Rate My Startup - Dawdle.com Is A "Moronically Easy" Online Marketplace For Gamers

My few notes:

1) I concur with the others, excellent design that is clean and intuitive to navigate.

2) Your seller rating stars in the left column on pages have a grey BG and for cleanliness these need to be on white. I understand you used the same pics from the standard ratings section which is on grey

3) There're two glitches with the top search bar where on some pages it is too long and overlaps the search button (FF3 on Mac). Also on FF3 on Mac if someone activates the thickbox, the grey overlay is under the search bar so it remains white and thus looks odd.

4) Kudos for not diving in head first to the gaming sphere. Most people would add forums and news sources and such and when you're starting out all that does is clutter the site and require more work on your part.

Overall I think it's a sound concept, and the site is very well done. The question becomes how the money is made? Is it per transaction? Ads?

As others said - a viable idea and it is already very well executed. One major functional issue I see is this:

# Having games and systems and accessories all mixed up is confusing. I would divorce these into separate parts of the website. At the very least I would ensure that games and systems/accessories won't show up on any list (i.e. For Sale) together, at least by default.

Few comments on the appearance and visual design:

# Logo needs to be redone. Right now it's completely unmemorable and bland looking. In fact replacing it with just a word "Dawdle" would improve the appearance of the page. Tag line needs to be removed from the logo too. I'd aim at something simple and similar to GameTap and Valve's Steam logos.

# Front page feels "busy". The "For Gamers, By Gamers" insert is a high-contrast item with too much text. It's largely useless, no one is going to read it. I'd go with a more saturated background color and remove the text.

# Font in the top menu looks funny. One pixel size too small.

# Putting "TM" after a StandingOffer is cheesy.

# Looking at this page - http://www.dawdle.com/product.php/resident-evil-outbreak-pla... - Seller rating in the top-left corner says "3 stars", the rating at the bottom of the page - "4.5 stars". And I am not clear who this seller is to begin with.

# Shaded buttons on the same page are nice. But they are inconsistent with the top menu - I'd style the menu the same way the buttons are.

Lastly, a feature suggestion if I may (I haven't registered an account, so perhaps you already have it). Consider the fact that most gamers are kids/teens and have very little money of their own. It would make sense to allow their parents to fill their dawdle accounts with "buying credits". This is not easy to implement by any means, but it may prove to be a great way to facilitate buying part of the business.

Again, great idea and implementation. Good luck !

1) This many sound stupid, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out what the logo was (is it a button?). That's probably just me though.

2) I agree with zhyder that it would be best if you don't show games that have no sellers. The whole offering a price to a seller was a little weird for me.

3) You have an impressive amount of games on the site, and the homepage banner (the guy holding the wiimotes) is very good. Anyone just dropping by gets the feeling that the site is very active, and that's great.

4) How does the 100% guarantee affect the company's bottom line? As a potential buyer I think "Great!" but as an entrepreneur I think "uh oh." How does that work out?

Again, excellent site. My brother's a huge gamer, and I'll tell him to check it out the next time he's looking to buy the next title.

1) I swear I clicked a couple times on less than $10, and was shown less than $25. Bug maybe?

2) If there are no items that match a filter, the filter shouldn't show up. If you have items in the $15-$50, and I click on Less than $10, I'm just going to be annoyed.

3) Unless I am missing something, there is no way to sort search results. I would potentially like to be able to sort based on release date (how much are new games?) and price (what's the coolest game I can afford?) and popularity (what's selling best right now, a great deal?)

4) Are you just adding the shipping cost into the seller's cost and then saying the shipping is free? The prices just seem a little weird. I guess seeing the total price is kind of cool.

5) http://www.dawdle.com/help/index.php/buy/ - Your buttons aren't right, and you don't use your Standing Offer terminology.

6) http://www.dawdle.com/help/index.php/sell-problems/ - I don't understand the refund policy. So someone is going to buy my game on the website via CC, and then if we work out an arrangement, I'm going to reimburse them via check off-site? I understand you are trying to limit refund charges, but this seems like one of the weakest portions of the selling process, imho.

7) http://www.dawdle.com/help/index.php/sell-problems/ - I completely don't understand the answer to the question about the damaged item. Am I missing something?

All around, this is looking pretty nice. At first I was a bit skeptical, thinking that this doesn't offer much more than Amazon Marketplace and/or Ebay, with much smaller audiences. However reading the responses here shows that the lower fees and simplicity of the process is a win for the seller, if not necessarily the buyer. You should really stress these advantages to first time and/or potential sellers to get them interested.

Any chance you will let users offer compound Standing Offers? For instance, I'll buy 10 copies of this item at a certain condition for X. Or I'd pay $Y (total) for games a, b, and c.

Keep up the good work. Will bookmark you.

1. Don't show an item in the results if there are no sellers. Or at least say "None available" on the results page.

2. For items that have multiple sellers, indicate the price range (rather than just the lowest price) as well as # of sellers. Similar to how the Amazon.com marketplace does it.

General Q: how will you compete against entrenched players like Amazon.com and Half.com? There's a couple of benefits on your about page (shipping included in price, ability to filter by seller rating + price), but just those probably won't be enough.

I don't like the middle panel either. The text doesn't say anything meaningful, and the buttons don't really add anything. I would change the buttons to something like "Games", "Consoles", and "Accessories".

Also, I tried to make a standing offer for a sega genesis system, but nothing happens when I press Yes to confirm. I'm using Iceweasel 3.0.1 which is essentially Firefox 3.

I clicked on Bargain Bin on the home page and couldn't find out how to restrict the listing to Xbox 360 games. The links I found removed the bargain bin restriction. When I clicked in Xbox 360, I immediately got a listing which started off with the systems, which I am definitely not interested in. A landing page with recent releases and recent top sellers would be more appropriate, especially if it made it easier to separate the systems and games.

I assume your business is a game-specific price comparison portal. It's not a bad idea, but you may need more content before you provide value over game store sites (ebworld.com) or game review sites (gamespot.com). Along those lines, why would I log in? There doesn't seem to be any community content that would require me to identify myself.

Other than that... It was fairly easy to figure out and use (until the problem above. ;-).

- First thing I noticed is when I clicked "View All" in FF3 in Windows, the menu was WAY over to the right (kinda broken). - Also your URLs are really ugly. This: https://www.dawdle.com/search.php/1/1/Video_Games=1/Systems=... just looks awful. Pretty URLs are important. - I'd guess you'll eventually run into legal issues with the "Buy It Now" links and using Nintendo's Seal of Quality as your "No Listing Fees!" image... - Oh and the server died once when I was browsing :(

bad fonts

the search button is slightly offline with the search box on the main page

"Buy & Sell Video Games, Systems, and Accessories with other Games online" tweak that?

Can we make the URLs prettier?

I just dont get the word "Moronically"

Why when clicking the blue triangle next to "Bargain Bin" or "Hot Deals!" (drop the ! btw) does it take you back to the homepage? I'm on the homepage.

Can we increase the font size of the "For Games by gamers" blue box?

Kudos for not using a statement like "For Gamers /Buy/ Gamers" or something!

Curious, is there any motivation for someone to sort by the 1-star rating?

I'll bet that's how it's going for quite a few of your potential customers.

Not a huge deal, but I had clicked "By Genre: Role-Playing" link on the home page and couldn't narrow down to platform.

Note that Buy It Now is an eBay trademark for "operating online marketplaces for sellers of goods and/or services" according to the US trademark office so I'd remove any and all references to that term.

Cool site though!

http://blog.dawdle.com

- good idea, the ebay for gamers. Marketing is going to be the challenge here, of course.