Found out about Swappingtons in a friend’s LiveJournal … it appears to be a website where you can list media items (books, CD’s, DVD’s, video games) to swap.
Sounds like a pretty good idea, but would like to get some feedback from actual users before I jump in.
Wow, this looks interesting. If anybody decides to sign up, you could put Gravity in the referal spot if you wanna be a pal. I’ve just put up a video game. I’ll let you know how (if) it goes.
The drawbacks I see is that “money”/swap points can only be used within the system. So, if you’re looking for some cash from cleaning up the attic, this is not the place.
The founder apparently wants to foster a sense of community. If this site, for whatever reason, takes off, that feeling will be lost.
eBay already provides the function and has a much bigger audience and repository.
I’ve unloaded several old DVD’s and games I was tired of via Swappingtons and got some new DVD’s and games. Worked out great for me, and I haven’t had anything go wrong yet.
Finally got enough points to get something. I rather like the system, actually. I mean, sure, I have to pay postage to mail out the game that somebody wanted, but with the points from that one rather mediocre PS2 game, I’m getting four PC games that I’ve wanted, provided that everything works out. I tried to sell that game twice on eBay. We’d discussed just tossing it into the package with another PS2 game that somebody actually bought. I’m glad that we didn’t.
While they do charge fees for the auction, that works out overall to anywhere between 2-10% depending on the final price. Given the possible price a bidding war might drive up, I think it’s worth it in the end.
As far as payments go, I pay and recieve paymemts predominantly via PayPal. And that’s instantaneous.
Of course, once eBay bought PayPal, they started charging the seller a fee and a percentage if the buyer used a credit card instead of a bank account to pay with. I think it’s $0.25 + 3%, but I’m not sure - my wife handles all of the eBay selling.