AIBU to think that Not on the High Street is a bit of a rip off?

[Marmiteandjamislush]

Just been having a browse and noticed that a lot of the stuff is mass produced and can be bought from other shops and websites (often on the high street) much cheaper?

I love NOTHS and have bought quite a lot of stuff from their sellers (mainly personalised stuff for 'big' birthdays, christenings, a few special Christmas bits etc) over the last year. I have to say I've always been delighted (as have the recipients of any gifts) with the products I've ordered. And when I've had to contact sellers for any reason they have always been polite and helpful in their responses.

But-I do agree that there is a lot of over priced tat on there. Quite a mind boggling amount of it!

There are some gems though if you have the patience to trawl through the tat...

And a biro for 15 quid.....baffled

I've never bought anything from there as the search engine totally baffles me. You put in key words and it comes up with pages and pages of unrelated crap that bear no resemblance to what you're looking for.

Their commission is 50%!

Their search engine is very very shit

I bought a wedding gift from NOTHS - the couple had a list. I then got so much junk mail from them, after requesting that they stop sending me junk mail, that I had to report them to the Information Commissioners Office to get it to stop.

I've had some gorgeous things from there. Some hand made pure cotton pyjamas (with london buses embroidered on - sent to DS of friends in Oz) for about £15.

I also got some fab glasses cases for grandparents - hand made and hand embroidered with a cartoon picture of DD with Grandad and Granny. They were about £20. I've had some lovely handmade soaps, cards, personalised colour lollipops for birthday party favours...all at very reasonable prices.

I have seen loads of people trying to sell party decorations for about a tenner more than they cost on the online party stores though! Guess you have to pick and choose carefully!

They also don't have any kind of back end IT support for sellers I gather - I've had issues recently where things showing in stock couldn't be shipped because the sellers have to update stock status manually so they'd actually sold out. Which is a far cry from amazon etc who have ways for the sellers to interface their stock levels automatically.

I think it's a thin veneer of high end marketing wrapped around a shitty business model that doesn't deliver on its promise, which is a shame because some of the sellers make genuinely beautiful things. But Liberty online it ain't.

I noticed some of the same stuff in Sainsbury's (not the personalised craft stuff obv)

I bought a map (place of my choice on it) printed on a small wooden heart of of eBay for £3 that was about £15 on NOTHS
how can that be right?

YANBU. The plan for a lot of sellers on there seems to be buy a load of wholesale tat, take a photo of it against a pretty backdrop like the pages of a vintage book, charge three times as much. It's a bit like Etsy and it's loose definition of 'handmade'.

Chipped the commission is 25% not 50!!! There is also a £190 joining fee.

I've been planning on joining because (silversmith/jewellery design- not personalised tat) because sales go well in that area,another jeweller I know gets 90% of her sales through there.They are the same price on NOTH as on her site,she just loses in commission but gets greater sales.It's hard to push the website of a small business such as that to a degree enough to make a living (as you can with NOTH).

The only thing that puts me off is the current influx of mass produced tat that is either shipped wholesale from abroad or someone shipping components and just putting them together. It cheapens it for those of us who slog,design and make the entire thing from scratch from melting,cutting and shaping the metal to polishing.Mass produced tat is taking over again and either charging the same price,for something that would've cost them pittance in time and money,or people having such low prices it makes everyone else look overpriced.

I'd guess it's the same with other skill areas used on there.

But YES please do follow and go to the makers own website and purchase through them if possible!

TripTrap, that's interesting, and yes you're right, the tat is really devaluing the genuine original items.

I'm not a fan of personalised stuff. I don't really have a favourite or significant date/book/quote/holiday destination, I like loads of stuff.
I like my homewares pretty generic, thanks.
Unlike DD who's mad for the personalised shit and would happily have her name emblazoned on her hairband, coat and shoes. But she's 4.

I hate the whole obsession with personalised stuff at the mo,I find it quite sad.Thankfully,people will get bored of it and it will become dull because it will all be 'copied',even unintentionally!

I've been tempted to do personalised jewellery before purely for sales but I can't bring myself to do it,unless it's a specific request from a customer.It just becomes cheap and tacky when everyone is personalizing everything.Yuck!

I bought a wedding gift for a friend, one of those memory box type of things. When it arrived it was such poor quality for the price, I paid fifty pounds for it but your lucky if it looked worth twenty pounds. I was actually embarrassed giving it to my friend. When I went it write a review I was shocked at the amount of bad reviews that basically said the same thing..... just overpriced!!

One of my favourite Christmas presents came from NOTHS. It is the personalised pyrex mixing bowl with MyName makes the best cakes engraved on it

I love it. I know there are thousands like it out there, I know some may consider it naff, but I love it! It was a gift from my best friend and it means a lot to me.
It is also good quality.

I am however horrified at how much she spent... NOTHS is certainly expensive...

I've had some lovely things from there. Although i bought a personalised new baby card once and was so disappointed. It was marginally bigger than a postage stamp.

I like using the site for inspiration.

Yup. Bought a nice bracelet for MiL - was £50 with postage. Thought it felt a bit cheaper than I was expecting when it arrived. Saw it in Covent Garden market for £24 two days later. Felt like a tit.

Oh people do fill their houses with 'me' personalised stuff Mrsdevere. A friend of DH's got married this year and their house is now FULL of this type of stuff. Framed drawings of their wedding venue, frames of their names in scrabble letters, wooden hearts with their initials etc etc you name it. They even have a framed picture of their names, important places to them and dates on the wall above their bog. Very odd.

Mine you they are very self-absorbed though.

A quick google and you can find a lot of 'handmade' jewellery on DXGate or Alibaba. Mass produced tat indeed.

I can never find what I want on it, it brings up results of thousands!! It drives me mental, I used to love it but give up now. Etsy is my new love

That's because NOTHS takes 25% commission on all sales, so if you buy in stock from other producers you have to take that into account when setting your prices. It works best if you are selling products you manufacture yourself.

They also have "competitions" throughout the year to be included in their various print catalogues, but if you make the cut you then have to pay hundreds of pounds to be listed and the commission goes up to 35%.

I feel that with the astonishing number ofproducts and sales they make, a commission more in the region of 12% - 15% would help to keep prices competitive.

Carpejugulum You are completely forbidden to include that sort of info when you send out the product, but I'm not sure how they'd police that, really, unless somebody complained!

As a seller, I wish they'd update their interface a bit. It hasn't changed in 6 years and the rest of the world has moved on a bit!

YANBU.

I bought some towels for my twin nephews a couple of years ago from NOTHS. Both from the same seller costing the same price, personalised with their names (both 5 letters long). They cost £25 each iirc.

When they arrived the towels were different sizes and different thicknesses. One still had the ikea tag on. The tag had been cut off the other. I was not impressed and contacted the seller. They'd apparently had problems with their usual supplier and were unable to fulfil my order to their usual high standards.

Why on earth they didn't think to mention this to me before proceeding to send me the products that they admitted weren't as good as they should have been, and charging me the full price, is beyond me.

I have never shopped there again - there may well be some very good stuff on there but I'm not keen to be ripped off again.