How many of you know someone who has felt disappointed or worse after an experience with a classifieds transaction? Either the caller for your item doesn’t show up or “falls apart,” or the seller is vague about the item’s features and functionality. There are many things that can go wrong in these transactions, but it seems to be a necessary evil if you want to get rid of your things.
If we take a look at the origin of many bad experiences, we see that it often comes down to trust or, specifically, lack of it. We don’t know (and therefore can’t really trust) the people we interact with in a traditional classifieds situation. How do we avoid this? The obvious way is to only sell to people you know. This, however, is easier said than done. At this time, there are very few channels that provide effective ways to share your “for sale” items with friends and family.
Email is an option. This is fairly easy to implement, but it can be challenging to put email together with images and information, making sure it reaches the right people (friends? Family? Co-workers? Everyone?). Many people may just ignore it due to having too many emails to browse.
One can consider posting their items for sale through their Facebook.com status. This provides a way to reach all the friends and family who belong to Facebook, but it can also have limited effectiveness. Many people have too many friends to keep track of all the items for sale, so your message can quickly get buried in other status updates, including yours!
Friendsell (www.friendsell.com) [http://www.friendsell.com] ) seeks to provide a forum for people to easily post items for their friends and family to see. This web company is still very small, but it seems to be growing in size. You can post something for sale and limit the list so that only friends and family can see the item, and you can limit item searches to items sold by members of your network. Items stay on top indefinitely. If this service grows in membership, it could be an effective tool to first sell your items to friends and family, allowing you to avoid the stress and pitfalls of traditional online classifieds sites.
In general, establishing trust improves the likelihood of a successful and successful transaction. New tools make it easier for people to share the items they would like to sell with people they already know and trust. As these tools grow and improve over time, people will be better able to transact with those they trust.
