How many of you know somebody who has been disappointed or worse following an experience with a classified ad based transaction? Either the person who called on your item fails to show up or otherwise "flakes out," or the seller is vague about the features and functionality of the item.
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 stuff.
If we take a look at the source of many bad experiences, we see that it frequently comes down to trust, or, specifically, lack of it.
We don't know (and thus cannot really trust) the people we are interacting with in a traditional classified ad situation.
How do we circumvent this? The obvious way is to only sell to people you know.
This, however, is easier said than done.
Right now there are very few channels that provide effective ways to share your "for sale" items with friends and family.
Email is one option.
This is fairly easy to implement, but it can be challenging to put the email together with the pictures and information, ensuring that it goes out to the right people (friends? family? coworkers? everybody?).
Many people may just ignore it due to too many other emails to sift through.
One may consider posting their items for sale via their Facebook.
com status.
This provides a way to reach all the friends and family that belong to facebook, but can also be limited in effectiveness.
Many people have too many friends to keep track of all the items for sale, so your message may quickly get buried under other status updates, including your own! 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 appears to be growing in size.
You can post something for sale and limit the listing so that only friends and family can see the item, and you can limit your item searches to items sold by members of your network.
The items stay up indefinitely.
If this service grows in membership, it could be an effective tool for selling your items to friends and family first, allowing you to avoid the stresses and pitfalls of traditional online classified sites.
Overall, establishing trust improves the likelihood of a successful and satisfying transaction.
New tools allow people to more easily share the items they'd like to sell with people they already know and trust.
As these tools grow and improve over time, people will be better able to engage in transactions with those they trust.