Enter Find My Fabric.com
My first impression of the site was a pang of traditionalism. Upon entering the search page there is a very pretty blue and yellow quilt with blocks that spell out the word quilts. As a modern quilter I would have liked to see it with more of a fresh aesthetic but that's just me.
The first search was "yellow pearl bracelets", with one result, a store in Bellingham, WA. I wanted to see how much shipping was but after two clicks, I still did not see it so I just abandoned this search.
The next search was "flea market fancy", and knowing this would have a lot of results I was hoping for better luck. The search returned with 135 results. I clicked on a couple of them and went straight to two sites that appeared to have a credible online presence. What I mean by that is I have browsed at or heard of these stores before today, so they were familiar to me and I would order from them. The shipping wasn't clear on either of those and it wasn't of interest to me to act like I was going to place an order, just to see the shipping cost, not to mention the "create an account" part of that whole scenario.
The next search was for "remix ovals", which returned nothing. This was sad as this is a pretty new line and to have no results was a disappointment.
The last search, which I was confident would be great, was for "kona". There was a whopping 2,066 results. So...I went to narrow the search by price point (as I don't care to pay over $6/yard) for any Kona I buy and it didn't work. :( I got an error message that said {Sorry, no results for Kona. You can try the search without price filters or go back}. I tried this 3 different times in case it was just me. It wasn't just me - I was able to duplicate the error message both subsequent times.
I wanted to check out this website a little bit more so I started clicking around, next > to the blog. The last post was May 2, 2012 (and I did all of this on December 29, 2012). An online presence must be updated frequently for credibility and this one wasn't.
Overall, I think the idea is great, but I was under the impression (which was all in my own mind) that webcrawlers were going out there scouring for all the fabric (similar to a google search) but actually, fabric shops who want to sell must sign up for an account and link their online inventory to this site. My question is, why would I go to this site, if a google search can find the same results (or more)?
Not wanting to be "Debbie Downer" there was one more thing to try! Upload a picture of the fabric you are looking for to find a match, so I did....and got an error message which suggested I try again later.
It was at this point that I had to throw up my hands and admire the idea but question the execution. So it is a no for me. I don't recommend this site to you at this time, with the current coding. Let me be clear, that makes me sound like I know a lot about how a website works, I don't. If Find My Fabric could somehow do the google search behind the scenes and produce a result of price per yard and shipping, then perhaps I would revisit them but currently, it is not valuable to me as a fabric buyer.
