Update: Tindie have added the “shortlinks” on the product list page in the store.
Tindie is an online store where electronics hobbyists sell their widgets and doohickeys. I recently started selling a couple of my products on this site and I am very pleased with the service they provide.
When selling your stuff online there are at least two issues any maker runs into that are nothing to do with making: shipping and marketing.
Shipping is just a pain. Keep it simple and make it repetitive and as automated as possible.
Marketing is a subject that I can honestly say is the only college subject where reading the text book actually made me physically nauseous – my brain is just not wired for it.
One of the most important things in marketing a product is the product name. It needs to catch the eye and hook people who might want it into clicking and looking deeper. It also helps for it to match search terms that people use when trying to find a solution to their problem. It may take a few iterations to refine a good name. That’s where a little wrinkle in the Tindie site turns up – their product links are based on the product name, so every time you change the name all your old external links drop people in your store home page, not direct in the product. Tindie are very helpful about this – you can open a support ticket and have the old name forwarded to the new, but that’s an inconvenience for both sides. Also they can only forward one old “slug”.
What’s needed is a permalink – like in WordPress. Tindie say they are working on it. I’m impatient so I poked around and figured out they already exist. Beware: Tindie have not confirmed that this is a permanent functionality. It works for me today.
First, figure out your product ID.
Go to your product page in the store, right click on the background and do a “view page source”.
About 30 lines down you will find a line like
That shows my product ID is 8759
So the permalink is
https://www.tindie.com/products/8759
It is that simple.
