Thursday, April 07, 2005

A New Way to Trade Things

I've got a whole crap-ton of old cd's, dvd's, and video games that I no longer need or want. I used to list them on ebay, but they don't really sell on there any more. Even when they did, ebay's fees were so high that it was somewhat pointless to sell stuff on there since I wasn't really getting any money for my stuff and the time I spent listing it just wasn't worth it.

I also used to use Half.com but then there was the whole fiasco over it closing down and ebay requiring all of Half's users to migrate over to ebay stores, so I tried that and figured it might work out ok. It didn't. To complicate matters, during the migration less than half of my items even transferred over to my ebay store. So I had half of my stuff still over at Half.com while the other half was in an ebay store. It should be pointed out that I had about 300 items listed between the two. Later, ebay announced they'd keep Half.com open. Great, so a good chunk of what I had previously listed on Half.com got moved over to ebay and now they only way to get it back onto Half.com was to enter it all back in (ebay offered no way for ebay store items to be migrated back into Half.com).

It was about that time that I just gave up selling small ticket items online completely. I still have a few things listed on Half.com, but not much. I really hate having all of these old cds and dvds and stuff just sitting around, but I really don't have any way to get rid of them other than tossing them out or giving them away... until I stumbled across BarterBee. It's an online trading site. You list stuff to trade with people and get points when other users request your stuff and you can use those points to request items from people. It's a neat concept.

I should note, however, that there isn't a gigantic amount of things listed on BarterBee so far, but there's a good amount of things there. I signed up and am going to be listing a ton of my stuff to see if I can offload it and then get a few other things that I actually want in return. Check it out and sign up. The more people using it, the more items to trade, which is always good. It's also a very novel idea and a good alternative to ebay, yahoo, or amazon auctions. It's free for thirty days too. After that there's a small monthly fee, obviously used to cover the hosting fees and such since the site doesn't actually get any revenue from it's users and there isn't any hosted advertising on their site. It's a nice, well-designed site that I would love to see take off.

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