Hey everybody. Just a thought...

[Marty]

It's always good to support out sponsors. They're listed as sponsors because in some way they support us, either via paying for advertising, sponsoring contest prizes or in some other capacity that directly benefits our community. It only makes sense to return the favour. Also, if you do order from another place, ask them if they would like to support our community. For starters you can tell them, that they will get few months of free advertising on us.

We have a really cool marketplace, but it seems to be horribly underutilized, heck virtually unused! Any vendor can place ads there to sell plants for free, those will be displayed just like the random photos. I can make individual sub forums or threads for specific vendors too, that's no big deal

[quiltergal]

Marty I like the idea of vendors having their own threads where they can answer questions about products that may be specific or peculiar to them, or where they can give us a heads up on new items, sales, whatever. My only fear is that with so many paying vendors if a member has a less than satisfactory experience with a vendor the member may feel like that can't be expressed for fear of the vendor pulling their support from OB. As a newbie I was wondering what was up with the Marketplace. If they have their own dedicated corner of the board we'd never have to leave OB to go shopping!

[Charles]

Problems will occur. But if we let that stop us, heck we would NEVER buy anything at all.

If the vendors had a shopping mall of sorts, they could field questions from us and sell products at the same time. It certainly would encourage them to continue advertising. If a member has a problem, we will all know about it sooner or later anyway. Things happen. Honest people have debates. Right and wrong is determined by the facts.