Finally, the battle continues! Part 2 of the battle: posting items to trade.
I’ve been meaning to write this piece for a month and a half, but with the Holidays and the year end, I haven’t had the time I’ve wanted to dedicate to this piece. This morning I spent 4 hours going over the five barter sites of the Part 1, Craigslist, BarterQuest, U-Exchange, Pay Me With a Chicken, and SwapTree.
The original experiment had to be modified for part 2. SwapTree only allows bartering of books, music, movies, and games, so the computer and recliner I am trading just don’t work there. Other than that one modification, the experiment continues.
Remember, the object of the game is to post two things I have, accept all reasonable offers, and consumate a trade. Hopefully one of these sites will provide that. Part 2 is all about posting an item to trade.
Craigslist
I started posting with Craigslist. I am a long time Craigslist user, so navigating through the four pages required to post an item was easy. If you have never used Craigslist, you have to login, click a couple of times, write whatever you want about the item including a description or what you want in return, click to add photos, and then authenticate your post with a Captcha box. That’s it, the listing is live. Slick, easy, not pretty, but loads quickly. No one ever accused Craigslist of being pretty.
Craigslist rating: A- : I can’t get over how ugly it is. I don’t like to look at Craigslist, and you had to move through four screens to post something.
Pay Me With A Chicken
To be very honest, I haven’t logged in to PMWAC since I set up the account back in November. I had forgotten my login credentials on every site, PMWAC not being an exception. I went through the process of trying to recover a password, but none of my secret questions would work. I tried different logins, different passwords, different security questions, and none of them worked. I ended up signing up for a new account instead.
The magic is that PMWAC made signing up a breeze. One page to sign up, no intrusive questions like before, and a simple email confirmation had me on my way to posting. Thanks to PMWAC for reading Part 1.
Unfortunately, posting an item to trade still has a glitch. Let me explain…
Clicking Post an Item to Barter takes you to a screen where you enter basic details of the item, including what you are looking for, and then upload a video and a photo. You aren’t REQUIRED to upload a video, but you can. I decided I would try. I brought up iMovie on my mac, put a picture of both the computer and the chair in to two different movies, and recorded basic voice over. I exported the video twice, once with the built in iMovie exporter to .m4v and the other through Quicktime to .mov, which is supposed to be supported by PMWAC.
Unfortunately, neither video would upload. I finally gave up trying to get the video working and posted my items with just a picture. PMWAC sends you an email confirmation, which is probably unnecessary, to confirm that you want to post what you just posted. You have to click a link to make your post live, which I did, but then my posted items never appeared in my account list. At this point, I honestly gave up. I don’t know if my items are live or not. I don’t think they are.
Pay Me with a Chicken: D : The only reason they didn’t get an F is because signing up is way easier. I couldn’t post a video, like the site says, and then my items didn’t automatically go live, and ultimately I still don’t know if they are live on the site or not.
U-Exchange
U-Exchange is one of the five that I was very skeptical about. I remember the sign up being very difficult and lengthy. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the process of posting something to trade was very easy. One page and it is ready. Basic information, very little of it required, so posting is very flexible. Places for four pictures. Very nice.
Additionally, finding what was available in my local area was very easy with regionally based searches.
U-Exchange: A : Easy, fast, non-intrusive. No problems. Immediate gratification. Easier even than Craigslist.
BarterQuest
The first thing that stuck out to me when attempting to log in and post an item to BarterQuest is that they must have a weird password requirement. I couldn’t remember mine, and I use less than a dozen passwords, and none of them worked. Luckily for them, the retrieve password section is very easy and fast, so I did set up a new password, which was inconvenient, but not a deal breaker.
Posting something you want to trade on BarterQuest is a lengthy process, though once you do it a couple of times it becomes more intuitive and fast. First, you select a category, then a subcategory, for what you are posting, then you finally settle on a specific subcategory and fill out the details. Depending on what you are offering, BarterQuest also suggests information. For the computer, it brought up make, model, processor, RAM, etc and made me choose which the computer has, which left me with very little to say about the computer itself. Then after your item is posted, you have to go through another process of adding things that you want in exchange for that item. There is no way to say, “Hey, make me an offer.” You must choose something in exchange. This significantly lengthened the time it took to get my items live. I set up very general categories of what I wanted, and left it at that. After confirming the item, you are taken to a Match page, where the software generates a list of things that may be a match for you based on what you posted that you want and what they asked for. Surprisingly, there were no available items in my local area, Utah. The closest item available is in Arizona. I didn’t spend much time on the list, because of the dearth of locally based items.
Barter Quest: C- : It took waaaaaaaaaaaay too long for me to post something to trade and was a little complicated. That process could be shortened by three pages pretty easily, which would be really nice.
SwapTree
SwapTree won the first round of the battle, and this round, they continued to provide a fantastic service, with only one little hitch. Posting something to SwapTree involved typing a number and clicking twice. That’s it. No providing information, no descriptions, nothing. I think their success in this is limiting what is traded to Books, Music, Movies, and Games. They have a catalog of UPC codes and ISBN #s for books, which is large but incomplete, which controls what you can trade or not. Simply enter the number, and your item pops up. Select the condition and click post and you are finished. Very quick, very easy, and very little time to do it. The downside is that the obscure items I wanted to trade (two of my own band’s CDs from the 1990′s) didn’t appear in their catalog, even though they both have UPC codes. Oh well…when I chose two more mainstream items (Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Night at the Museum DVD) the system worked perfectly.
SwapTree: A+ : Yes, SwapTree couldn’t trade my computer or chair, but for DVD swapping or book trading, the system is magical and quick. No time taken to make something happen. Enter a couple of numbers, click twice, and you are finished. It was my favorite of all the systems.
Part 3 in the upcoming weeks: trying to find someone that wants what I have. I am going to assume that no one is going to contact me from any of my listings and see if I can make a deal happen on my own. Watch for it.
