I and others routinely advise people to search the database looking for comparable stones to one that someone is considering as part of the shopping process. The usual advice is to look for GIA & AGSL stones only and, depending on the cut, looking for a particular cut grade like GIA-excellent as a subset of that. I understand that the cut grade question requires more data from your dealers and that it may involve data that they don’t have but the lab is already there. Encouraging your dealers to provide more data seems helpful and would be self-rewarding because they stones with more data are likely to come up more often in user searches and, presumably, be more likely to sell. It may take little more on your part than to make it
possible to include cut information in order to get them to do it on a fair number of stones.
I would also recommend some kind of field saying how many results there were and how many were truncated so that the searcher can change their criteria to narrow it down a bit. When I search for 1.00-1.02 SI1/G, admittedly a category where you would expect a lot of stones, I see 10 pages of results varying in price by more than a factor of 3 and with no clue what may have been truncated from that but my guess is that it's at least half. It’s wickedly difficult for a consumer to narrow this down to the ONE stone they want to buy or even a few stones they want to consider. They’ve already made something of an arbitrary sort because most people who would be happy with a 1.02 would be equally happy with a 1.03 and created this boundary purely as a way of narrowing down the results. Some tools to help with would be helpful and a few would be easy. Allowing the searcher to choose which lab(s), which dealer(s), and what price ranges to consider seems like it would be helpful. The current ability to use depth and table for this purpose is, if anything, a bit deceptive because people think they are making an informed selection when they are effectively ruling out large blocks of stones more or less at random, rather like the elimination of the 1.03’s in the example above.
A tool that might be useful, or at least entertaining, would be a graph with the distribution of the stones from the query with #of stones on the y axis and price on the x axis and with a different colored line representing each lab that they've chosen to include. If people find the query produces too many results they can use this to narrow down the parameters.
Neil
Edited by denverappraiser, 22 June 2008 - 11:40 AM.
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