adrianmott.com

Back when I was a kid I absolutely loved trading sports cards – it was an obsession of mine.  Bartering after all is one of the original forms of acquiring goods and just feels good to do, know what I mean?  In college I spent some time buying cheap DVD’s from Ebay and Half.com – DVD’s I still own, but rarely (if ever) watch anymore.  These DVD’s sit on my shelf basically gathering dust, while I continually get new DVD’s in the mail from Netflix and enjoy them.  Sound familiar?

Enter Swaptree – a service that focuses on allowing users to trade things like books, DVD’s, CD’s and video games.  So if you’ve played out that new video game and want to try another, simply swap it with someone who’s looking for your game.

Sounds simple, I agree, and possibly something you can do with Craigslist, but that’s not all.  The coolest part of Swaptree is the instant gratification that happens when you enter in an item – Swaptree immediately turns around and tells you exactly what you can get for the item.

For example, I just signed up and entered in the copy of Fight Club on DVD that I’ll probably never watch again.  Immediately, the service entered in the item into my ‘have’ list and listed some 31,000 items that I can get simply by trading the DVD.  One click set up a trade and I’m on my way – pretty sweet.

There are a few things that left me wanting more about the site however – one thing I would love to see is the ability to trade multiple items for one of greater value.  For example, I have about 10 DVDs in the system and one of the first things that I put on my ‘want’ list was Lost Season 2 (we’ve become recently addicted you see) – but I can’t get the Lost set right now because I don’t have the right item to get it.  It would be awesome though if I could trade 5 of my DVD’s for the Lost season I’m looking for.

I also would love to see the company expand their scope of trade-able products to include electronic equipment such as phones, camera, mp3 players, etc…Sporting goods would also be an excellent thing to include.  I understand there are challenges with making this happen (you can really enter a UPC number for your tennis racket), but pictures could be included along with product specs they could scrape of third party sites perhaps.

The site also faces a challenge with revenue generation, relying on advertising dollars.  For now, it seems like they’re growing enough for the to sustain them, but as you know, it’s always a dicey proposition when this is how a company operates.

All in all though, I absolutely love the idea and think it will be a total success.  About to make my first swap – ‘Elf’ for ‘Matrix Reloaded’, think it’s a good deal?  I do – happy swapping.