Show HN: Sell your stuff for more money with less hassle
bidkat.com
bidkat.com
"By selecting an Upgrade you agree to pay BunKat LLC the fees indicated for that service. Payments will be charged on a pre-pay basis at the time of purchase for an Upgrade and will cover the use of that service as indicated. Upgrade fees are not refundable."
Also, I'm confused -- where does the payment transaction happen? Does it happen inside Bidkat or is that part left up to the transacting parties?
Not sure if that's your vision or not, but I would totally use Bidkat for collectibles as well as local sales. Of course, in your value proposition you state your purpose is to make local sales a lot easier, so I guess that's not the current vision.
Also, make it clear when and how the payment part of the transaction happens -- that's not clear either.
The current system seems like it favors predatory buyers over fair ones. If the seller undervalues their item, trying to start at a fair price will get rejected. I don't know how you selected the [500 1500] envelope on price, but it seems pretty narrow. Couldn't you just warn the bidder that their bid is way above the seller's expectations (or current maximum offer) and then confirm they want to pay that much?
For instance, someone might do a real bid of $500 (let's call them bidder A), but if there's a fake bid of $2000, would the virtual cat try and make bidder A bid higher than $2000?
A suggestion is for a short text field for comments, to differentiate tie-breakers for the seller maybe?
It might just be me, but I didn't immediately grasp from the content on the landing page that I should be using other services like craigslist, et al. to share it. Even without sound, the video cleared that confusion up very quickly.
My immediate thought when filling out a new listing...
You should auto complete. For anything and everything (that you can.)
I type in Xbox.. a list drops down with xbox 360, complete with Photo, MSRP, estimated value (based on other data points ie craigslist or ebay) and a pre filled out description.
Well, sort of like what ebay does I guess. I hate filling out forms. Everyone else does too.
Clicking "Continue" confirms that craigslist is the exclusive licensee of this content, with the exclusive right to enforce copyrights against anyone copying, republishing, distributing or preparing derivative works without its consent.
Note that a legal argument could have been made that based on the new (but since abandoned) Craiglist TOS, by posting to Craiglist a user was revoking all prior grants of license to other sites, i.e., including any licenses granted to BidKat (by virtue of using BidKat). In such case, you would have been the one in CL's crosshairs, not the user.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/08/good-news-craigslist-d...
Allowing me to buy information on the auction is an interesting choice but I'm not convinced it will actually lead to better revenue for the seller.
I have no proof for what I'm about to say but here it is anyway.
The only information that bidders will practically care about is the current top bid. So the information that you are charging people for is the same thing that most auctions already display (that is, the current top bid). As the seller, I want people to see this top bid because it will raise my revenue. Charging people to see the top bid will result in less people seeing the top bid and lower revenue overall. It makes money for the site but less money for the seller. Then I might want to go to another site and make more money for my item.
You might want to look into using a 2nd price auction (like eBay) does. There's a nice book called Auction Theory by Vijay Krishna that might be of interest to you guys.
For the seller, showing the top bid means that people will bid no more than they have to. Witholding the top bid (except to those who are interested) means buyers offer what they think the item is worth - which could be a lot more than top bid + 1$.
It's definitely a different approach and may fail miserably. At which point we'll pivot and come up with a better one :)
That's not true. I'm not going to put down what I believe the item is worth because then you will charge me that amount. If I believe this item is worth 100 and you charge me 100, I get a final value of 0. What I actually do is bid under my value and its not exactly clear what I do.
If you sell the item to the guy who bids the highest but charge him the second highest bid (known as the 2nd price auction), then people are incentivized to bid what they think the item is worth.
I'm not claiming that you should necessarily do any particular auction format because the theoretical results are for scenarios that typically dont hold in practice. However, I do recommend reading a bit about auction theory to help guide your decisions.
Good luck!
Who is that? It looks to me like it's local-transaction buyers. This could definitely make craigslist selling a lot better.
It wasn't clear to me what you did -- obviously I read "auction" and I think eBay. But you're much different. The marketing copy didn't explain it well to me, but the video gave me that 'ah-hah! Nice!' moment.
Take that for what it's worth. GL!
What's the differentiator between BidKat and that option?
We don't do payment processing between parties and people don't pay us to create an auction. We also are not a competing listing service, we offer no ability to search our auctions - they have to be advertised separately. Hopefully these things differentiate us enough.
Just out of curiosity, have you tested this or is this just supposition? It was the first thought that came to mind when I read about bidkat (posting it on CL, that is). I would just wonder whether people viewing the posts on CL actually click to go to another site?
Did you have any control on how readily/quickly/aggressively you discount your price when creating a new auction listing?
Interesting regarding the counter prices, also nice touch that BidKat suggest you give a "donation" when you get a bid offer. I think if I had a real bid offer, I'd be inclined to donate $5 or so!