Ok, I am fine with the need of something better than ebay and craiglist but would someone explain me why does it have to be a mobile app? why? i think that this services need to reach the larger audice they can. Making it an app does not do that..it is limiting IMHO. Why I, android and PC owner, should be excluded? i understand you will (maybe?) make it available in future for other platform even porting it to android cuts out all those people who want to do things on the PC, which is the biggest part of the userbase I think.
the thing with marketplaces, is that the ui itself doesn't matter...what matters is having buyers.<p>sellers will post where the buyers are, and it doesn't matter if UI is crap. So craigslist wins on that by a huge margin. Add the fact that it's free, means that they have a pretty entrenched position.<p>To me, eBay and Craigslist have an insurmountable first mover advantage. They are already established in our culture as the place for auctions/classifieds, you can't undermine that with some flashy UI or a few extra features. And since you need people to sell/buy, you don't have the same viral effect that allowed Facebook to take out Myspace.<p>The only way I see going at them, is thru incredible service. Rent a huge warehouse. Hire a few drivers.<p>Charge a fee for someone to come to my house to collect all my spare stuff, take good professional photos. Then list them for sale. Charge a % for all items that sell. Let buyers pick up the stuff at the warehouse instead of having to deal with shady sellers. Offer to ship to buyers. Offer credit card processing etc. Send a check to the seller.<p>Sure it's a bit more effort than slapping together a website. You'll need to go state by state, renting warehouses and hiring a lot of people to do the legwork and will need to spend the money on marketing. So your profit margins will be closer to a real business than a website(franchising might work for something like this). But if you want to crack the Craigslist nut...you need to put in the extra effort...otherwise you are just one of the hundreds of people who think they are the ones to beat Craigslits
Got excited about this, grabbed it for iPhone.<p>Launched it, got error that it can't connect to server. Will probably be deleted now. You got the one chance to get my attention, and it got blown.<p>Edit: I tried reconnecting 4-5 times, still failed.<p>Edit2: Reading the TechCrunch article, they want to take 10% from the seller at some point in the future? For a craigslist style thing? How does this make sense?
This was submitted on another thread, but this one seems to be getting more traction, so I'm reposting my comment here to add to this discussion:<p>"The app is set up so you can easily cross-post your item on Craigslist, too."<p>I find that statement extremely interesting. The problem with apps like this is they're only as good the volume of people that use them. YardSale sounds to me like a more beautiful, mobile centered Craigslist. But YardSale is only as good as the number of people who have it installed an use it.<p>I'm in the process of moving and we're getting rid of a bunch of random furniture. Where did we post it?<p>Craigslist of course. Because when you need to find something, you go to Craigslist.<p>I don't envy YardSale. Craigslist has a not-so-pretty interface and it's not exactly the most intuitive.<p>But when it comes to selling/buying things, Craigslist simply works. Really well.
<a href="http://www.garagesellr.com/merchants/1" rel="nofollow">http://www.garagesellr.com/merchants/1</a> (very early stages); it is essentially craigslist but allows anyone to accept credit cards using stripe (I charge 1$ per transaction, and stripe charges their usual fees). Every time you list, you will have the option to tweet/FB it; You can only login with FB or twitter to buy, sellers login with stripe/fb/twitter. You "make an offer" and the seller decides whether they want to accept or not, based on your FB friends etc, to eliminate scamming. Every seller has their own "merchant account" through stripe.<p>I started building this, then stopped due to a lot of negative feed back, anyone think this is worth pursuing? Anyone have any feedback?
Seems kind of lame that an apparent competitor already owns yardsale.com.<p>You'd think that even if you couldn't get the domain you wanted, you'd try not to drive people to a competitor.
question for the founders I'm really curious about because you probably get asked it a lot (and it probably has a great answer): why would I use this over CL?
So...it's competing with Craigslist by building an OS-limited mobile app that posts items to Craigslist. And they want 10% of any sales.<p>Craiglist is accessible from any device, and it is free.<p>They really need to put more thought into their business model.