Most online shops will price by the half yard if you look at their place where you are to type in the quanity you desire. This has been done for a number of years now. Even on ebay you have to watch because some people charge by the half yard but you are also able to purchase full yards obviously by multiplying times two when you type in the quanity you want. Course many times the yard price is way over what you might want to pay.

The point is read, read, read on any site you order from. They all seem to have developed different methods in how you put in the exact amount you want. Also many quilters have wanted quarter yards and many businesses have developed their amounts/prices to reflect the many choices quilters desire. Just as many people have said on this board they go to a box store and request as little as a few inches of many different fabrics. So maybe in some way we have shot ourselves in our on feet for this situation.

We all have the responsibility to read and understand what any particular shop states in their purchasing area. We do a dis-service to ourselves when we don't throughly read everything on websites that clarifies their particular methods of doing business including shipping. Then it is our choice to to business with them or not.

Regarding food prices, cosmetics, perfume and whatever else one might purchase it's all gone up and the amounts are lower in the product. Seems to be the way anymore. So we just have to be savy shoppers and educate ourselves as to getting the best deal for our money as we possibly can.

I haven't seen this yet with fabrics but I do think it is more of those mind games that are going on. I hate the fact that we are not only getting less when we purchase something but also paying more. Too bad we just sit and take this sort of thing as another "we can't do anything about it"

Lots of conspiracy theories flying around on this one too, I see. :mrgreen:

Hey, they're not out to get you, they're not trying to fool you, they're not trying to downsize you or make you spend more...

The real reason a lot of online shops, like ours, price by the unit rather than by the yard is pretty simple;

It's a limitation of most shopping cart software systems. Since almost all products sold on the web are sold by the "each" rather than by fractions of an "each," most of the best, most reasonably priced, easy to maintain and use shopping cart systems are oriented toward selling by units.

And since, in fabrics, the most useful unit of sale if you're limited to selling by the unit, the one that is the most useful for the buyer and the seller is 1/2 yard, a lot of stores tend to sell by the half-yard, with a half-yard minimum and 1/2 yard increments.

Even stores that sell in any fraction often have a 1/2 yard minimum order. This is because the labor taken to cut a quarter yard or eighth yard of fabric is the same as a 1/2 yard, and a cut smaller than a half-yard doesn't produce enough profit to pay for the labor involved. Additionally, a smaller cut is more prone to requiring trimming to straighten the pattern once you get it home and adding the half-inch to the cut needed to allow trimming room, on a smaller fractional cut, is very unprofitable.

There are only a couple of cart systems that allow fractional sales, and they tend to be oriented toward fabrics and are either severely limited in their other features, quite expensive, or "cookie-cutter" in their appearance and functionality.

We've been after the developers of our cart system for years to implement fractional sales, but it's a significant piece of programming and doesn't benefit most online stores (since most online stores sell things that are based on units,) so they haven't done it. On the other end, we like a lot of the other ease-of-use features our cart system offers, so it's a tradeoff. We could have a modification custom-made to our cart system, but it's very expensive.

I don't know if other stores do it, but we take the time to clearly mark all our yardage fabrics, in bold print, on every fabric, what the increment and sale unit is, so this helps people not make the mistake of thinking they're ordering a yard when they're actually ordering a half-yard.

If you think about it, a little bell should go off in your head if you see a first-run, high-end fabric priced at $4.49 when the same thing is marked 10.95 or 11.95 in local Brick and Mortar stores, shouldn't you? And if you do the math, you should also figure out that 2 x say $4.49 = $8.98 is still a really good price for fabrics selling for up to three dollars more per yard in B&M stores.

What you say is interesting, but like most people who buy yardage we would rather stay with it being by the yard. I do understand that we are in a time of changes but the customers usually aren't the ones who want these changes. We are comfortabnle with buying our fabrics by the yard because that is what we are used to and find the easiest way to figure our costs. It used to be that what customers wanted was what was given, but it appears that doesn't count in the decisions of those who are changing things.

I believe shop owners are trying the hide the actual cost per yard. That's where math comes in handy! I've been to some sites where the actual unit is hard to discern. I have to scout the site to find the unit. Some don't show up until you're in purchase mode.

What can we do? Write an email and tell the shop owner what you were willing spend. Explain to the shop owner you will not purchase from them unless they are upfront with costs. A chorus of voices will initate change.

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I received an email from a shop owner. Here is an exerpt.

"You’ve probably heard by now that the price of quilt shop quality fabric is going up. The first reason for the increase is because the price of cotton has gone up. The second reason, according to a discussion I had recently with one of my salesmen, is that China controls the majority of the greige goods on which quilt shop fabric is printed.

We tend to want the newest fabrics that come out, but those newest fabrics will soon be hitting your local quilt shops at no less than $10 per yard. This same salesman told me that by the end of the year our fabric will be $12 per yard. I’m telling you this for several reasons. 1) Being armed with this information ahead of time will keep you from thinking that we shop owners think highly of our fabric and are charging accordingly. 2) If you have holes in your stash you might want to fill them as soon as possible. While I do not raise the price of older fabrics I’ve been told some shops do. 3) You can begin now to decide how many cups of that expensive coffee you really need each week and whether or not you could do without a couple so you can spend that money on fabric instead. Fabric won’t harm your health, but coffee raises the level of cortisol and insulin in your body. These hormones accelerate the aging process and store body fat. Who needs that!? Yes, fabric is much safer and much better for you.


What’s a quilter to do? If you like a certain quilt shop, or several certain quilt shops, support them wholeheartedly. Don’t bankrupt yourself trying to do it single handedly, enlist the aid of all your fellow quilters or quilter wanna-be’s. Take a road trip or two each month to your favorite shop(s). Tell anyone who will listen to you whose shop(s) you like and why. Generating business for your favorite shop will help that shop stay in business. If the shops have to have sales all the time to get you to darken their doors it won’t be long before they either quit buying new fabric or they close all together. No retail shop can stay afloat by just covering their costs, if they’re lucky, and not making a little profit with which to purchase new goods.

I understand about budgets…boy do I understand! While you’re adjusting your budget shops have to adjust their budgets as well. While you buy one marking pen at a time we buy six. You buy one pack of needles, we buy twelve. While you buy a quarter yard of one print at a time we buy fifteen yards of one print at a time. I’ve seen two salesmen in the past couple of weeks and it was very hard to say no to the fabrics that they were showing me, but when I added up what each bolt would cost, making myself just a bit queasy in the process, it got easier and easier. We’ll be getting new fabrics in soon but not as much as I’d like to see coming through the door and definitely not as much as I feel we need in order to fill your needs and wants. "



I don’t mean to be preaching at you, I really don’t, so please don’t take it that way. But I think you need to understand why the fabric portion of the quilting world is about to change, possibly on a bigger scale than we can imagine. Manufacturers are already showing us goods that won’t ship for six to nine months whereas it used to be four to six at most. That’s because they have to know how much fabric to print so they can find and purchase the amount of quality greige goods they need to fulfill their customer’s orders. The days of their having lots of fabric left over that shops can keep purchasing even after a group is several months old are probably gone, maybe forever. They cannot afford to have fabric sitting around in their warehouse and from what I’ve been told they’re trying to keep the excess fabric down to a minimum. That means that the shop owner is going to have to buy all they need of a group when given the opportunity because obtaining it, or more of it, at a later date will probably not be an option. The days of, “Oh, I’ll get that the next time I come in,” are soon coming to an end if you happen to be referring to a new group. I found that to be true this past May when a Christmas group came in and I tried to get more of a couple of the pieces within a day or two of its arrival. It didn’t happen because only so much had been printed and since it was a Christmas print they were not going to print any more. Staples in the lineup of a specific manufacturer can be repurchased for the most part, but even these are having some of the colors cut and we might not know that until we go to reorder. Bottom line, buy enough when you get the opportunity to cover what your pattern says you need and a bit more, just in case."

end of excerpt

No one is trying to hide the true price per yard from you. As I explained in my post above, online shops price goods by the half-yard mostly as a function of the way their shopping carts work. There is no devious reason.

Prices are going up, way up, and shop owners are forced to raise the prices or go out of business, it's as simple as that.

As far as the email you got from your shop owner, the entire thing is true. I might add that when stocks of old overstock fabrics run out, you'll no longer be seeing the big sales you do today all over the place. The fabric industry is undergoing a big shakeout, and in the end, quilting fabric is going to cost a lot more than it does today. We just got a price increase of 50 cents a yard on most fabrics after getting a big one just a couple months ago. The manufacturers/distributors are raising their prices on their current stocks as well, so you will see prices raise on replacement stocks of the same yardage as shop owners are forced to pay more to replace fast-selling and standard items like blenders, etc.

I notice this also. I almost bought some Kona cotton for$2.69 online and thought it was a yd until I looked real good and saw it was 1/2 yd.

It seems like a lot of things have gone up and we are getting less for our money. I am giving up quilting and going to sit on my stash and cash we may have to use that quilting fabric for other needs.

Unless I really have to have the fabric, I don't purchase "by the unit." I don't like that form of pricing!

It's your decision of course, but I see absolutely no difference between buying fabric "by the unit" and buying apples "by the unit". Whether that unit is marked one apple at 50¢ or two for $1.00, what possible difference does it make in the grand scheme of things? :D

If we don't buy it they will have to keep the yard..........ya think?

It's world - wide. Can't help but feel cheated. The ones I also don't like is when you get a big bottle and there is a false bottom so you think you are getting more than you really are.

Umm, not to put too fine a point on it, but you're always buying "by the unit."

If someone sells by the yard, you're buying by the unit of a yard. If you buy say, 1-1/2 yards, you're buying 1.5 units. If you buy 1-1/4 yard, you're buying 1.25 units. Pricing is always done by the unit, no matter what the unit is, or what it's called. The only difference is if the seller sells partial units, or not.

I don't like it one bit either..Not sure what we can do...

I think it's particularly troublesome when you're browsing the sales section and they have it in half yards. They'll say something like "on sale $4.95" ( and then that means by the half yard.) Maybe the "sale" meant they knocked off just a few measly cents of the yard price . It hardly seems like a sale when when you're only talking about a half yard.

I don't mind doing a little extra math for a good deal but I'd like some websites to be a little more upfront.

When Joann's and other large fabric stores start this practice, I'll have to quit sewing and quilting, just can't hardly afford the prices now.

It makes me feel as though they believe that I am stupid. So wrong. So, so wrong. I say, let it be what it is. Stop playing mindless games. They never work. Whew! Glad I got that off my chest.

I have ordered alot of fabric from connecting threads and they say 4 units = 1 yd. I just placed a order with them last night.It's confusing to try and remember that when I look at their lil sticker on each section of fabric ...like it'll have a 16 on there and I think I didnt get that much !!! but really only got 4 yds lol

remember when they used to cut you off a few inches for a sample swatch? not really that many years ago. now they do want to charge you for a inch!! its so sad. makes me want to watch Little House on the Prairie and go back in time. Always wanted to live back then anyway!

I don't mind the 1/2 yard increments. Sometimes I just want a 1/2 yard and I can add the dollar amounts in my head if I want a full yard. The price for a 1/2 yard is half of what you'd pay for a yard, so what's the big deal? A lot of website cut minimum of a yard and I like samplers of a 1/2 yard of each, if I'm adding to my stash.

Hancocks of Paducah is the worst!
I will not shop where they can't list the price of a yard!

as for the food...OY...even toilet paper!

and we are the blessed ones who have had both of our incomes put on freeze for the next two years..again....and I am unemployed since Aug....utilities are up so high I am ready to cancel the TV and phone...I sit and freeze all day so we can have heat at night...driving me crazy!

No! I don't like it either, it can be rather deceptive.

it's a con, but sadly most people do not check weights etc. so few complain.

It is part of the deceptive pricing that stores are engaging in. They are bargaining that we are too stupid to notice. Look at a "quart" of ice cream. The price is the same as it used to be but you are purchasing much less quantity than you used to. Which in the case of ice cream is not a bad thing but in the case of fabric is rotten. When my now twenty something children were babies I could make them a pair of pants for less than a dollar if I bought a remnant of fabric.

remnants, remember those??? where do you find them now? have you ever seen them at the LQS? even at hobby lobby now, they throw it in a drawer and when the drawer is full they throw it out!

I agree, now I have to look closer at the yardage and not just the price. I don't mind if they just said what a whole yard would cost. Cleaning out my sewing room I came across a 2002 Connecting Threads catalog and the prices back then were $8.90 so it's only gone up .10 a yard roughly per year. I can live with that.

If you go thru this topic you'll see how many people have not read your explanation. They're also the same people that don't read Jo-Ann's coupons, ebay descriptions, and numerous other things. The biggest problem is people don't read.

It makes perfect sense for an online shop to price in their smallest sale unit since the software is going to work much easier that way.

remenber the nickel hersey candy bar it was big now small for 50 cents

Thanks! I think a lot of people just read the first post in a thread and hit reply, not reading the rest of it, so they miss a lot, including any explanations of what's really happening.

It's beyond me why anyone would think that any online shop owner, especially small to medium sized ones, would purposely engage in deceptive sales practices. There is no deception, and there is no benefit in engaging in anything deceptive. It's just a function of how online sales carts work!

Anyway, I don't know if many people will read this, but for those of you that do, here's a question, given that because of cart limitations we can still only price and sell in units:

Would it help if we listed the full-yard price someplace on the product description, or would that just make it more confusing?

Even the carton non concentrated orange juice I buy, as same size carton, but fewer ounces.

There are two separate discussions going on here...the original one about unit pricing fabric at a half yard instead of a full yard, and the offshoot one about how things, mostly grocery items, are being sold in smaller quantities in order to keep costs down for consumers. I speak to the first (please correct me if I am wrong, QKO).

QKO has made it perfectly clear that it is the shopping cart software on fabric sites that forces the merchants to make a decision about what to use as the smallest unit of pricing. The software is simply not capable of handling 'partial unit' sales.

Look at it this way, if the merchant were to decide to use full yards as their pricing unit, as most of you say you want, you would be forced to buy ONLY full yards of fabric from that site. It would be impossible for you to buy 2½ yards of anything. You couldn't do it because the merchants software wouldn't know how to make it happen.

So, the merchant has to decide whether he will lose more sales to people who won't accept half yard pricing or to those who are looking to buy something other than full yards. My guess is that, checking his sales records, the merchant has determined that a great many people buy fabric in quantities that end in a half yard so that is what he chose as the unit...the half yard. It gives the customer much more flexibility in the quantity they are able to buy.

Would you really prefer to only be able to buy in full yard units just so you don't have to multiply by 2 to figure out the price per yard?

There are two separate discussions going on here...the original one about unit pricing fabric at a half yard instead of a full yard, and the offshoot one about how things, mostly grocery items, are being sold in smaller quantities in order to keep costs down for consumers. I speak to the first (please correct me if I am wrong, QKO).

QKO has made it perfectly clear that it is the shopping cart software on fabric sites that forces the merchants to make a decision about what to use as the smallest unit of pricing. The software is simply not capable of handling 'partial unit' sales.

Look at it this way, if the merchant were to decide to use full yards as their pricing unit, as most of you say you want, you would be forced to buy ONLY full yards of fabric from that site. It would be impossible for you to buy 2½ yards of anything. You couldn't do it because the merchants software wouldn't know how to make it happen.

So, the merchant has to decide whether he will lose more sales to people who won't accept half yard pricing or to those who are looking to buy something other than full yards. My guess is that, checking his sales records, the merchant has determined that a great many people buy fabric in quantities that end in a half yard so that is what he chose as the unit...the half yard. It gives the customer much more flexibility in the quantity they are able to buy.

Would you really prefer to only be able to buy in full yard units just so you don't have to multiply by 2 to figure out the price per yard?[/quote]

No matter what a merchant does people are going to complain about it. Most merchants don't sell quarter yards. If they did then the smallest unit would be a quarter yard and then everybody would have to multiply by 4.

Sometimes I think people just want something to complain about on here since complaint topics seem to get more responses.

No, actually complaining is my least favorite thing to do - and I do little of it, because my patience level is not very high. If a store advertises a print for $4.38 - I expect it to be for one yard. If I find out they got my attention with a price I can afford, and I wasted my time to visit their site, and find out the price is for 1/4 yard (anything other than 1 yard) - it is false advertising. One Ebay store advertises $1.00 - when you get to their store, the $1.00 is for a 4x4 sample piece. That is false advertising cloaked in the overall theme of bidding. That is deceptive - people will state the unreasonable of it - and the market makers need to listen. Plain and simple. Price the fabric per yard, and state your policy on less than one yard. If a store has an obsolete pricing software - they need to upgrade it. Does anyone think fabric inventory is run on 1/4 yard? When more than a few consumers complain - think maybe there could be a real issue? I do.

I finally got to go to Olive Garden again with some friends last week. Yay! We had been longarming hard all morning and decided to treat ourselves for Work Well Done! I haven't been there in 2 years. My meal was called Chicken Toscani or something, there were only three tiny pieces of chicken in the entire dish (each 1 x 2 inches)! AND I think it was $12; the price had gone up by at least $2. I don't know if I'll return there anytime soon! :(

IMHO it is a way to catch the unwarry off guard and sell them more fabric because the purchaser thinks it is a great buy. I personally will not purchase from a seller who does this. If they are really serious about not being deceptive, they can always include the price per yard in the description. I have a web site that does not allow me to price my shipping amounts separately, so I include the shipping amount within the description so as to avoid unhappy customers.

I just ordered from Hancocks of Paducah. Those big red letters that say HALF YARD are sure designed to catch people off guard.

[img]http://www.pic4ever.com/images/25r30wi.gif[/img]My thoughts exactly!

gidday from oz!..

i'm hearing you girls!!..the relatively few quilt shops we have here are horrendously expensive AND dont carry a good range of what is actually available out there..

so i buy quite a lot of my fabric on ebay, from both here in oz and from the states..including postage this is usually a slightly cheaper option and i can find exactly what i'm after in pretty much the right quantity..ie. 4 fatties = i yard/metre, meaning no waste if i want 1 1/4yds, 5 fatties (yes i check first that their fabric is off the bolt and uncut)..

BUT..recently i have noticed more and more sellers selling by the half yard or worse still, by the full yard only, meaning i end up with between 1/4 and 3/4yd more than i want..this substantially adds to the price especially since i usually buy a number of fabrics from the one seller, and puts the postage thru the roof!..i already have a burgeoning stash, dont need to add to it this way..

so what i'm saying is if sellers, stores and manufacturers are going to sell by units, make the units 1/4 yards or metres, and ALSO spell out the cost per yard/metre straight after..nothing should be sold by only half or full yardage mesasurements...

I'm sure there is a lot of deceptive advertising out there, but accusing a store of being deceptive when the price is clearly marked in half-yard increments isn't it, plain and simple.

Why not price it in meters? After all, the USA is about the only country left on the old foot system? And the market is world-wide.

As far as "obsolete pricing software" is concerned, since probably 99.9% of the sales on the interweb are done by the unit, developers not spending a lot of time creating specialty pricing software for fabrics being sold according to an obsolete system of measurements isn't surprising.

Apparently not a lot of consumers are complaining, since the two biggest online fabric stores, i.e. fabrics.com and Hancocks both sell in half-yard increments with a half-yard minimum order. Or maybe they both have "obsolete pricing software." Or maybe they're trying to be "deceptive."

Oh, and btw, most stores keep their fabric inventory by the inch, not by the yard.

Uh, ok, I'm done with this subject now...

Whatever.