Can we get tracking pixels for Google analytics and Facebook ads?

4) Sometimes payments are stuck in a processing state for several days. When this happens my wife contacts support and they release the payment almost immediately. Any chance of automating this?

5) We're redirect a domain to my wife’s Etsy store. Can we add more integration for external domains? Perhaps domain masquerading?

6) I understand that you want to keep the algorithm that generates search results private; is there anything you can say publicly about improving your position in results? One example, my wife thinks that if she lists new items daily it helps with Etsy search rankings. BTW, my wife’s store is in the fine jewelry category, which has been moved around Etsy a bit lately.

7) Any chance I could get your personal email? :-) Just kidding.

Thanks for doing this. Etsy is great and I enjoy Code as Craft.

EDIT: Grammar

In my experience Solr works pretty well with the exception of building the index. It takes forever if you have a large site.

As long as you're willing to devote the time and infrastructure to re-indexing, the feature set and price of Solr make it a very attractive choice.

Thanks for the link. We had all of the same issues you mentioned, plus problems with the crossover between dev and ops. The dev guys would test something, usually something like adding another index, and it would work fine. But that was in a QA environment. Even though the QA database would be a recent replica of production it was hard to simulate load. When the change was applied to production MongoDB would apply a read lock on the table and things spiral out of control.