There's a buzz in the halls here this week: SwapItGreen has emerged from beta testing! We're a full-fledged website now and we've even graduated to the domain level. Our permanent home is www.SwapItGreen.com.
Many websites these days start as beta releases that are accessible to a group of users, if not the public at large, under a subdomain. They usually do not include the full range of features planned for the public launch. Marketers use the term early adopters, referring to people who enjoy trying new products before public release. We found a group of early adopters—our beta users—and invited them to test drive the site and let us know what they liked and what they weren't so crazy about. We learned a lot from our beta users, as real-life users tend to bring a perspective that is much different from the people who develop and live with the system from its conception.
So what did we learn? First, people who use the system are generally not retailers or businesses who have a warehouse with a stock of variously sized standard shipping boxes and a postal scale. Our users are not professional shippers who can estimate with accuracy the costs of shipping and packaging. As a typical swapper, you might take something from the back of your closet or off the bookshelf. You sit at your computer and begin listing your items on SwapItGreen, humming along through the description and category and condition, suddenly coming up short on the shipping and handling fees. How can you know how much to charge until you are at the post office, where the clerk weighs your item in its final packaging and then tells you how much it will cost to ship this item in this box to this destination zip code? These are all critical elements of the shipping cost equation.
We wrestled with this problem. We considered adding hooks to the U.S. Postal Service and the major carriers, enabling sellers to provide the height, width, depth, and weight of their packages and get back an estimate of the shipping cost. But this was a further problem for two reasons:
1. Most of us will not immediately know the dimensions and weight of the item in its shipping container.
2. What the shipping carriers return is merely an estimate, and we have found in our own testing that the estimate is often simply wrong.
In the end, what we really wanted was a simple, easy-to-use system, and we didn't want sellers to feel misled when they shipped their items and found that they had not charged enough for shipping.
So we tweaked our model: seller pays shipping. You invest a little when you sell an item, you recoup when you buy an item. Since everyone who joins this community intends not just to sell but also to buy (else what's the point of accumulating trading points?), we figure it all comes out in the wash.
We also changed the name for the unit of currency used on the site. Some users were confused by the term SwapItGreen dollars. We thought about it and agreed. So now you’ll see that items are sold for trading points; purchases are paid for with earned trading points.
We appreciate your valuable feedback throughout the beta phase. We're very excited to bring you this mature version of SwapItGreen, and we've got some great things planned for our all-out public launch, coming soon!