Selling Quilts Online -- what's your ideal?

14 years ago

I posted this on another quilting forum that I frequent, but I thought maybe you lovely ladies might have some ideas to add as well.

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?

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Comments (4)

teresa_nc7
14 years ago
As a quilter that has a shop on Etsy, I can think of some questions to ask you:

1) are you a quilter? do you know anything about quilting?

2) what's in this for you? are you going to make a commission on any sale? will you be charging members to list their items for sale?

3) will there be a set time limit of how long an item can be listed? will there be a charge for relisting an item?

4) how many images per item will be allowed?

5) will you offer different methods of payment?

6) will there be separate areas for new quilts and antique quilts?

7) how would you handle listings for cheap, foreign-made quilts?

An aware quilter will list the size in inches, content of the fabrics and battings used, the type of construction (pieced blocks, applique, whole cloth quilt, etc.) and the type of quilting whether by hand or machine. There should also be a description of any embellishment and also the binding.

You might want to have the ability to contact the quilter for custom orders or questions about a listing.

Teresa
rivkadr
Original Author
14 years ago
1) are you a quilter? do you know anything about quilting?

I'm a new quilter; just finished my first quilt top last month. It's my newest obsession and I love it. Programming is my other obsession, so it would be fun to meld the two :)

2) what's in this for you? are you going to make a commission on any sale? will you be charging members to list their items for sale?

I'd probably have to charge a nominal fee to cover my web-hosting costs. Part of why I'm asking questions is that I'd want to know what people thought was fair -- an upfront fee? A small percentage of the final sale price? I wouldn't do both, just one or the other, so my question would be, what would you, as a seller, consider the most fair way to do it, and how much would you think is acceptable?

3) will there be a set time limit of how long an item can be listed? will there be a charge for relisting an item?

Nope for the first one. And the second one is moot, since listings wouldn't expire, so no need to relist. My only concern about letting listings not expire is that people may sell things through other venues, and then forget to remove it from my site -- so I'd probably have something in place where if the item has not sold after say, 3 months? 6 months? then the seller has to take some sort of action to make it stay active (like, click a button to renew the listing for another 3 months). If they don't, it becomes "archived" (no longer searchable), but the seller can come back and unarchive it at any time.

4) how many images per item will be allowed?

I imagine I'd make it unlimited.

5) will you offer different methods of payment?

I'd probably have to leave payment up to the seller; I would have ways for them to indicate which payment methods they'll accept, but I don't want to personally be dealing with payment between buyer/seller. The site's intended to be more like a...quilting classifieds that brings together sellers and buyers, rather than a "click here and buy it now" kind of thing. Doing the latter would require more legal involvement than I'm interested in dealing with -- I'm one person, not a company.

6) will there be separate areas for new quilts and antique quilts?

Yes.

7) how would you handle listings for cheap, foreign-made quilts?

Having never bought or sold a quilt myself, I wasn't aware of this being a problem. Do you have any suggestions yourself on how to handle this? My preference would be to keep such listings out altogether -- mass-produced quilts isn't really what the site is intended for. I could probably limit the IP addresses of people selling to only those within the US & Canada, although I'm sure the foreign sellers would find ways around that...

Excellent questions, Teresa. If you have anymore or have comments on what I've said above, please throw them at me.
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solstice98
14 years ago
This is very interesting. What I would like to know is how it would be marketed. How do you draw enough of an audience to generate sales? I'm not sure the search capabilities are nearly as important as the level of traffic, which etsy and ebay already have. How do you make it a destination site?

Kate
rivkadr
Original Author
14 years ago
Search engine placement and optimization is a large part of it -- if someone searches for "quilts for sale" or "buy quilts" on google then the site would have to be one of the first hits. And it would take a certain amount of time to build up traffic as well -- if I did make the site, I'd allow people to list their items for free for the first several months...that way they lose nothing by doing so, and it would allow for time to build up traffic. It's also possible to do Google adwords for a relatively small amount of money, and that's something I'd probably investigate.

Obviously, the site couldn't compete with Ebay or Etsy specifically -- if someone's first thought when buying a quilt is to type ebay.com into their address bar, then there's no way they would even be aware of my site -- name recognition on a niche site like this can't be comparable to something like Ebay. The people I'd be hoping to draw into my site would be people using search engines, mainly.

Selling Quilts Online -- what's your ideal?

Comments (4)

teresa_nc7

rivkadr
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Selling Quilts Online -- what's your ideal?

Comments (4)

teresa_nc7

rivkadrOriginal Author

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solstice98

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