actual picture of v.5 charcoal
(notice how different is looks from the photoshop recreation below… it really was false advertising… sorry about that)
I was able to borrow my friend’s camera & take some shots of the newest member of family v.5. Just as soon as they arrive, I try to rid of them, of course, so go to mintd and buy it (if you don’t get an internal server error).
Yes, that was a bit of a petulant dig on mintd. mintd, if you don’t already know, is a hipper, younger version of etsy. I’m currently in the middle of a love/tolerate/hate relationship with it. Let me explain. The good parts include, but are not limited to:
Its hipper-than-etsy-ness
The ability to have different shops with completely different feels for different kinds of products.
Lookbooks… customers who have bought a certain product can take pictures of it being used & upload it to the site. Visitors to the site can then see the products used in real-world applications & in a different style than maybe the seller intended. Plus, if another of that product sells, the person who took the pictures gets a cut.
Bad things:
I get internal server errors all the time. Maybe it’s because mintd is young, maybe it’s because every time I want to check the site it’s the same time when the folks in Australia (where mintd is based) are having national mintd parties… I have no idea, but it happens waaaaaaaay too often. They posted a blog entry about this problem two weeks ago saying “you guys deserve better,” but it hasn’t gotten any better. The site is often really sluggish when I can get through… growing pains, I guess… maybe they should hire Alan Thicke as their spokesperson.
Site navigation kinda sucks. My first time at the site almost made me go away & never come back. I still find myself getting lost sometimes in the mintd jungle
I obviously don’t get any of their numbers, but I don’t see many indications that anyone actually sells anything. Very few other “mintizens” that I’ve come across have ratings for other products or have had their products rated. Is mintd just a big show & tell social networking site?
The prices default to Australian dollars, so when I put up a bag for $90USD, it shows up as $109.80 or around there. I definitely wish that the site would recognize where you’re browsing from and adjust the currency appropriately. There is definitely a big psychological difference between $109 and $90 that could cause potential buyers to not investigate the product further. So should I lower my mintd prices to help that? I already get 7.5% taken out of the final sale by mintd (the commission gows down if you become a paying member) as opposed to etsy’s $.20 & 3.5%. I get less money, mintd gets less money…
All in all, I love being part of a newer community, but I’m quickly tired of how little infrastructure they’ve built to deal with their admittedly newfound popularity.
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on Monday, May 28th, 2007 at 4.43 pm and is filed under the web, Bags.
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August 31st, 2007 at 6.09 pm
[…] may remember my post bitching about the problems with mintd. That was three months ago and the cause for my bitchiness […]