Wigix: A Stock Market for Your Stuff

Stock and commodity markets work well because one share or contract is pretty indistinguishable from another. A continuous, bid/ask model will only work if they're careful to trade within certain bands of quality. Even then the 'lemons' problem applies. The rest is interesting, though.

I think it's an interesting idea only in that it seems to be a case of throwing a whole bunch of stuff at the wall and seeing if any of it sticks.

It allows you to do a whole bunch of things, none of which I want to do. You can sell/buy stuff, but as others have mentioned evaluating quality seems like a huge problem. You can make a list of all the stuff you own and find out what it's worth, but since that's an awful lot of effort and all my stuff is worth less than I paid for it, why would I want to? You can tell everybody about all the stuff you own, but that just seems kind sad. And you can ask people about the stuff they own, but there are plenty of online review systems which make getting the opinion of random people easier.

But of all these services, there might be something that's of interest to some subculture somewhere. Maybe obsessive stamp collectors, or obsessive [something] collectors will find one or more of these features to actually be useful, and that might be enough to build a business on.

This is an interesting follow-up to the "better Ebay" discussion (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=184988).

Not sure whether or not they'll get enough users, though.

This might be a relic of the industrial age. Every thing I see in manufacturing today seems to be drifting toward the "customized" product. The more options and customizations available to consumers, the less we'll all have "the same thing". Are black macbooks really worth more than the white ones? What if I get mine laser etched or painted red?

This depends on everybody having copies of a limited number of mass produced products. I think (and sincerely hope) we're headed for a much brighter future.

I think this is pretty awesome. One of the things I do most often on eBay is check completed sales for items I own, to see what the opportunity cost of me hanging on to my stuff is. I was thinking a few weeks ago about how I needed a site that had a list of all my possessions(of the non-sentimental variety) and gave me updated values of their worth. I considered building one myself for about 5 minutes because I knew my skillset wouldn't be a good fit for this type of project. But am very glad to see someone has taken up the challenge. I think for young people and others without a whole lot of income, a site like this is very useful. I think there is a huge market here. Wigix is definitely a site to watch.

I would be interested to see if they did any sort of market research into whether people are interested in such a service. It doesn't seem like it will be all that useful for one of a kind/rare items.

Wigix: please get rid of the stock photo on the front.

I'm a little confused as to how they handle different types of products under an SKU.

For example, an iPhone with a short, abused life is going to carry a different market price than a nearly new one.

Or have I misunderstood the site?

edit: It seems they have quality categories when adding a product but they still seem discrete.

they need a lot of users to get liquidity to "make real markets work" but if so, they will beat ebay based on its inherent usntructuredness. worth a try.

From the description, it looks a little too "be everything to everyone", but that may well be a mistaken impression.

It's definitely a great exercise to see how much you spend/lose on gadgets and stuff.