

Wigix: A Stock Market for Your Stuff - dpapathanasiou
http://billburnham.blogs.com/burnhamsbeat/2008/04/wigix-an-idea-w.html

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byrneseyeview
Stock and commodity markets work well because one share or contract is pretty
indistinguishable from another. A continuous, bid/ask model will only work if
they're careful to trade within certain bands of quality. Even then the
'lemons' problem applies. The rest is interesting, though.

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run4yourlives
Bingo. That was the major problem I saw with this as well. Your iPod and my
iPod may have been bought on the same day and at the same location. But you
left your's on your desk for 3 years, and I took mine on my deployment to
Iraq. There are two very different values there.

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hugh
I think it's an interesting idea only in that it seems to be a case of
throwing a whole bunch of stuff at the wall and seeing if any of it sticks.

It allows you to do a whole bunch of things, none of which I want to do. You
can sell/buy stuff, but as others have mentioned evaluating quality seems like
a huge problem. You can make a list of all the stuff you own and find out what
it's worth, but since that's an awful lot of effort and all my stuff is worth
less than I paid for it, why would I want to? You can tell everybody about all
the stuff you own, but that just seems kind sad. And you can ask people about
the stuff they own, but there are plenty of online review systems which make
getting the opinion of random people easier.

But of all these services, there might be _something_ that's of interest to
some subculture somewhere. Maybe obsessive stamp collectors, or obsessive
[something] collectors will find one or more of these features to actually be
useful, and that might be enough to build a business on.

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dpapathanasiou
This is an interesting follow-up to the "better Ebay" discussion
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=184988>).

Not sure whether or not they'll get enough users, though.

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noonespecial
This might be a relic of the industrial age. Every thing I see in
manufacturing today seems to be drifting toward the "customized" product. The
more options and customizations available to consumers, the less we'll all
have "the same thing". Are black macbooks really worth more than the white
ones? What if I get mine laser etched or painted red?

This depends on everybody having copies of a limited number of mass produced
products. I think (and sincerely hope) we're headed for a much brighter
future.

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breck
I think this is pretty awesome. One of the things I do most often on eBay is
check completed sales for items I own, to see what the opportunity cost of me
hanging on to my stuff is. I was thinking a few weeks ago about how I needed a
site that had a list of all my possessions(of the non-sentimental variety) and
gave me updated values of their worth. I considered building one myself for
about 5 minutes because I knew my skillset wouldn't be a good fit for this
type of project. But am very glad to see someone has taken up the challenge. I
think for young people and others without a whole lot of income, a site like
this is very useful. I think there is a huge market here. Wigix is definitely
a site to watch.

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eru
On a somewhat related note: Have you ever thought about re-selling on ebay?

Say an item has a really shoddy presentation/page and it is obviously keeping
the bids down. You could buy it, make a better site and let the original
seller ship it to your buyer instead of you.

For example you could ask the original seller for more photographs of the
item.

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breck
Yeah I have an uncle that does that in his free time. I think he makes decent
money. It seems like a lot of work though. I've only done about 20 or so
transactions on eBay in the 10 years I've been a member. I'd say half of those
have been more trouble than it's worth.

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eru
My mother has sold tons of stuff on ebay since I introduced her to it a few
years ago.

She has a friend who does dissolving of households - that's where she gets
most of her stuff from. People buy the oddest things.

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Kaizyn
I would be interested to see if they did any sort of market research into
whether people are interested in such a service. It doesn't seem like it will
be all that useful for one of a kind/rare items.

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maxwell
You can probably find and get rid of one of a kind/rare items already. What's
harder, is dealing with used generic items. I have a bunch of electronics I
wouldn't mind selling, and a bunch I would like to have, but it would be more
hassle than its worse to go through eBay or craigslist. This thing looks well
implemented, with the focus on the type of item, rather than each discrete
item in particular (like existing listing sites). This is a good fit for mass
produced items, whose differences are basically limited to just condition.

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awt
Wigix: please get rid of the stock photo on the front.

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mynameishere
You mean this one:

[http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=woman+with+lapto...](http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=woman+with+laptop)

Seems like a pretty good idea, though.

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sadiq
I'm a little confused as to how they handle different types of products under
an SKU.

For example, an iPhone with a short, abused life is going to carry a different
market price than a nearly new one.

Or have I misunderstood the site?

edit: It seems they have quality categories when adding a product but they
still seem discrete.

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slvrspoon
they need a lot of users to get liquidity to "make real markets work" but if
so, they will beat ebay based on its inherent usntructuredness. worth a try.

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davidw
From the description, it looks a little too "be everything to everyone", but
that may well be a mistaken impression.

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dbreunig
It's definitely a great exercise to see how much you spend/lose on gadgets and
stuff.

