I wasn't quite sure where to put this, but since it's not directly related to quilting itself, I figured this was the better forum...

I was poking around online, looking at the various sites where you can sell quilts. They tend to fall into two categories:

1) Homegrown sites where you send the information about your quilt to the person that maintains the site (usually over email, or through an online form), and they update the page with your quilt info. You can't personally update the information yourself. No real search capabilities.

2) Mega sites devoted to crafts/selling in general (etsy, ebay, etc.) with very limited search capabilities. For example, if you're looking for a queen sized green quilt, that is completely handstitched...well, you have to hope that the seller put that information in the title/description, to be able to find it. There's also so many different crafts, with limited organization, that your stuff can get lost in the shuffle.

I was thinking it might be kind of fun to make a site where folks can sell their quilts online (I'm a web programmer), but I guess I'm wondering if you guys think there's a place for that? It would be a place specifically for quilts (and quilted items) that would be dynamic (meaning, you sign up for an account, and input your items yourself. You can edit them, remove them, etc.) with robust search capabilities (people could search on size, color(s), handmade vs. machine made, etc.)

If I were to make a site like this, what would YOU want to see on it as far as features, both as a buyer and a seller? Do you think that a site like this would be of any use or value to quilters?

I think an important feature that E-bay buries in it's advanced search is the ability to look for completed listings to get an idea of fair pricing. Also, a "surprise me" feature would help for folks who aren't sure of what they are looking for, or someone like me, just looking for something pretty to rest my eyes on.

Keep us updated - in my area there really are no outlets locally.

it's great that you think about where things are properly posted. thanks very much for that. in this case, i'm quite pleased to disagree with your choice to plunk this into GCC. :P

this topic is suitable to the Main section because it does relate to quilting. many of us are interested in exploring professional possibilities and are always on the lookout for advice and outlets.

any input you receive from us regarding your venture will be useful to others, too. ;-)

once you set up your site, you can announce it in the Member Buy/Sell/Swap section.

Thanks, PatriceJ -- I'm sorry I posted it in the wrong place :oops:

I would love and use a sight like this. I have made many quilts and would like an outlet to seel them other than ebay or etsy. Where did you find other sites. Keep me posted. This definitely is something I would like to pursue.

I'd love to see a new site to sell just quilts/quilted items. I tried to sell 2 quilts on ebay, but it got lost in the shuffle. I only have 1 to sell now, all machine embroidered, Oriental designs. I'm sure there are only a limited folks interested in Orientals, but I just loved it and got many complimentsl

Dot

Wow, that is really a great idea. I was actually looking at etsy for the first time the other day, trying to compare my work to what's being sold, the only problem is I have no idea what's being sold... the ones listed are NOT sold, lol. It would be nice to have a history by category to see what got sold at what price, etc. I mean, I'm not surprised that the plain patch baby quilt listed at 900 dollars hasn't sold, but it would be nice to see which ones have sold and at what price. Am I sounding redundant here? lol!
I like all the other ideas listed so far :) Let us know what you do with all of this, I'm very interested!

Thumbnail pictures on the main pages! I hate when I have to take the extra step of clicking on a link and waiting for the picture to load. Assuming you have a lot of business, it will probably help people to look through more quilts faster if they can search for "hand quilted queen" and then immediately see that one is not their color, without opening the link.

Also, I don't know if this would be like a Craigslist where it's pretty bare bones with no fees to you, or eBay where it's got a lot of fancy stuff (that I could live without) and fees to you, but I would like to see reasonable fees. eBay + Paypal = fees that really add up. I'd like to see no listing fee (final fee seems reasonable) so that way people can list it and change their mind, or if it doesn't sell, no big deal. And longer expiration dates. eBay's 7 day auctions assume someone who wants your product will see it in that period. I'm more of a fan of Craigslist's month timetable (or longer)

And feedback is important. Even just a basic section where someone can say "great quilt, fast shipping", that's important to help future buyers

Lots of great ideas, thanks guys.

About listing expirations, the way I would probably do it is that listings would be good for say, 3 months, and then you'd get notified over email that the listing would be "archived" one week before the end of the 3 months. You could then click a button on your listing to say "keep this open for another 3 months". If you didn't do that, then it would be "archived" (i.e. no longer searchable or available for sale) -- but you could always unarchive it at any point within your accout.

I tend to view this as a sort of classifieds site, instead of what Ebay or Etsy does (so more like Craigslist, but definitely not as barebones as that is). So a seller can list the types of payments that they take, and a buyer contacts the seller to purchase something -- and all money goes between the two of them. That relieves me of the legal and monetary aspects of it.

As far as fees, I had been debating how to handle those, and I think that probably I wouldn't charge any fees. I rent my own server (that's in place for a couple of other sites that I run), and I have space and bandwidth to hold another site, easily. What I would probably do is say that if people would be kind enough to send a donation if something of theirs sold to help cover my server fees, then I certainly wouldn't say no to that, but there's no requirement to do so (if the site becomes some huge behemoth with tons of visitors, then I might have to change that policy, of course). Does that seem reasonable?