The Dime Weblog

Dear sellers,

Dime (Beta) goes live today, and shoppers can now browse through your products and stores. This means that if your store isn’t open yet, now’s a good time to do it! There have been a ton of updates over the last few weeks, and you’ll find them as you browse through the site. Of particular importance is the profile picture and payment details sections you should update in ‘My Account‘.

We’d also like to thank you all for signing up and being patient with us while we worked through the kinks in the site. The feedback from all of you have been incredibly important, and we want to make sure that we’re building something that all of you enjoy using and find really useful.

In that sense, Dime belongs to all of us, so if you have any more suggestions, improvements, or any features you’d like to see, keep your feedback coming. Post reponsese here on this blog, or contact us directly - whichever the case,  I guarantee we will be listening.

Now, for those of you who are new to Dime, here’s a quick introduction:

What is Dime?

Dime is a few things. It’s a shopping site. It’s an online flea market. It’s a fashion portal. Dime is all that, but more importantly to us, we want Dime to be a community. Read on to find out more.

For bazaar, flea market and casual sellers, we want to provide you a place to set up a proper online store, which allows you to manage your catalogue, track your sales and orders and post your announcements. You can also customize the look and feel of your store, because you’ve got your own style, right?

For shoppers, we want to provide you with a place where you can search for clothes, shoes, accessories and things like that from the different sellers here. This means that instead of having to browse individual blogs or sites, you can find them all here, AND make and track your orders all from one place. Curious yet? Read on…

Why should I be interested?

I suppose it depends on what you’re interested in! They say you can’t please everybody, but that’s not going to stop us from trying! We’ve just started, and we’re also only just getting started. Join us, and grow with us. The more sellers we have here, the more products we’ll have. The more products we have, the more there is for shoppers to find, which means more happy shoppers, which translates into more customers for the sellers. Everybody’s happy.

What’s next?

We don’t know the answer to that yet. We need your help with that. As we grow, we’re not going to add features and information just because we feel like it. We want YOU to tell us what you’d like to see here. But for now, take a look at our site, try it out, and let us know what you think!

Learn more about Dime

Currently, the limit for each product image upload has been increased to 1.5MB. This size limit should allow comfortable uploading of photos directly from a digital camera without resizing. However, if you are still having problems with the filesize limit, you might want to look at optimizing your images.

Optimizing images keep them small, which makes loading quicker, which in turn provides a smoother experience for shoppers browsing your store.

One option you might want to look into is PICASA (http://picasa.google.com), which is a free photo-organization program by Google, which also allows for resizing and optimization of images. It’s pretty user-friendly and also allows you the option of scanning your computer for photos so you can select them easily for editing. For instructions on how to resize your photos on PICASA, you can read on here.

For Windows XP Users, you can also go to Microsoft’s website and download the Image Resizer Powertoy. This piece of software allows you to easily resize your photos by using the right click function of your mouse. But don’t take our word for it — go check it out for yourselves!

Finally, aside from the options listed above, there are other online resources on image resizing and optimizing, and a quick Google search should result in some useful information.