Ellen Christine Featured in The New York Times

Hello Fashion Diggers,

I just wanted to give a shout out to Ellen Christine, owner of FashionDig shop Ellen Christine Eclectic for her feature in the March 30 issue of The New York Times titled “Keeping Heads from Going Naked” .

Congratulations Ellen! You make us proud!!

FashionDig Featured in New VISA Go Campaign!!

We are excited that VISA is featuring FashionDig in its latest ad campaign. Just visit www.visa.com/go and select Go Explore at the bottom of the page. You wind up on a page that looks somewhat like a visual highway passing billboards that call out favorite sites to see, places to go, or things to do. Ours is the one that says “Find New Vintage Clothing”. Very cool — We love it!

New Lower Subscription Rates and Commissions for FashionDig Shops!

Hello Fashion Diggers,

We are excited to announce that we have lowered our rates to sell on FashionDig.

We have reduced the Commission Rate to just 10% of net sales.

And Shop Subscription Fees now start at just $9.95 monthly for the Standard Plan.

Note that all of our plans include the listing of an unlimited number of items, hosting of all images, no additional picture fees, no per-item listing or insertion fees of any kind, and no required advertising fee. I think you can compare our offering to any option available and find that our rates and features are the most attractive and competitively priced.

For details of all Shop Subscription plans offered please visit the following link:

http://www.fashiondig.com/help/help_openshop_pricing.asp

Talk Soon,

Barry Bryant

Incentive for New Shop Referrals for FashionDig Shops

Hello FashionDiggers,

We have been providing current FashionDig shops a 1-month extension on their shop subscription when they refer a new shop that signs up to sell on FashionDig.

This will now change to equal a portion of the new shops sales commissions during the new shops first 3 months on the site. We will pay the referring shop 50% of the net commissions earned during the first three payout cycles.

We feel the new incentive will encourage all our shops to refer high quality sites that will help improve our overall selection for the customer.

Talk Soon,

Barry Bryant

Order Fulfillment Changes Implemented

Hello Fashion Diggers,

Beginning with orders place on January 19, 2009, FashionDig shops will be shipping most orders directly to customers rather than to the fulfillment center.  This should allow orders to reach customers in a much quicker manner since the extra step of shipping to the fulfillment center has been removed.

The only exception to this is on orders with multiple items from more than one shop going to International destinations. Due to the high cost of shipping overseas we will continue to consolidate these orders at the fulfillment center prior to shipping to the customer.

As a response to these changes, as well as rising shipping costs, we have adjusted our shipping rates. Rather than having a flat rate shipping charge for each order we have had to add an additional per item charge since a single order with multiple items from different shops will now require shipping from multiple locations.

We will be making further changes to the shipping process where individual shops will be setting their own shipping rates but for now we are still collecting a uniform sitewide shipping rate.

Talk Soon,

Barry Bryant

Progress of Updates

Hello Fashion Diggers,

I apologize for the lack of recent posts but the move to a new server a couple weeks ago has taken up much of my time.

Also, I have decided to go ahead and launch the changes that have been completed as soon as possible rather than waiting to release all the changes in January. I am in the process of testing these changes now so I hope to have these ready to launch within 1-2 weeks,

The changes that you will see first relate to an improved inquiry process and the ability to track inquiries and orders via a login in My FashionDig.

After these have been posted we will get to work on all the checkout and shop control panel changes.

Talk Soon,

Barry

Server Maintenance

Hello,

Just a short note to let everyone know we have been busy preparing the site for a move to a new server that will accomodate the new changes we will be launching next month.

The move should occur later this week and the site may be down for a short period of time.

After that has been completed I will have more time to post some updated info in the blog.

Talk Soon,

Barry Bryant

Update on the Update

Hello Fashion Diggers,

The programming is going slower than expected so it looks like my mid-November guestimate is probably going to be more accurate than the end of October target that I had initially hoped for. I have always heard to double the time that the programmers estimate and that seems to hold true in most cases – sort of like building a house… you know it’s going to go over budget and take twice as long as you expect.

Here are the features that they have been working on and are nearly completed with - but do keep in mind none of this will be rolled out until it is all completed since many pieces depend on others before they will function properly.

My FashionDig login – will allow site visitors to store and update shipping and billing info, view current and past orders and as well as tracking info, view answers to any inquiries they have placed and place follow up.

Customer Inquiries – improvements as indicated previously

After this weekend they should begin working on the functions that affect the shops and checkout.

I’ll release more details of other expected features in the next post.

Talk Soon,

Barry Bryant

FashionDig Sales and Fulfillment – Part II

Hello Fashion Diggers,

As a follow up to Friday’s post I want to talk about some of the biggest changes we will be making with the new site… changes that will affect the way that orders are currently processed and fulfilled.

As most of you know FashionDig is a cooperative of independent vintage clothing dealers that are located all over the U.S. When an order is placed presently individual shops ship sold items to our fulfillment center where we consolidate all orders and ship them out to the customers. This is how we are able to offer a set shipping price on all orders… and why we have specific sales and payment policies for all shops.

There are benefits to the way we handle this now but this method does have significant drawbacks as well… shops have to absorb extra shipping costs into their pricing which may make items more costly in some cases. As a result returns to FashionDig at present incur a restocking fee which we split with the individual shops to help pay for these extra shipping costs. (Shop to fulfillment center, fulfillment center to customer, and in the case of returns fulfillment center back to shops.) Also, we are not able to offer expedited shipping because of the additional step of shipping to the fulfillment center.

After the first batch of changes are launched in several weeks, sales on the site will be handled directly with the individual shop. Each shop will be able to post it’s own sales and return policies, set it’s own shipping costs and acccepted forms of payment, and ship items directly to the customer.

Since we are cutting unnecessary layers of administration shops should be able to offer better pricing on many items and will be able to eliminate the restocking fees. They will also be able to accept checks, money orders, and Paypal if they like in addition to credit cards. Also, they will be able to offer expedited shipping if they choose to do so. And shipping costs can be based on each item so light or small items may cost the customer less in shipping.

Additionally, we will be able to accept International shops… something that would not be possible under the present setup with the way order fulfillment currently works.

In lieu of the changes we are making we will be lowering commission rates and shop subscription fees that we now charge our shops.

Overall, we think the changes will greatly benefit the customer as well as the individual shop on FashionDig.

Please let me know your thoughts by leaving comments to this post.

Talk Soon,

Barry Bryant

Shop Administration/Control Panel Changes

Hello Fashion Diggers,

This post will mainly interest current and prospective shops. I want to mention (without getting too technical hopefully) some of the changes and features sellers on FashionDig can expect to see once the PHASE I updates are completed.

Currently our shops select from a pre-defined list of item attributes for each item that they add into their shop. This is what enables our advanced search, the FashionDig Look Finder, to function properly. We will be converting this attribute list - which is currently lengthy and time consuming to use - to a simpler text box where shops can enter “tags”, or keywords, of their choice that define the item. This will help to streamline the listing process for shops. Also, we will then be able to eliminate the advanced search (Look Finder) as these tags will be searchable through a newly design and simplified search function for customers.

We are also changing up the way item inquiries are handled. The customer will still submit an inquiry from the item detail page as they currently do… and shops will respond to inquiries as they do now. But, rather than customers simply receiving an email reply we will also enable customers and shops to follow the inquiry online and submit follow up questions, attach images to questions or replies etc… this will make for a more conversational format.

Shops will now have the ability to reactivate items more easily in their control panel when an item is returned or when an order is cancelled. At present this is not so easily accomplished and shops sometimes have to relist items from scratch so I believe this will be a welcomed change.

Lastly, when a shop is created rather than having a link that is your standard fashiondig.com link followed by a shop ID number each shop will get a unique link such as shopname.fashiondig.com. This will make it much easier to promote your shop and also will make it more likely that your FashionDig shop will appear in search engine results if someone searches for your shop name. Don’t worry though, the current shop links will still work and customers will be simply directed to the new location.

OK enough for today… to recap, item attributes (tags), inquiries, reactivating items, and shop links will all be handled in a new and better way once the new website code has been implemented.

There are also some huge changes in the way the FashionDig sales and fulfillment process works and I will go over those changes in the next day or two. I will be very interested to hear feedback on these as they will likely be the most dramatic changes that we will be making.

Talk Soon,

Barry Bryant