Why listing on Craigslist AND eBay should be SUPER easy…

So back in January I launched my pet project WipBox. Built originally to bust out items I wanted to sell on eBay before moving back to the Bay Area more quickly, it saw amazing response. With over 3,000 people signing up in the first month, I decided in February to build it out and make it soup-to-nuts. This week the new version launched to it’s (now) 6,000 users.

The world of online auctions and classifieds is still an open unorganized mess. eBay and Craigslist have done an solid job in providing venues to sell and buy items, but the core of ACTUALLY selling is still far from a user-efficient experience. Hence, this is what I set out to solve in the new version of WipBox.

While posting is straightforward on both sites, when you’re all ready to put your listing out there, getting to the point where you can actually post remains a very circuitous route. Listings, no matter where you want to post them, should be straightforward. There are certain things that sellers (especially casual sellers) should have at their fingertips to get their stuff sold in double quick fashion. Items sell better when buyers have high-quality info and images for the item they’re considering. But, right now, sellers either have to signup for massive sites like Andale, Vendio, Zoovy or try to cobble together their own solution to post to eBay or Craigslist. WipBox has been built to address this.

I wanted something that I could use to post something in under 2 minutes. That’s what we’ve achieved in WipBox. While it’s still a BETA, it does exactly what it was designed to (thanks to ex-Yahoo-er jenni4). It tells you the best place on eBay AND/OR Craigslist the item is selling, makes a beautiful and (more importantly) very informative listing, and auto-posts it directly to eBay AND/OR Craigslist (I’ll be doing a follow-up post on playing nicely with target sites, as it’s mission critical in solving technology-related user-experience challenges while not killing the target domain). Take a look at WipBox. The feedback over the last 2 days has been AWESOME. But I’d love to hear more.

Great weekend to all!

J.

Holy 45,000 pvs and 3,000 new users this week!

Yesterday and today have been INSANE on WipBox!!!  45,000+ page views and 3,000 new users in the last 2 days.

There will be a moderate update happening tomorrow night with some solid bugs/usability fixes.  Also there will be a tutorial on what  the graphs do and how to use them best. I’ve also wrangled  some resources to help get BIGGER releases done to and make it way more usable and friendly.

Please keep sending in bugs, though. I’ve been putting them into the bug tracker and have all of them slated to be addressed as soon as possible.

Also, please be patient.  I originally created this for myself to use in less than a month.  For me it works great.  But, it’s becoming VERY clear that, as more people have been signing up, I’m finding  things need to be made more usable.

J.

WipBox…WOW! 4 days LIVE -> 375 users, ~6000 PVs

What a great way to start things off!!! Had awesome feedback from people right out of the gates, was written up by Mashable and Emily Chang’s eHub, received excellent suggestions and had WAY more than expected signups.

Launching Wed, the last 4 days brought 5,987 page views, 1,968 visits and 375 registered users. Thanks to everyone for trying WipBox out!!! I’m planning some cool new additions, but definitely, let me know how I can make it better.

Better info for my eBay and Craigslist listings…

I decided at the beginning of December to play around with mashing something up. The result is WipBox (pronounced whip-box).

I was selling a couple things on eBay and got REALLY annoyed with how long it took me to get everything together, take the pics, find the right categories, find the right price and THEN research good product information for people to bid on my listings. If I simply put up the item with a decent pic and a half-assed description, I’d normally get the lower-end of my expectation range. But if I took 25-30 minutes extra and cut and pasted some detailed specs and reviews on it, I was at the high end of what I was hoping to get for it, and even in some cases I got WAY more than I expected.

That got me thinking. Well, Amazon has this great resource API that I could call to get better descriptions which I could then skin and include in my listings…and eBay has category and price info available from their API, and if I use that with a basic checklist, I could sell things more quickly and more profitably. Then I tried using it on a handful of listings and was stoked about the results. I was able to list thing 4-5x faster on either site. My auctions on eBay bumped up to an 86% success rate from the low 70s% and the closing price was about 10-20% higher that I’d expect. And my response rates on Craigslist more than doubled. A case in point was when I helped T sell her car. We couldn’t believe how many people called simply because they’d never seen such a nice listing on Craigslist. One guy even said he wouldn’t have considered it (being above 100k miles) if the listing didn’t look so good and have all of the info he needed in one spot. Kinda cool.

Well after 4 weeks of casual on-again off-again coding and stuff, I’d like to introduce the world to my little mashup, WipBox (http://www.wipbox.com). It’s in its second iteration, but I’d definitely appreciate any feedback you or your friends may have.

It was developed all on MAMP (Mac/Apache/MySQL/PHP) and deployed on WAMP (Windows-flavored). I’m using SOAP calls to the Amazon and eBay APIs; Mootools for the AJAX (which there is a ton of — but not in the hokey ways most people are using it right now) and user experience stuff; Maani charts for charting and TinyMCE for WYSIWYG editing the listings before you export.

Take a look, play with it (IT’S F.R.E.E…FREE), and let me know what you think.