FMF - Friends of Minerals Forum, discussion and message board

[cascaillou]

I'm not sure I quite understood the concept behind virtual shows (such as the Tucson Virtual, or Sainte-Marie virtual).

1) Is it in the form of an online directory of links to dealers websites? Meaning that it's essentially one page gathering links to various websites which one can visit successively.

2) Or is it rather an online market place, like Minfind used to be, which is to say one single website gathering the inventories from all the dealers? (thus making things much less laborious)

3) In any case, does it actually bring something more than just visiting dealers websites or online mineral market places (which buyers can already do any day of the year)?

[James Catmur]

I have seen a number of variations.

Some are the first type you mention, so just links to existing web pages. New material may be added for the 'show' but that was not clear to me.

There was one run on Facebook where you could see a mixture of videos and photos of material that was added live. I found that a bit hard to follow, but did spot something interesting. Do a search for 'Oxford Mineral Show Facebook' to get an idea of what they did.

Another was run by a single dealer and they released new material every few hours. At the end of the show, all the material was added to their website.

Some did, I think, add something new to you visiting websites (live release of 'new' specimens to the collecting community) and some did not.

What none of them did was to have material set aside for a particular client - I guess that happened off line.

[Bob Harman]

We all know that during this worldwide pandemic most in person events were canceled.
Of course this included virtually all mineral/fossil shows from the big international events to the small local shows.
Of course this affected dealers from the highest end to the mom and pop shops. The "virtual shows" were a creative way to continue mineral sales more on line, than had been done before. James C, above, has pointed out several dealership sales variations.
Instead of going to each dealer's website, several linked their websites with their specimens displayed for sale. Somewhat of a marketing gimmick.

For those collectors willing to buy on line, the bottom line for me is that if it helps mineral dealers thru these hard times, creative sales gimmickry is fine. Bob

[cascaillou]

Thanks for your explanations everyone.