So I took a look at a couple of choices in the "retail" category. Each one offered a completely different way to do interactive shopping.
Etsy.com -- This site allows up and coming artists a chance to share and sell their clothing, crafts, toys, books, jewelry, and anything else one can think of. Besides the type of item you may be looking for, Etsy also lets you search by location of creator, their hot items, and even by the color! It's an awesome way to get something really unique and it also offers these creators an inexpensive way to showcase their talents.
The only warning I would give is that anyone can make an account and post products. I was looking at different stationary and stumbled on a seller who make 4 Valentines out of construction paper and was trying to sell them for $10.50. Not cool. I would consider this to be like Ebay... be very careful about who you buy items from.
threadless.com -- I *really* like this store. Just like Etsy, this site gives artists a chance to sell their artwork, but all designs are sold on cotton shirts. The one thing this site does to prevent an overload of choices, is it allows the public to register as a score-person. Once registering, you can start looking at recently submitted designs and score them on a scale from 1-5. The highest scores are made and sold into shirts. I like the way this site encourages designers, but I also like how there is a filtering process so not just anything is posted and sold.
Both sites offer the viewer a number of things not offered before when it comes to shopping on the Internet:
- More viewer/shopper interaction
- A chance for new artists to show their stuff
- Viewers have more control over the content of the site
Of course, I guess that's what Web 2.0 is all about.
1 comment:
Cool - you give a very thoughtful analysis of both sites. Thanks for such careful attention to this.
Keep up the Learning 2.0 work - you're on the road to the 23rd thing!
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