About Us
DOLL-WORLD is a new doll community and selling platform...
We have an ambitious plan. It’s perhaps an impossible dream to create a one-size-fits-everything platform. But our plan is to offer a carefully curated, easy to navigate website for doll enthusiasts and crafters. Why? To serve a variety of purposes and fulfill the unique needs of doll enthusiasts in a one-stop friendly atmosphere. We’ve already integrated some features and will add more as our membership grows.
For more information, scroll down and click on the tab links below.
Share this URL with your doll friends:
http://www.doll-world.com
All About DOLL-WORLD
What is DOLL-WORLD and who’s behind it?
We’re hobbyists, and DOLL-WORLD is an extension of that. Donna is an artist and writer who has been collecting dolls and action figures for several years and enjoys making doll dioramas and accessories, as well as customizing and photographing dolls and accessories. Marsha is a knitter who loves designing and making unique custom doll clothing and accessories, and has recently begun exploring the art of acrylic pour painting. We are not professionals nor doll dealers, but hobbyists reselling items we own or have created.
DOLL-WORLD is the replacement for a website we created several years ago to sell one-sixth-scale (12″) dolls, clothing, and accessories. Originally when we started that website, we had planned to expand it to incorporate doll community features that would allow doll enthusiasts to meet up and join in conversations, offer advice and tips about dolls and doll-collecting, and more. But life happens while we all make plans. So the original website never fully incorporated those features, and remained unfinished until it recently quit functioning altogether.
Currently DOLL-WORLD functions on a basic level, allowing us to sell one-sixth-scale doll-related items and provide a rudimentary library of doll information for doll enthusiasts to enjoy. Future plans include expanding the site functionality to provide an active community platform with a forum for discussion and private sell-buy-trade transactions. Initially, the forum was live and functional, but subsequent website updates created functionality conflicts that could not be resolved, so the forum was deactivated. Realistically, it didn’t matter at the time that the community feature was working, because we lacked a thriving membership of active participants. Without interested people participating, a forum is meaningless – just extra cumbersome coding that isn’t being utilized but takes up valuable memory space. Eventually we hope to reinstate the forum after our internet presence is much better established.
We invite you to join us in creating something awesome all doll enthusiasts can enjoy. Become a member and invite others to join. Add your knowledge and expertise to make this site something that can serve everyone who loves dolls of every kind. This website is just a start. With you help, we can all pitch in to build something no one has seen before but will be happy it exists. Share our dream with your friends and invite them to contact us.
Share this URL with your doll friends:
http://www.doll-world.com
What we sell at DOLL-WORLD
We’ve been collecting dolls and making accessories for quite a while. In an ongoing effort to control the number of items on-hand and share our finds with others, we’ve set up this website to find new homes for many items from our collection. We know other collectors have a desire to do the same thing, so we’re developing this website to help other doll enthusiasts find new treasures or find new homes for some of their beloved items. We have a large inventory of items of different types and brands on hand, and plan to expand our sales offerings to include:
DOLLS AND ACTION FIGURES:
- Fashion Dolls – Mattel, Integrity, MGA, and others, including obsolete brands/lines and hand-made or customized.
- Action Dolls and Figures – Obitsu, G.I. Joe, BBi, CG/Cy Girls/Cool Girl, and others, including obsolete brands/lines and hand-made or customized.
- Bulk Lots – multiple items grouped for bulk sale.
- Salvage/Parts – items sold for pieces or parts for repair or customizing needs (may be damaged as noted in item description).
ACCESSORIES AND RELATED LARGE ITEMS:
- Clothing and Related Accessories – clothes, shoes, purses, hats, armaments, custom attachments, and more, including customized or hand-made.
- Animals/Creatures – horses, dragons, dogs, cats, miscellaneous pets, and more, including customized or hand-made.
- Vehicles – cars, campers, carriages, and more, including customized or hand-made.
- Diorama Items – rooms and furnishings, including custom or factory-made.
- Bulk Lots – multiple items grouped for bulk sale.
- Salvage/Parts – items sold for pieces or parts for repair, customizing needs (may be damaged as noted in item description), or pieces to complete a set.
CONDITION DESCRIPTIONS:
- New/Packaged – new in package, (NRFB never removed from box, NIP new in package), includes items of any age from any year of manufacture, with various conditions of packaging as indicated in individual item description.
- New/Unpackaged – new item recently removed from package/box, never played with.
- Used/Pre-owned – out of original factory package and played with.
- OOAK/Custom – one-of-a-kind or customized/modified (rerooted, repainted, reconditioned, repaired, retooled, body-swapped, or otherwise modified).
- Excellent – in new original factory condition with no discernible flaws.
- Good – close to new original factory condition with very few discernible flaws.
- Fair – some minor visible flaws like spots or scratches, or minor defects that affect the functionality, but item is still usable.
- Poor – discernible damage or flaws that affect functionality or perceived value of item.
- Salvage/Parts – suitable for use in repair of other dolls or for customizing projects (may be damaged as noted in item description).
Share this URL with your doll friends:
http://www.doll-world.com
What to expect at DOLL-WORLD
A satisfying shopping experience. Our goal is to provide a pleasant shopping experience, from item selection to final delivery. To ensure that everything runs smoothly, we’ve endeavored to create a website that is informative and easy to navigate, with a streamlined checkout and payment process. We strive to answer questions, ship orders promptly after payment, and follow up on customer satisfaction after the sale. While it’s impossible to prevent the unexpected from happening, we will do our best to make things right in the event an order doesn’t go as planned. If you have suggestions on how we can improve, feel free to contact us. We appreciate your feedback and look forward to your repeat business as well as your recommendations to others.
Reasonable prices and maximum buying power. We are doll enthusiasts first and foremost, but in our shop we strive to offer a great selection of unique and reasonably priced new or pre-owned doll items. We strive to keep our prices reasonable with a variety of cost-saving measures so we can pass those savings on to you. Some of those measures include:
- Offering reasonable secondary market pricing. Nobody likes price-scalping, and that’s not what we do here. Instead we try to offer reasonable prices on all items we sell – in many cases, below expected market worth. To figure out pricing, we check the current resale market for older items similar to what we sell, while gauging expected demand. Then we compare the original price we paid for an item with consideration for condition, and try to find a happy midpoint so we’re not losing ridiculous amounts on our original purchases. Overall, the objective is to rehome items we have for sale, so prices may be below other current market pricing.
- Selling grouped item lots. Occasionally we offer specially selected grouped items for quick sale at reduced prices. These include sets and lots containing similar items bundled together.
- Offering discounts through sales and coupon specials. Oftentimes we offer discounts on order totals or shipping costs, or reduced sale prices on a variety of items to provide even more savings. Check our DISCOUNT PAGE to learn how to take advantage of these special deals.
- Avoiding commercial offsite sales fees. Occasionally we offer items on EBAY and crafting outlets like ETSY to attract new customers, but those sites charge additional sales and listing fees. Therefore we seldom sell on those sites and encourage everyone to purchase directly through our DOLL-WORLD website so we can keep our prices lower.
- Requesting single payment per purchase. We pay processing fees for each payment we accept at our website. To avoid excess processing fees being passed on to our customers, we recommend making one single payment for each shopping visit to our website. Eliminating extra processing fees allows us to keep our costs down so we can apply those savings in our standard pricing.
- Requiring minimum purchase of $25.00. No one wants to pay $9.00 in shipping on a $0.45 item. To ensure shipping costs are economical per item sold, and to equalize selling fees per item sold, we have a minimum purchase requirement of $25.00. This helps us keep our costs under control while offering you more purchasing power for your money. With each order containing at least $25.00 of merchandise per shipment, that $9.00 shipping fee works a lot harder for $25.00 than for $0.45 by providing more merchandise value per shipping charge.
- Observing responsible recycle-reuse-repurpose practices. We created this sales website to pass along useful and desirable doll items to others when those items no longer fit our needs. We practice repurposing with shipping materials as well, to help save money and the environment. Brand new shipping supplies may look nice, but they cost money and create additional waste that may or may not get properly recycled. Whenever safe and practical, we will reuse shipping materials to help the environment and to save on overhead costs so we can pass those savings on to you, as reflected in our pricing and shipping charges.
Stay informed. We’re continually updating our website and adding new offerings that may include:
- New store items
- Sales promotions and coupons
- New blog posts
- New DYI tutorials
- and more…
We encourage you to check back often. A better way to stay informed is to subscribe to our email notification newsletter. Our infrequent (no more than monthly) newsletters are short and sweet, and you can easily unsubscribe any time. CLICK HERE to subscribe to our newsletter or scroll down to bottom of page and use the newsletter subscription form.
Share this URL with your doll friends:
http://www.doll-world.com
A Wishlist for the Future
SOME THINGS JUST HAVE TO WAIT
Setting some things aside for now… After two years of working to compile and compose information that could be essential and useful to the average fashion doll enthusiast, the results have fallen woefully short of achieving the original vision for this website. It became obvious that to LAUNCH the website and have it go LIVE soon, certain content and functionality would have to be cut back or postponed so the basic website would be up and running near the anniversary date of starting this odyssey. The rest of things on the agenda to accomplish still remain on our website wishlist. Here are some key items on that wishlist:
THE WISHLIST WAITLIST
Creating a centralized platform to serve the doll community. The idea of building a doll community platform consisted of creating a virtual centralized place for doll enthusiasts to share information and doll treasures online. A place that was stable, well-known, well-maintained and curated, and easy to find and come back to.
Many internet resources and social media platforms already exist for doll enthusiasts to find doll items and information about dolls, but each platform is specifically tailored to offer only certain slices of content with levels and kinds of services that either have a lot of overlap or differ so greatly that they are like different species in the social media landscape. Some platforms are great for posting random pictures in a time stream, while other sites are better suited to archival curation of pictures with little or no communication. Blogs provide a platform for individual ideas and information, with only limited community interaction.
We wanted DOLL-WORLD to provide the best of what most of those platforms offer, but be geared strictly for the community service of doll enthusiasts and crafters. Essential features of an easy-navigating website with a generic but attractive design would include:
TOP OF WISHLIST FOR THE FUTURE
- Blog sharing. A shared blog format for doll enthusiasts who’d rather “guest blog” than try to maintain their own blog. A shared blog or guest blog solves many of the problems of coming up with new content on a regular basis without it becoming a life-sucking chore. Marketing – attracting new readers interested in a doll-community platform – would become a member networking function rather than remaining the burden of one person. Spreading out the writing workload among several people would have the added benefit of different styles of writing and more sources for ideas and content. Archival search capability would help ensure articles can be found later for repeat enjoyment or discovery by new members. Additional functionality would be needed to allow established members to post their own articles. The success of blog-sharing would depend on the availability and willingness of people to actually share the responsibility of writing and posting articles. So, for now, the blog on DOLL-WORLD remains a solitary responsibility relegated to wishlist status for future modification.
- Help and discussion messaging forum. A forum function with membership capability had been designed and implemented. However, it later fell into disrepair and ceased functioning properly due to website backend incompatibility. The forum was simply useless space without a community to use it. It remains in wishlist status until community membership grows to the point that a forum can self-maintain with active community participation. When/if that point is reached, we’ll tackle redesigning and reinstating the forum to ensure it’s functional, with a message help center monitored by knowledgeable doll enthusiasts. A moderated chat-messaging function would allow community members to interact and offer advice on specific topics related to dolls. To help maintain membership participation, moderators would likely need to sponsor monthly “challenges” and similar activities.
- Tutorials. We have already set up a RESOURCES page with different sections on doll maintenance/repair and other topics we felt would be of general interest. Adding how-to tutorials and DIY project tutorials with uploaded printouts and patterns would enhance the existing library of information. The added functionality of making the information searchable by keywords and indexed by topics would make existing and future articles more accessible and useful. Video capability would allow tutorials to be uploaded on other different platforms for additional exposure to attract more people to the community. The larger the community, the more opportunity everyone would have to create a sustainable “dollhouse clubhouse” for people to visit and interact with, share information, and enjoy camaraderie specific to doll enthusiasts.
- A curated gallery. Indexed gallery pages allowing members to upload their own doll photos would increase the community sharing aspect of the platform. The gallery could be organized by member and/or by topic. Adding attribute “tags” to photos would make galleries searchable. Membership participation could be increased with incentives like monthly “tag” challenges to produce and post specific doll topic pictures such as “Rainy Days”, “Redheads”, or “The Color Purple.”
- Expanding the community scope. Most doll collectors don’t focus on just one type or scale of doll, so community growth could be increased by expanding the site to include enthusiasts of additional doll types and scales, with content sections specific to each type. Knowledge from various collector experts would be essential to put this expansion into practice.
- A message-based sell-buy-trade forum. A platform that serves the doll community must also offer the means for private buy-sell-trade opportunities in a safe and trusted environment, with participants fully vetted, and activity moderated to ensure a fair and trustworthy marketplace.
- Consignment-vendor sales level. At some point we hope to offer consignment vendor sales opportunities for doll collectors wanting to regularly sell restockable or volume items, like custom-made clothing or furniture accessories. Seller items would be vetted for quality and shipped to the DOLL-WORLD site for photography, upload to the store, and shipment as orders are completed. Selling fees would be percentage-based as items sell, to cover payment and shipping costs, as well as product processing (photography, handling, storage, etc.)
- Individual vendor shop. For the doll enthusiast/crafter interested in regularly selling doll items on a sustainable level, or looking for an additional outlet for sales, we hope to offer personalized shops at DOLL-WORLD, where vetted sellers can set up their shop for free, list as many items as desired for free, and maintain their own inventory to ship items as sales occur. With no upfront cost except time and effort to apply for a shop, set it up on our platform, and photograph and list items for sale, this might be a better alternative than maintaining a separate shop with a dedicated website. As sales occur, shipping information will be sent to shop owners so they can ship their own products. Sales proceeds will be paid on a regular basis as sales occur, minus limited charges such as payment processing fees charged by the payment portal.
BUILD IT AND THEY WILL COME
The original plan for DOLL-WORLD was to include all the features listed above, as well as features already part of the website. However, most of the features listed above are still in wishlist status because most will not be viable without participation from a large enough membership base. Until we get that membership base, we’ll continue with a sales website with basic features. We know we can grow and expand with help from others in the doll community. We’ve got the basics in place, and we’re ready to go. All that’s left is for you to join in!
Share this URL with your doll friends:
http://www.doll-world.com
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Email newsletter. Subscribing to the DOLL-WORLD newsletter does not require a member account with DOLL-WORLD, nor does it create a member account. Submission of your email address to receive automated newsletter emails is all it takes to subscribe to our newsletter. Once you subscribe, you will automatically receive emails from DOLL-WORLD on an infrequent basis, usually monthly. These brief emails will notify you of updates to the DOLL-WORLD website and shop – new promotional sales, new products, new features added to the platform, noteworthy news of interest in the doll community, etc. If you have a DOLL-WORLD account and unsubscribe from the email newsletter without deleting you account, we will stop sending you newsletters via email and will no longer contact you, but will retain your information you shared with us when you created your account. You may unsubscribe/ resubscribe to our newsletter anytime without affecting other features of your DOLL-WORLD account. Use the subscription form below to subscribe to our newsletter now. If you decide to unsubscribe, click the “unsubscribe” link at the bottom of every newsletter, or go to our NEWSLETTER page on our website to subscribe/unsubscribe or change your newsletter subscription email address.
Thank you for visiting DOLL-WORLD - a place where dreams can be shared...
WISHES and DREAMS…
Everyone has them.
What are Yours?
Don’t let them fade, see them through. Do what you must to make them come true!
