Why Don’t More Of Us Swap And Sell?

The limitations of the sharing economy

I’ve mentioned before that I’m a big fan of both clothing swaps and neighborhood listservs that allow facilitate the sharing of secondhand stuff among people who live near, yet might not know, each other. But though various websites have attempted to capitalize on this natural human impulse to re-circulate stuff rather than let it languish or throw it away, most have found it tough going.

The site Shareable offers up some explanations as to why:

while it’s a nice idea to share with neighbors, many people don’t know them or want to know them. Counter-intuitively, the most successful sharing marketplaces connect strangers. [emphasis added] Thirdly, getting critical mass in a two-sided marketplace on a range of items in a single neighborhood or city is incredibly tough. It’s much easier to build two-sided marketplaces in a single, high-value asset class on a national or international scale a la Airbnb. Lastly, it’s tough because it takes time. Craigslist took almost a decade before it took off internationally.

Besides, any new site that resembles Craigslist has to compete with Craigslist:

A newcomer competitor site won’t have a very big community to begin with, so few people will post things there because they know few people use it. And few people will look for things there because there isn’t much there. Why use the new site when there’s craigslist? Even if the new site is much flashier, all singing and all dancing, you’re going to use the site that has the biggest community.

And, at least according to its FAQ page, Craigslist still bestrides the digital world like a Colossus:

Here, by the way, is a short but entertaining interview from 2007 with Craigslist’s fabulously named CEO Jim Buckmaster, who shrugs off the suggestion that maybe he should be trying to make more money by saying that that idea “hasn’t been tempting.”

We enjoy working at Craigslist. Users like it, and we’re not sure what we would do with a big surplus of cash. We’d probably look at ways to give it away. …

If your users decided they liked another site better and trickled away, would that be O.K?

If we’re so inept that we couldn’t provide a value proposition that users found important, yeah, I’d probably encourage them to go away.

I’ve found myself using Craigslist less and less over the years. Listservs are more limited in what they can offer but they also seem a bit more trustworthy, perhaps because they’re hyper-local. Plus, when you don’t have a car, hyper-local also means you’re almost guaranteed to be able to pick up your stuff on foot.

Other sites I’ve admired for their aesthetics — Yerdle, KRRB — and then haven’t used. I don’t exactly need a set of two vintage glass seltzer bottles for $225, especially when the ad warns, “Siphons not in working order. Wire mesh has losses and breaks.”

There are plenty more options, too.

As someone put it recently to me, though, the trouble is “it seems like the only way that they work is if you are sharing something that has some social cachet, that helps people feel like they’re getting significantly more than they gave for. An equal sharing exchange just isn’t enough for people.” Is that true for you?

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