We decided to make them all items instead of doing half icons/half items, and we didn't want to keep just a few of the store front images that were still up to date art wise while everything else became items. Some of the old store front items were so so so old (hey grooming parlour ) and it was easier to update them with items vs having artists go through and revamp all the icons + make new ones.

I'll talk with Keith about ordering them differently rather than by store ID. :)

Ordered by name instead of ID (how it was before)!

And we're working on further organization (by category, giving each shop a small description of the type of things you'll find there)

Just pushed an update that puts them all into categories.

As far as the art: A lot of it was out dated, we might update them to store fronts at some point but making a big map for them (which makes it much harder to actually navigate) just felt very neopets-y and is absolutely not a priority.

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Also I'm sure you've noticed we've just slowed down (a lot) on putting things in shops and have made restocking a lot less of a "thing" on the site in the past year+. We aren't devoting a lot of resources to main shops at the moment.

In the past two days over 80% of main shop purchases came from the shop search. Restocking just isn't a thing our current users really do that much of.

People don't use them: they use google or set bookmarks for their pages. The maps are looked at once and then ignored because they just aren't actually useful UI for getting around the site.

They're beautiful and awesome but not actually useful.

Also, we're totally tracking the feedback from this thread. We tried the item thing and it doesn't seem to really be popular so we're drawing up some cute icons for the page that brings them all into the same visual style.

If those go over well we're interested in using the same style on the bottom of the explore pages, linking to the various activities on the map.

I think this will work way better because over time there were two visual styles for the shops (old vs new) and sometimes icons on the old maps (just the image + link) were items or things made specifically for that page and they didn't really look great together.