Power Sellers Unite

johnnycon · Joined: 13 Jan 2010 Posts: 2

A friend and I recently launched a new classified/marketplace called http://www.friendsell.com (about 1 month ago) Basically, I built this to solve my own needs as I was pretty fed up with both ebay and craigslist. It's starting to pick up some traction especially in the community groups (groups are basically private groups that can be setup to sell and buy to each other, where there is already trust established, workplaces, churches, extended families, specialty interest groups, local communities etc...).

We've got some really interesting features still being developed, which we'll deliver in increments on a weekly basis and based on feedback we receive from our users.

Check it out, let me know what you think. I really appreciate the feedback! We are always available to chat if anyone wants to do so (email, skype, google chat, whatever)

John

DaLizardsLair · Joined: 15 Feb 2009 Posts: 4780

Nice look to your site, but I didn't see where I select the geographic area (city / state) where I reside.

IMO, classifieds work best when they are for the local area, where buyer and seller can get together, to inspect what is being offered, and payment is in cash.

That's why Craigslist works so well. They use pretty much the same premise.

But once you start talking about shipping items across the country, then problems start arising. Buyers not getting their items, or getting something other than what they thought they were buying, etc.

Maybe you will find solutions to those problems, but I think that I will stick with Craigslist. It works well for my needs.

johnnycon · Joined: 13 Jan 2010 Posts: 2

Thank you for your feedback. I couldn't agree with you more. locality for general classifieds is essential. We actually have built in locality into the site (based on metro area as opposed to zipcode), but we're currently hiding this part for now. What we found was that it's a bit of a catch-22 when you get started If you don't have enough activity on the site (listings), then certain localities will be empty. This is actually what I tend to see with a lot of new sites out there and most classified sites, even the ones that have been around for a while. They try to cover all cities, but what happens is that nobody posts or browses because seeing a site with zero or one listing for a city conveys abandonment. This is why we've we've taken a different approach.

Friendsell actually supports some features that might not be very apparent in viewing the home page (we need to work on our messaging a bit). We support the idea of "friends" and "groups". Which basically means you can add people you know or trust as friends (or have had positive transactions with in the past). You can also join groups (we are working with a few external websites who have large communities of people interested in things where there is already some level of inherent trust). This allows us to start to grow via this model where locality is "less" of an issue. This is where we are picking up the most traction at the moment. Once we reach a point where enough users and listings for a certain locality are present, we will make locality visible. We'll probably start with "Chicago" and "San Francisco" since this is where we are located or have the majority of our users so far. Friendsell actually allows you to target your listings too. So you can say, I want to show this item only to friends and my "church group" or I want to show this item to everyone (friends, all my groups and the public website). We leave it completely up to the user to decide and control.

If anyone has a better ramp-up approach, I'd totally love to hear about it. We've thought long and hard about this chicken and egg problem and this is the best solution we've been able to come up with so far.

Thanks again for the feedback! John

tjdirect · Joined: 26 Feb 2010 Posts: 1

Hello,
I signed up here so that I could find out some stuff about friendsell.com. At first and even now a little I am thinking that friendsell is some kind of a joke or a place to harvest emails of people that are interested in selling stuff. I say this because I personally got attracted to friendsell because it was NOT locality specific. I have several items that I am trying to sell and I do not have the type of buyer I am looking for in my local area, therefore friendsell seemed like the perfect match. My problem is that their links do not work. I signed up, listed one item and then could not get back into the site. It keeps telling me (Woops, your username or password must be wrong). It is not. I kept trying and finally did get back in, however it took me close to 8hrs to list 4 items. Now I cannot get in again. I go to their help/support section but none of those links work either so I am getting the impression that the owners of this site are too busy or just not interested in developing it. I think it's pretty hard to get people to list stuff if they can't sign in, or once they do get their ad all ready and then push the submit button and it takes you to the sign in window (all the ad info now lost) and again you can't sign in.
How frustrating is that!