The problem with peer-to-peer swapping sites
Like many people I know, I’ve got a bunch of junk that I don’t need. Stuff that doesn’t seem worth the hassle of putting on eBay or Craigslist piecemeal. All of the books I had put on Half.com didn’t sell — it turns out that other people didn’t want them either. These are books like “Business at the Speed of Thought” that I bought at a dollar store (sorry Bill). Regardless, I didn’t want this stuff and there was other stuff I did want. Enter Swaptree.
On Swaptree, you can list all of the junk you don’t want that you are willing to trade for junk that you (presumably) want. In fact, you can make a list of everything you want so that people with it can see that, and see what you have to trade in exchange for it. Sounds like a great idea! I signed up and put all of my junk on there.
Two days ago, I received my first offer: someone wanted to give me the Art of War in exchange for my DVD of Spaceballs. This was kind of exciting since I had almost ordered the Art of War from Amazon a few days before. After a few hours without replying, the offer was rescinded. Boo.
Then yesterday, I received my second offer: Art of War for Spaceballs. Again. Huh? This seemed unlikely to be random chance and more likely that something strange is going on. My guess is that Spaceballs is the item of highest value in my collection, and that the Art of War is the lowest value item in my collection. By doing an item-for-item trade, the other person is actually “earning” money.
It’s been hard for me to verify this. The Art of War is hundreds of years old. Some historic copies fetch quite a pretty penny while others are 1.99 on eBay. Same thing with Spaceballs: there are some zero bid items for .99 and some 5 bid items for 1.99. However, at the Caltrain station yesterday I had two coincidences related to the Art of War. First, I saw someone carrying it — and the book looked like it was only 100 pages or so, like one of those cheap college editions. Second, I downloaded the entire book in Kindle form for free, supporting my idea that it’s the lowest value item in my collection.
I don’t want to pick on Swaptree. I think it’s a cool site with a neat idea behind it. But what I’m wondering is, will any swapping site where you can trade non-equal value items eventually fall to this? If a site was able to introduce price groupings for items, that would help. You could either restrict trades to same price groupings, or at least warn the trader, “Hey! Your item is worth much more than what he’s offering you for it!” It might be harder than it sounds, and might not be the best solution, but I’d be willing to bet that the next iteration of peer to peer swapping sites will introduce a mechanism to help prevent this sort of thing.
