Ideas

I've been a long-time champion of aggregator sites, and would love to see aggregator sites for everything.

Anything to save time - isn't that what computers and the Net are for?

While this seems like a good idea, the clothing vendors are *not going to go through the trouble of keeping their in-stock sizes updated unless you can promise them Tons and Tons of customers as a result, which you can't.

To LeFou:

If the information is pulled from the vendors' own sites, though, then the Aggregator would be no less accurate than the vendor's site. I agree that there will probably be some places where the vendors will not have things up-to-date, but that really is just part of e-commerce.

would clearly be useful for people like your wife. I wonder how difficult it would be to create hooks to all the vendors ecommerce sites though- seems like GAP and Banana Republic sites aren't going to have API's (I could be wrong). Screen-scraping routines are very brittle and would break often...

sean

How about applying the idea in the context of thrift stores? Many are in the business of gathering tons of wildly different items and many are posting them to ebay anyway.

What if you created an ebay input form that required a standard set of info that would allow you to categorize and help people understand how things will fit (like actual measurements, versus just size). There are also chain stores everywhere now that ebay stuff for you. If you hooked up with a major chain it could be a huge source of items.

If people don't categorize properly, they don't get to post.