This opportunity is focused on introducing some useful element(s) into the app which help customers understand which products/downloads have received updates.

 customers notifications is a separate concern. This is about visually showing customers who are logged in and want to know which products have updated files.

This will tie into our Product Versioning feature released in summer 2024.

Visually communicate to customers which downloads have been updated

Lists of products on single order views can be long. If we added clickable sorting functions at the top of those lists, customers could more easily find specific products and navigate their orders.

Sorting functions on product lists within orders

The idea is to create a new top level page which shows unique content for each individual user. If logged out, it prompts the visitor to login and see their recommendations. When logged in, users will see content personalized for them based on their history.

"For you" personalized page for customers

Creators could potentially be getting a lot more reviews on their products if we sent out requests for reviews some time after purchase.

Automatic followup emails asking customers for product reviews

Currently our content editor for products does not permit creators to use Bootstrap classes on their HTML. Some creators have requested the ability to use some Bootstrap classes in order to present their content in columns.

Provide creators with a way to put product description content in columns

Creators would like to be able to dictate the order that product files appear in on the downloads page in order to make it easier and more clear for customers to know what order to download things in.

Allow creators to specify file order

Currently, creators cannot create their own "sale" or mark an individual product as "on sale", apart from tagging products as part of a site-wide sale. Creators could benefit from having more control over the marketing of their own products which includes being able to periodically run their own unique promotions.

Allow creators to run their own sales

Creators right now cannot schedule emails to send at a later time. They have valid reasons for desiring the functionality such as timing the emails in sync with product releases, for example.

Allow creators to control email send time

Give individual creators the ability to process refunds with no admin intervention.

Give creators refund control

At this time, customers can subscribe to updates from creators and creators can email customers who are subscribed. But it is all or nothing. Customers cannot pick and choose which creators to subscribe to in this way.

Allow customers to control which creators they receive email alerts from

Creators often have to reply to customers with standard messages. These can be technical clarifying questions, escalations to admin support, addressing FAQs, redirecting customers to an off-platform resource, and more. Eventually, when creators can process refunds, pertinent replies may become a serious need.

We could introduce a feature enabling creators to save specific messages and then quickly access them from within the message editor, similar to how most help desk applications function.

Saved replies for creator support

Creators need a way to manage different version releases of the software they are selling.

Product versioning system

Creators would like to be able to rearrange the order of the FAQs they include on their product pages. We have no mechanism for reordering at this time. 

Allow creators to specify FAQ order

Linking images is difficult and it shouldn't be.

Add ability to easily link images in product editor

Allow creators to enable recurring payments for their products. Purchasing customers would be "subscribed" and continue to renew until they cancel. Access to downloads will be revoked when subscription is cancelled.

Enable products to be sold as subscriptions

Customers can currently add products to a private "wish list", accessible within their accounts. These lists represent products the customers are considering purchasing but haven't followed through yet.

We could potentially turn a lot of those wish listed items into completed sales if we sent email alerts to customers whenever the prices for those products changes.

Email customers when wish listed products have price changes

Creators would love to be able to more easily filter down their list of orders based on a number of criteria, but dollar value would be one of the most immediately valuable. In particular, this could allow them to easily exclude $0 sales from their view or to isolate only higher value orders.

Allow creator sales table to be filtered by $

Creating the product page is a challenging task for creators. It takes a lot of effort and skill to create a well written, compelling page for each product. Not all creators are experts in writing sales copy, or even writing English for that matter.

What if we made it easier for creators by giving them a tool which accepts prompts (like a technical, sloppy product description) and generates a readable, error free, customer friendly product description?

Creators would not only save time, but potentially end up with a better pages as a result, especially creators who do not natively speak english.

We could benefit from better product pages across our site resulting in a better overall image and potentially better conversions.

AI product description writing tool

Right now, creators need to manually add a very specific product tag to each of their products if they wish to participate in a sale. That tag is unique to each sale event.

Creators would appreciate something easier. We could make their lives easier and possibly increase sale participation if we improve this part of the creator experience.

Better mechanism for opting in to sitewide sales

Creators can design and send custom emails to their subscribed customers. However, we do not currently offer any way for creators to preview the email before sending.

I could see this being accomplished by either adding a new preview view and/or a way to send a test version to the email author.

Provide creators with a way to preview their emails to customers

Currently on the home page and on category pages, we have several sections which rotate qualifying products. This helps customers discover potentially interesting and relevant items without requiring them to browse the entire catalog or search.

Frequently updated sections like these tend to be effective for surfacing products to customers which may otherwise be hard to find and also helping customers find valuable items quickly. Taking cues from other marketplaces such as Creative Market, Envato, Unity Asset Store, and others, these sections are valuable and we can benefit from introducing a few more.

At this time we are looking to introduce the following:

Add a new special placement sections on home and category pages

Our new sale alert emails apparently have a subject line which reads: "New Sale - Order xxxxxx".

Creators would love to see the product title (possibly variant as well) in the subject line instead of that GUI, which one creator told me was useless to them.

Gumroad emails were shared with me as an example. Those display "New sale of {product name} for {purchase amount}".

Include product title in new sale email alert subject

For increased security purposes, we could introduce two factor authentication. This would be most important for admin users but definitely valuable to creators and affiliates.

2FA login

Presently, our customer account area has five tabs:

Customers have requested the addition of a Downloads tab which would be a single view curating all of their downloadable files together. At this time, customers must go to Orders and then click on the downloads button in order to access their files. For customers with many different orders, this is extremely inefficient. One view listing all the files would be amazing.

The files would need to be presented in some kind of table arrangement with the necessary context like Product - File name - Order, etc. Other info like file size, creator, etc. would be helpful.

Big bonus points if the table were sortable by columns and filterable.

Add "Downloads" tab to customer account area

There's potential for stimulating sales with the introduction of some kind of gift-card-like system.

Blender Market gift cards

Affiliates get a percentage of each qualifying sale. What if approved affiliates could, at their own discretion, offer special discounts on their affiliated products? They could only discount up to the % amount they earn, but it would still be a real discount and exclusive to the given affiliate.

It would give affiliates more control and flexibility when it comes to promoting products and could generate more sales for creators.

Allow affiliates to offer discounts

 for design details. We need to apply the new Superhive aesthetic to the site.

Superhive Redesign

Many creators would appreciate having more control over which new sale notifications they receive. In particular, being able to opt out of emails specifically for free products has been requested.

Exact solution remains TBD. This could be a toggle specifically pertaining to emails for $0 products. Or we could introduce a pre-product setting so creators could specify exactly which products they want to receive alerts for, regardless of their price.

Allow creators to opt out of new sale notifications for free products

It would be impactful for creators if we were able to show them stats pertaining to their product pages like:

And probably more than that. Savvy creators could do a LOT with that information.

I'd also go so far as to say that it would be good for US and the BM community if more people had critical eyes on these stats.

Which metrics we can realistically provide is unclear but we would like to figure out what is possible and share anything we can with creators.

Provide creators with analytics reports

Right now, the events list in creator reports only shows a column for product ID. Creators would appreciate being able to see the product name right there AND the variant (when applicable).

Add "Product Name - Variation" column to event list table in creator reports

That reports page is currently only a cumulative total of all products. It would be a huge improvement for creators to be able to see it broken down by individual products.

Expand creator Sales report page to break results up by product

Creators sometimes wish they could communicate to customers that support will be delayed while they are out of office for one reason or another. It would be good for creators to be able to have some peace of mind while away from work. It would be good for customers to have realistic expectations and notice when creators won't be as responsive.

"Out of office" feature for creator support

If a customer has purchased a product and gotten a refund then they should not be able to leave a rating on that product.

Additionally, if a customer leaves a review prior to getting a refund then we should either hide or highlight the refund on that review.

Do not allow customers to leave rating if order item is refunded

We're looking in to the possibility of adding a feature on the marketplace which allows users to have a balance of virtual funds associated with their account. It is a popular feature on many other marketplaces, commonly referred to as "store credit" or "digital wallet". With this feature, users can make purchases using funds from their existing balance.

Store credit

This new feature would allow creators to introduce a new product which is a curated bundle of some (or all) of their other products, sold for one price.

Creators could use this to hand pick a group of related or complimentary products from their own portfolio and sell them together for a special rate.

Creator controlled product bundles

With this feature, site admins could create product "bundles" or "collections" which consist of hand-picked assortments of products from the entire BM catalog and are then sold as a group for one special price.

Products can come from any number of creators. We will need to have some kind of policy and process governing how products get included, ensuring fairness and creator consent. 

In the end, a dedicated customer facing page for these "collections" would be created to list all active curated bundles.

These bundles/collections could be surfaced in other places too such as the home page and within relevant product listing pages.

Admin controlled product collections

We have very important PayPal upgrades to complete in Q1 of 2025.

Upgrade PayPal integration

TL;DR we should have some kind of feedback display, maybe on the creator dash or maybe somewhere else, where you can see products that you have been added as a collaborator to (via the edit product form). Right now you can as the creator of a product see what collaborators you've added, but there's no way for those collaborators to know themselves.

Creator dashboard - Display a list of products you are collaborating on

There are 2 main components for this ticket: (1) Allowing creation of Products or ProductVariants with a price of $0.00, and (2) Allow users to purchase/checkout these free products.

Free Products

Currently, we don't show customers anything about OS compatibility. However, some products do not fully work on all operating systems. We could introduce some new meta option for declaring compatibility.

I see it as an optional field for declaring 

 most products are OS agnostic. I don't want to introduce a new field which all creators suddenly need to fill out.

Show OS compatibility pre-purchase

Some products are essentially addons or extensions to other products and this is not something creators can easily communicate to potential buyers. Creators have requested the ability to link products so certain items can't be purchased without already owning a dependent item.

Product dependencies

Creators have requested more ways to advertise their products. We could approach this a number of different ways.

Quite possibly other options exist as well.

Offer advertising opportunities for creators

In order to give more creators an opportunity to gain visibility and to help customers more easily discover relevant, useful products, we want to begin displaying those four rotating special sections (popular, new, featured, and gems) on top level category pages rather than just on the home page.

This will allow products to compete with only those in the same category instead of with the entire catalog. It will also make many products more easily discoverable by buyers.

Move popular special product placements from home page to category pages

With this feature in place, we will be able to very accurately measure the impact of the rotating placements which products can have on our site. Currently those special placements include popular items, new arrivals, featured goodies, and hidden gems.

The goal is to create clear reports which tell us exactly how much traffic products receive when their products appear in a special placement.

Add custom URL parameter to all special placement links

Our current search algorithm factors in only title, tags, categories, content, and excerpt. I think a very natural and beneficial addition to that ranking system would be product star rating. The idea would be to boost products which have consistently high ratings and conversely downrank products with low ratings.

Factor product ratings into search

A valuable addition to our user system would be the ability to establish hierarchical relationships between accounts. These relationships would enable users to create teams.

The connection between users can range in its sophistication and we will want to scope out the initial base feature set carefully.

Once relationships are established, sharing of certain things becomes possible. Those things can include:

Those are just examples and others exist. We 

 need all of these things initially and may never need some of them. When we start to scope this we'll identify which elements are the greatest need and break things apart.

Team accounts

Exact feature scope TBD but it could be exciting to offer an integration of some kind with GitHub. Essentially this would allow for a connection to be established between an individual product and an individual GitHub repo.

This can accomplish a few things potentially:

Connect product to GitHub

Some creators have requested this. And WebP could represent an opportunity to further reduce bandwidth and storage costs since the file sizes are lower.

Add support for WebP images

Right now we include the product description, excerpt, title, tags, and categories as eligible fields used for building our search index. However, there are many occasions in which customers search by the name of the creator. Right now queries for "orange turbine" don't return Orange Turbine products because we do not include the creator name.

Include creator username as product search field

General enhancements to existing interfaces such as the sales index, order records, affiliate management views, and data exports, all focused on disclosing more detail about affiliate involvement.

Give creators more detail about affiliate referrals on transactions

Suggested feature: Allow readers to basically rate reviews by clicking some kind of yes/no or 👍/👎 options next to a "Was this review helpful?" prompt.

"Was this helpful?" reactions on reviews

Specific discount codes creators can make which get associated with a given affiliate for tracking purposes and revenue sharing.

Affiliate Coupons

Creators presently have no clear way to attribute sales earned by their own off-site marketing efforts to themselves. This occasionally results in creators paying commissions to affiliates who benefit from our last click attribution model.

Creators should be given the opportunity to also secure the last click attribution on sales, thereby crediting them with the full earned share of the sale commission.

Creator self attribution for sales

When viewing an individual product, the is no search bar at the top of the page, nor is there any link or icon available to reveal a search bar. The only way to run another search is to navigate to a page with a search bar, such as home or a category page.

Preserve sitewide search availability on product single

With the addition of product versions, we now are storing changelog descriptions for all versions. We could make that public by displaying it somewhere on the product listing pages. A tab after Ratings is an option.

Add a changelog tab to product pages

Reasonably, creators have asked if a rating or review could show which version the customer was using. This can be important information for customers reading the reviews.

Make ratings/reviews indicate the version

At this time, when products are set to inactive, customers are shown a message which at times confuses them and makes some believe access to legitimately purchased files is being revoked. This is not the case but enough interpret our message that way that creators are frustrated.

Most likely we just need to re-write that message to reduce confusion, although it's possible a more elegant and helpful UX could be possible.

Modify messaging on inactive products so customers don't think orders are being cancelled

Creators have complained that file uploads can sometimes take quite a while and we do not show any measure of upload status.

Progress bar for file uploads

In addition to our current Creator Affiliate system which requires defined relationships between creators and affiliates, we will be introducing a new global system allowing affiliates to begin benefitting from all delivered sales. This will introduce a significant new incentive for affiliates to prioritize Superhive and maximize their efforts to deliver quality traffic.

Introduce platform affiliate system

Creators would love to have more ways to showcase their special offers and promotions to customers. Right now, creators can 

 coupons, but their is no discoverability for those offers. The only way a customer can learn about an offer is by a creator marketing it themselves or through an affiliate.

A good example of this functionality is found on Amazon. Sellers on Amazon can create coupon offers which are made publicly visible in specific contexts. 

. This means browsing customers can organically discover deals available on select goods.

Accomplishing this at a basic level would not be extraordinarily complex. Ultimately it comes down to introducing a creator facing option to 

 publish a coupon when creating one (as well as possibly some additional configuration options TBD), and a page on the site which displays all public coupons.

Then we could introduce a link somewhere prominent to a "Deals" page wherein customers will see a list of every public coupon. The coupons would probably have a fairly standardized display, showing text like "25% off all Orange Turbine addons" or "$10 off Retopoflow" or "50% off Extra Lights Upgrades" and so on, all leveraging functionality we currently have.

Public Coupons

Right now, creators have zero way of knowing how many customers will receive their Creator Emails. We can provide them at the very least with a number.

Show creators how many subscribers they have

Creators can now be their own affiliates. But in order to get credit for referral, they still need to use their referral link with the ?ref=123 value set.

 be set as the referring affiliate for sessions which originate on the creator's public page?

For example, creator CG Cookie posts their link to 

 on that page as being referred by the CG Cookie user and credit them with the referral for any ensuing sales.

Superhive Roadmap