Archive for November 6th, 2009:
Listia: What if Craigslist and Ebay had a baby together?
If Craigslist and Ebay had a bastard child, it would probably look something like Listia.com. The site allows you to auction off your old junk for “free” and then use the points others bid on your items to buy their “junk” in return. As one man’s junk is another man’s treasure, it’s easy to come out ahead in a transaction like this. I put “free” in quotes because you have to have points to bid on items, and the only way to get points is to give away your own stuff on the site or buy them. You also get a few (100) points when you sign up for an account and 500 more free points when you list you first item. This is more than enough points to grab something cool for free from the site, such as a DVD or video game.
To give you an idea of what points are worth, I recently auctioned off one of my Wii games (Bikini Zombie Slayers) for around 600 points and the DS game Ninja Town for 500 points. A $300 netbook with MacOS installed recently ended for almost 9,000 points.
Besides the stuff other users list, the site also holds their own “Rewards Auctions” where they offer things like TVs, blu-ray players, Nintendo Wii’s, random electronics, and other big ticket items. They offer several of these a week. Currently, I’m saving up my points to buy a big ticket item in a future auction, although I did use a couple hundred points to buy a brand new Rubik’s Cube Revolution Titanium Edition.
If you’re interested in the site, you can check it out here. It’s a very promising site, although currently subject to some user abuse because of their policy of giving free points as soon as you sign up.
