- aggregating listings from across other sources / syndicated auctions is a cool idea. You probably still want a category focus. In the 90s, at one point the other dozen auction sites shared/exchanged their listings into one combined, shared set of listings, and eBay still killed them. But if you can choose a category, you can beat eBay.
- bit coin or other payment community, cool direction
- mixing in results from eBay is a great idea. Airbnb used craigslist listings to gain critical mass. Again, should work best within something narrow not broad
Good luck, you're going in the right direction
On Classfy right now you can add your forum username and the url to your profile. There is no way to authenticate the user but if many members from a forum join and list with classfy. We will arrange something with the owner of the forum to authenticate the users.
I have added a reddit authentication system too.
Pretend that I'm arn, running MacRumors. Why should I switch to your service?
My own "Marketplace" forum is working well. People who sell a lot on there have a reputation for not ripping others off. For those that are new, it's either caveat emptor or going through PayPal when something bad happens.
There's also Heatware already. It allows you to leave feedback for forum transactions. Your account is linked to all your forum accounts, so if you're new to one forum, but established in another, you have references. Here's my feedback page, for example:
http://www.heatware.com/eval.php?show=to&id=69703&nu...
They have around 70K registered users right now. If you want to displace them, it's going to be difficult (especially because people have momentum on Heatware already: they don't want to lose all their feedback to move to another system).
Heatware is pretty good for feedback, if they facilitated transaction it would have been even better. We are not really trying facilitate feedback of every forum transaction only those that occur on Classfy. However we respect people's previous feedbacks and so You can add your heatware profile to your Classfy profile.
The problem is that launching any marketplace you are faced with the chicken and egg problem. To try and get passed this problem we have released this as more of an MVP. Maybe forum users wont embrace our site but another niche might. So we will pivot towards them. There are MANY niches that need their own marketplace but currently don't. Take a look at http://www.coalmineclassifieds.com/ there is also another one for Oil and Gas and agricultural. Innovation is not evenly spread out in many areas of tech the reason is developers innovate because they want to solve their own problems. How many Techies are familiar with enough with the coal industry in order to disrupt it with a marketplace only dedicated to coal. Which probably will be very lucrative
We don't want to do that even though it may look like it.
Through some research and suggestion of others. We found out that there are lots of transactions taking place on the internet on no particular platform. They are done on forums, Facebook, twitter(as Status update)..ect. The reason why they don't sell on eBay is because eBay takes too much time and has too much hassle and it's expensive. I used to be an online seller. But never on eBay. I used to flip websites and offer my services on various SEO forums. There are hundreds if not thousands of communities that sell their stuff in their own forum section. They do this because it's free, simple and quick. I agree that pulling people away from eBay only based on the simplicity and being free is going to be hard.
That's why we are open to pivoting to the particular category that might use our site the most. For example if the bitcoin community starts using Classfy more than others, we will become a bitcoin marketplace. If people start selling car parts on classfy then we will pivot to that category.
However I love the idea of becoming a front-end tool for eBay and mixing the results with listings on Classfy.