[meteorite-list] Question for dealers re: displaying sold items

From: Michael Mulgrew <mikestang_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Tue, 12 Apr 2011 20:47:05 -0700
Message-ID: <BANLkTind5sRJ0hpVo+T_y+b3KrYwNpnEzQ_at_mail.gmail.com>

List,

I appreciate all of the responses, both on- and off-list. It appears
to me that the #1 reasons for leaving SOLD items up is a lack of time,
3rd party hosting, or added expense to keep the web page up-to-date.
I can fully appreciate these reasons. I also appreciate the resum?,
so to speak, that leaving up SOLD pieces build. This history lesson
hits home with me on how things used to be, but I'm a progressive
person and I'd like to see current technologies utilized more
efficiently rather than reminisce about the past. :)

Speaking purely as a consumer I would recommend that dealers make the
time or find the resources to more clearly differentiate between SOLD
and FOR SALE items rather than having them all lumped together. This
would serve the buying public better. I'm sure there is no shortage
of thesis papers written by marketers on the best ways to present
items one is attempting to sell; there's undoubtedly a whole
psychology behind it. As a few members have already elluded to,
sometimes seeing SOLD everywhere is enough to make the stop shopping -
surely not what any dealers wants from their website.

The simplest think to do would be to move a sold item to the bottom of
the page that it is on and have a clear division on the page between
in-stock and sold. The time it takes to overwrite the price with the
SOLD text would be about the same as to cut and paste the sold
specimen to the bottom of the page. A more elegant solution (although
more time intensive) would be to have a separate portion of the web
site devoted to previously sold specimens.

My humble $0.02,
Michael in so. Cal.
Received on Tue 12 Apr 2011 11:47:05 PM PDT