We wanted to let you know that we’re making changes to Saved Searches - giving you more flexibility in how you control and receive your Saved Search alerts. This change is going live this week, so we wanted to talk you through how it will work.
What’s new?
You will be able to manage and choose how you receive notifications for each individual Saved Search - either push notifications, emails or both! This gives you much more flexibility and control over what notifications you receive.
Email and app notification changes
The email will no longer combine and display the results for multiple saved searches and send once per day. Instead, you will now receive an email per saved search - it will link you to the relevant Saved Search results, where you can view the newest listings.
For now, the timings of the email will stay the same, but over the coming weeks, we’ll be making some further changes that mean your emails will be sent more frequently throughout the day, dependent on when searches have results. You can then control which searches you want those immediate alerts for, and switch off any you don’t want.
There are no changes to the app notification timings.
Here is an example of what the email will look like:
You may notice in the first couple of days, the emails are more generic and may not reference specific saved searches. Don’t worry, this is only temporary.
Email notifications can be changed in both the app and on the website. App notifications can only be changed in the app.
To make sure you see any further updates, please keep your app up to date.
If you have any questions or feedback on this change, please let us know.
Things have changed now for me. I got an email alert about a “pawsome sit”. And things have changed in the web interface, that I can switch alerts on or off.
But not the push notifications. (I can imagine technical reasons why it would be difficult/impossible to do that from the web interface.)
As a Basic sitter, I see that I am still limited to three saved searches in the web interface. I tested that the app still allows me to create more saved searches, and that I can now switch on email alerts for those. Also from the web interface.
But why oh why I am forced to use the app as a workaround for that? That limit of three does not make sense.
I find that when I receive many of the notifications they are already at ‘reviewing applications’ stage, or indeed ‘currently not in need of a sitter’.
Up to two days ago I got a notification of new sits in the areas I was looking for.
And as they were not highly popular areas, there would always be between 1 and 7 new sits.
This was one of the most valuable features on the THS site for me, because if I had images displayed in my emails, I would see at a glance the main pic for the sit, the dates, the pets, the exact town, and I could click on that photo to go straight to the HO’s listing.
(I am not talking about Push notifications, nor the app. I only use email and the site on a laptop. The app is too slow and choppy for me).
For the past two days, I have got a different type of email, with no listings displayed, just a button to go to the site. And when I get to the THS site I am faced with hundreds of sits, none of which are in the area I chose because THS includes all sits within what seems a 50 mile radius/
So if someone had added a new sit in my chosen area (a city) the chances of me finding it are slim. I don’t have time to go trawling through hundreds of sits to find one or two brand new ones, when I could see at a glance previously if the new ones were suitable.
Why on earth did THS change this feature? It was perfectly fine before.
So I actually haven’t seen any new sits for the last two days, making the notification useless to me.
Please go back to the old notification system for new sits in saved areas.
How exactly does it give us more flexibility and control?
It only lets us choose how to receive the notifications.
You haven’t mentioned that you’ve taken away the most valuable part of the emails!
The emails we now get are useless, because they don’t tell us the exact sits that have become newly available that day. We have to go hunting for them out of many sits. And we end up looking at sits we’ve seen before. So in taking away this feature we are wasting a lot of time to find out what we got in a very handy email previously.
Hello @BillyBonnieBenji Thank you for your feedback I will let the team know.
Just to check you did not miss a couple of important notes that might help with how your saved search emails are appearing today:
So hopefully soon you should get emails with links to your individual saved searches and they should be in order of newest first. I will keep you all posted of any updates. Thank you
It must have been to save money. Although as the old emails were automatic, it was obviously a bit of computer code that enabled them to happen. How keeping this code would have cost them more money, I cannot understand. Unless they get a good offer from the developers, the fewer scripts they have.
Thank you Carla, but I think the above quote is a clever way to disguise the fact that the most valuable part of the email is still now missing. And to be honest, this wording made me think I had got it wrong, and the old emails were going to come back. But then I read the succinct summary of what has happened in @pietkuip 's post, and it’s clear the new notifications are still a lot worse than before.
The initial post in this thread asked for feedback. But when I gave feedback in my own thread, my post got merged with this thread which instead of being in the more popular Sitters section, is now buried in the less popular Product section.
Hello @BillyBonnieBenji I completely appreciate your concerns and I will make sure your feedback gets passed onto the wider team.
I’m happy to explain why your post was merged. We try and keep everything together so that we don’t miss sharing any valuable feedback with the wider team and also to make sure that the discussion stays in one place, so the Forum team can then keep this thread updated with the latest news.
It is available for all members to see. Check out the Community Guidelines as it explains a bit more about merging.
The new email format allows us to send individual saved search emails more regularly than the old ones and the new email system means we can add new features in the future to help optimise saved searches even more. We will keep you posted about any future updates
I don’t like this change at all. Previously I could click on the photo of specific sits in the precise area of my saved searches. Now it takes me to my first search only and any sits within 100 miles or so. So pretty pointless. As always, changes rarely improve the service you’re providing. I wonder if sometimes the point of changes is simply to keep your growing numbers of staff busy!
When the changes are complete, and we have notifications turned on for a saved seach, will we receive a notification as soon as there is a new listing up?
If this is the case, unless you have a search saved for a very unique area or narrow dates, then it makes more sense to just do manual searching at a fixed time…basically every day.
Same comments as others - the missing pictures/listings of the new sits in the new email (and the direct links to them) will greatly reduce the chance of me going to the site to look at those sits. Having one email I can quickly review is the fastest/best option for me. If I have 10 searches for places I’d like to go someday, there is 0% chance I will click on a single button link in 10 emails daily and then look at the listings.
I’m sure the choice was with the intent of driving people to the site to look at more sits than the handful shown in the email, I think it will have the opposite effect. As a casual (more passive) sitter, the single email was the best option. Unless I am actively looking for a sit, I’m far less likely to click on one of the new email button links. On the old email, I daily would go and favorite good looking sits for the future. I’d never do that now with the new flow.
Now… if you could add the new listings (with pictures) to the new individual emails, I’d be good with that. Currently, one is limited in the number of searches in the single email (maybe the last 6), so being able to receive more search notifications (potentially more quickly) would be a win
I agree, this is happening for me too, I clicked the ‘pawsome sits’ link in the most recent email and it took me to a webpage of all sits! “Explore thousands of house sits and find your next pet sitting adventure”
It wasn’t until I saw the ‘saved searches’ at the top that this made any sense at all.
Also, what would really help would be searches by date in a specified location, I’d saved a date range and UK, but the emails would contain sits in USA and further afield.
