When browsing products, you can sort them by popularity, and on the homepage there are sections that show various groupings of products.
Here’s an explanation for how popularity is calculated, and how these sections are sourced.
Aside from the header featured products, which refreshes every 30 minutes, all the homepage sections refresh every 5 minutes.
Popularity
The popular metric is the key piece to all of this, and it’s where the magic really happens when finding products that are new, interesting, and enjoyed by others.
The metric takes a few key pieces of information, in this order of importance:
- Paid purchases in the last 30 days
- Paid purchases over all time
- Recommendations in the last 30 days
- Recommendations over all time
- Views over the last 30 days
- Free checkouts over all time
- Wishlist additions over all time
All of this combined informs a popular metric the prioritises high-selling and well-recommended products, with an emphasis on recent activity. The effect of this is easiest to see when ordering products while browsing, and it also affects some of the homepage sections.
We regularly revise the information used to calculate the popularity metric to make sure it is accurate and surfaces the most relevant and popular products at any given time. we’ll keep this page updated whenever we make significant changes to the factors in these calculations.
New & noteworthy
The homepage section titled New & noteworthy shows products by fetching the following:
- The 15 most recently published products, regardless of popularity.
- The 10 most popular products published in the last 60 days.
It takes those 25 products, shuffles them into a random order and shows 4 of them. This means you will regularly see different products in that section, and you will always see recently published products that lean toward the more popular.
Only one product per creator is shown in this section at a time.
The ‘New & noteworthy’ ordering on the Browse page (the default view) uses similar logic, but includes more products in the pool.
Recommended for you
The Recommended for you section will only show for logged-in users who have either purchased at least 1 product, or viewed at least 10 products. It is a set of personalised product recommendations that share the same taxonomy terms as products you have purchased or viewed. It prioritises purchases over views, and the more taxonomy term matches a product has, the more likely it will show here.
It excludes products you have already purchased or you have published yourself. Only one product per creator is shown in this section at a time. The same section is shown on your Dashboard page, where it shows up to 10 recommendations using the same criteria.
The ‘Recommended’ ordering on the Browse page uses the same logic for selecting the order of products to display.
Trending now
The Trending now section of the homepage fetches the 20 most popular products, shuffles them into a random order, and shows 4 of them. Because the popular metric emphasises recent purchases and recommendations, this section will always remain up to date and current.
Only one product per creator is shown in this section at a time.
Top sellers this week
The Top sellers this week section shows the 4 products or bundles with the most paid sales from the past 7 days. In this case, “paid sales” means sales of at least 50c. This doesn’t look at popularity and can include multiple products from the same creator.
Now in print
The Now in print section of the homepage doesn’t look at popularity. Instead, it finds the 20 most recently published products with a print book available, shuffles those into a random order, and displays 4 of them.
Only one product per creator is shown in this section at a time.
Featured creators
The Featured creators section of the home page is from a manually curated list of creators who have been selected by the RPG Trader team. A random set of 4 creators from that set are shown in the section.
The criteria that the team uses to select featured creators is subjective, and includes things like how interesting, popular, and diverse their products are.
Active & upcoming collab bundles
The Active & upcoming collab bundles section shows a random set of 4 of any collab bundles that are either active (currently open for sales) or upcoming (will be open for sales soon). Collab bundles are bundles that include more than one creator.
Creator’s product spotlight
When browsing creators, you will see a Product spotlight mentioned below their name. If the creator has set at least one featured product on their creator page, this will show a random one of their featured products. If they have not set any featured products, this will fetch the 5 most popular products from that creator, shuffle them up, and show one at random.
Browse by taxonomy
The Browse by {taxonomy} sections on the home page select which taxonomy terms to show by fetching all of them that have at least 2 products, shuffling them into a random order, and displaying 5 of them.
Each taxonomy term includes 2 products in its display. To select these, they first find the 30 most popular products in that category/genre, then they shuffle that list into a random order, and display 2 of them.
There are three of these sections that display here. The first is always for categories, then the other two are from taxonomies selected at random.
Header featured products
In the home page header, there are 5 featured products displayed as photos. These are manually set by the RPG Trader team, where any number of products can be set as ‘featured’ with a random set of 5 of them being shown at a time. The displayed products refresh every 30 minutes.
While the criteria that the team uses to set products as featured is subjective, the main factors that influence the decisions are:
- Is the product interesting?
- Does it have a striking primary image?
- How popular is the product?
- How broad is the product’s appeal?
These criteria may change and evolve over time. If you feel like your product should be included in this section, please email support@rpgtrader.com and we’ll review it.
Related products
On each product details page, you will see a section showing related products. This looks like for products that share taxonomy terms with one you are viewing - the more shared terms, the more likely it will be shown. If you are logged in, it will deprioritise products you have already purchased.