CityBazaar

This site is not an auction service

• The site has two main purposes at the moment.
  1. Create a shopping cart with items, descriptions, photos. This helps advertising your sale. You can tell the URL to your friends or post on mailing lists, and they can look at your stuff.
  2. Have a simple online shopping cart for your sale. This makes it easy for interested buyers to place an offer on your items. A few clicks and that's it, an offer is placed, and the Buyer and Seller both receive an email.
• The site is different from an auction, because there are absolutely no auction rules in it. The main reason to this is to make the system as simple as possible.

How can this site help you sell stuff?

You can upload photos.

If people like your photos, they will have greater desire to buy. If they don't like your photos they will not contact you and not waste your time.

Simple online shopping cart.

Interested buyers can place an offer on your items with a few clicks.

Summary page as email template.

The site can generate a simple summary of your items, which you can easily paste into a mailing list to advertise your sale.

Item states: available, sold, private

Buyers can place offers only on available items. Items that are sold are displayed for reference, but offers cannot be placed on them. Items that are private are completely hidden from the public.

The site is designed specifically for this purpose.

• You can put your items on picasa but will you have a shopping cart? NO.
• You can advertise your sale on mailing lists but will you be able to post photos too? Typically, NO. And, can you make changes to your list of items after you posted? NO.
• Can you put multiple items on Yahoo! Auction on a one-page sale? NO.

This site is "the" solution for selling stuff in a small local community.

The future of this site

It's going to evolve, of course. Features to look forward to:

• Plugins to automatically post on local community mailing lists.
• Improved item list editor (in-page editing).
• Received bids will appear on the item list page.
• Archive sale and clean workspace for a new sale.

We do not aspire to become another Ebay or Yahoo! Auction. The site is designed specifically for the different scenario of small local communities, with simplicity as a chief aim, and we are going to stay focused on that.

Finally, remember that CityBazaar is for cities. That is, rather than having one global CityBazaar site, in our model we aim to have multiple small CityBazaar sites. If you would like to have a CityBazaar site in your community, please get in touch with us.

How will potential buyers find your shopping cart on the internet?

They won't. Unless you tell them the URL to your shopping cart. That is, you have to advertise your shopping cart yourself, it is not automatically added to search engines, at least not yet. So where is this shopping cart URL? It is the "Your shopping cart" link on the front page. Tell this URL to your friends, post it on mailing lists or bulletin boards.

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