Flippid Matches Gear With Geeks, Free
- December 18th, 2006
- Read 1299 times
- 8 Comments
When it comes time to sell your crap stuff, many of us turn to eBay or Craigslist. In theory, they’re great places to unload last year’s iPods, Zunes, Treos, flashlight enabled slippers, whatevs. The problem is that eBay takes for-freakin’-ever, and Craigslist can be hard to search, and is chock full of stupid scams.
Flippid is a different take on online person-to-person sales, utilizing both the instant-gratification of Craigslist and the navigation and searching of eBay, and adding a little Web 2.0 tagging action to boot.
Sellers simply post an item they’re offering and how much they want for it. If a buyer likes the product and price, he/she can buy it right there. If not, the “BuyOff” option allows the buyer to indicate the price he/she is willing to pay for the product. If another seller has the item, and likes the offered price, then they’re automagically matched up. Sort of a reverse auction, similar to the way sites like Priceline work. If everything seems mutually satisfactory, then the transaction plays out like any other, and you’re gawd-awful Disko case is on its way. In addition, your BuyOff can be tracked via RSS, so you can see what others are paying for the item you want, and what offers come through. Very modern.
We like the idea of peer-to-peer marketing, and the idea of putting the pricing power in the hands of the buyers. Sadly, there’s not much of a selection just yet, but it’s still a new site; a new site with a great idea, so that’s bound to change. If things go well, it should be a great place to find the gadgets we talk about here by this time next year. It’s also free to try until the end of this year, so feel free to get your feet wet.
Flippid [Flippid.com (beta, of course)]
Jon (Who am I?)
1 year ago
Interesting… but will wait for the actual release before playing around with it… beta is just another word for “use at your own risk”. I wonder what EBay has in store when they get around to doing some much needed improvements to their site. It seems the more successful the company becomes, the longer it takes to do even fundamental improvements in their user interfaces.
Jon
Amit (Who am I?)
1 year ago
Well as a company grows, there is more red tape that gets involved. More people to answer to and more permissions to obtain before you can make any changes. This is why innovation is quite slow for sites like Ebay and I am surprised that Google brings out new products as quickly that it does. This is not necessarily a bad thing though, it allows for start ups to have a chance to grab a place in the market because they can make changes quickly, thus making it hard for monopolies to exist.
Amit
Craig Blanchette (Who am I?)
1 year ago
This sounds like a great service. I often feel like I have stuff to sell if I only could find the right buyer. A lot of time I just keep the stuff sitting in my office closet!!! I can’t wait to see this in action.
Craig
Andrew Kippen (Who am I?)
1 year ago
My collection of ‘89 Fleer baseball cards rejoices, but I’m pretty sure they’re still worthless.
Kevin Old (Who am I?)
1 year ago
I like the BuyOff feature. Seems like a neat enough concept. It’s like putting swap meet online!
Amit (Who am I?)
1 year ago
Kinda of like Jellyfish.com’s smackshopping (http://www.jellyfish.com) . The price keeps falling until the quantity of the product runs out, so you can buy it at the current price or wait till it gets lower but then you risk losing it.
Amit
bpm2000 (Who am I?)
1 year ago
Someone has to say it though: its hard to beat ebay for selling things at a much higher value than you should be getting for your item.
I suppose this might have its uses for more specialized things.
That Canadian (Who am I?)
1 year ago
Exactly…
craigslist is a scammers heaven, but as long as you sell smart it isn’t hard to get a good deal. When no one is looking at your listing it’s much harder to get rid of your stuff quickly and at a good price