Where did Gear Swap go?

Why would someone lower their prices when they are selling at those prices? How would that generate more traffic on Gear Swap? An item is posted, someone wants to buy it at that price, and the transaction is completed. How does that vary with a lower price.

People do often times drop their prices when the market will not bear that price. But to just post a low price when it would have sold for me seems like a bad strategy to me.

"Why would someone lower their prices when they are selling at those prices?"

Agree. Also considering quite a few of the posts in this thread are complaints about stuff not sticking around long enough on the swap forum, one might argue even higher prices could be commanded.

"I can go to craigslist a get 50% off most items I see on the swaps here."

Maybe it's different where you live but I don't see the type of gear I want on Craigslist very often. And that's for Denver. Not too many cities that are more into the outdoors than Denver. I just checked the first page of Gear Swap vs Craigslist Denver. Only 2 items were available on Craigslist and the prices were cheaper on Gear Swap for those 2. And that's shipped. Driving to Denver is 90 minutes round trip and $10 for gas for me. But if you see gear like WM, Tarptent, Lighheart, Gossamer Gear, MLD, etc, on Craiglist for 50% of what it sells for here, buy it!

Hi Rusty,
Like Nathan above, I wonder how I can get that deal from eBay. Looks to me like selling an item for a fixed price means $0.50 insertion fee, plus 10% of the first $50 of final value, plus 8% of the remaining $25 (in the case of your Trail Gloves). That's $7.50 total, or 10%. Auction-style sales are flat 9%, no insertion fee for up to 50 items. Curious what you did differently.

Regardless, a subscription to BPL is not a commission on sales, or a fee to sell, it's a subscription to a magazine. That subscription happens to come with the benefit of placing free classified ads in the magazine. That benefit was once available to non-subscribers as well, but hasn't been for about six months.

Time to move on?

Edit: Clarified where Nathan's post was that I referenced, and removed phrase "Buy it now.'

Rusy, you did not just sell a $75 item on ebay and only get charged $.50.

I won't list every paypal and ebay you just incurred, but perhaps you should look into it before comparing the two sites.

I've sold records online for a decade on multiple auction sites, multiple forums and multiple merchant sites. A $25 buy-in to a site is a great way for a site to make money and deter scammers.

As someone who has seen a lot of online communities, I would say the marketplace for BPL is one of the best. High demand, high supply and trustworthy people.

Hi David,

My apologies. I have not sold many items on Ebay and haven't paid that much attn to fees. Obviously, I am no expert. I see now that the $.50 fee I referenced to earlier was actually an insertion fee like you said. So far though, I only see $2.48 taken out of the $75.