User-Designed Products
Lately, some of my favorite e-commerce sites are ones that let you buy products designed by their user community. Threadless is a well-known example that sells t-shirts, and I’ve lately discovered Thumbtack Press, which has a selection of cool prints from a variety of artists. I recently ordered some for my apartment.
The key to making sites selling user-designed products work is having a well-edited selection. This is especially important for any products related to style or design, such as fashion, art or home decorating. If you aren’t a design professional, it’s difficult to weed through the thousands of offerings available. As a customer, I’m relying on either the site’s owners, or the user community, to filter the selection and bubble up the best products. The ones that do this the best are the ones I’ll patronize.
This stands in contrast to sites like Cafe Press, which also offers a marketplace of user-generated designs, but doesn’t really filter or edit them, so there’s an unwieldy number of products to sift through. And it’s why I rarely bother with sites like shopping.com, which dumps thousands of offerings into what amounts to an online bargain bin.
So far, user-designed product sites have been limited to areas like t-shirts, art prints, and handmade goods — items that are cheap to manufacture. But it could be applied in many more areas. Lately, even gadgets are as much about style as functionality. How long until we see a site selling user-designed electronics?
