Swapit Update: Performance & Stability Improvements

We’ve just updated Swapit on iPhone and Android. It’s now ready for you to download.

Get Your Swapit Update: http://get.swapit.la/now

 

Recently, we’ve been working on several bigger changes on our Swapit marketplace platform. It is great that the potential Swapit has, shows in the fact that we are mentioned with other leading e-commerce startups in Hong Kong and that our communities on other social media like Facebook are growing rapidly. Motivated by such great feedback, we are working tirelessly to improve our app by publishing update after update, and making improvements every step of the time.

This current update comes mainly with cosmetic changes as well as performance and stability improvements. An increased number of Swapit users means also an increased challenge in making sure our product works on all supported devices (phones and tablets) out there. We are monitoring closely the performance of Swapit we take swift action should there be any issues on any devices out there.

Current Release Versions:

• Android: 1.15.4.1
• iOS: 1.6.6

Note: We will soon make this latest release on both platforms mandatory for everyone.

Sharing to Facebook Messenger (new on iOS)

On iPhones it is now possible to easily share to Facebook Messenger with just one click of a button. At each item listing you can now see a Facebook Messenger icon, which allows you to click & share that item in the easiest way possible.

 

REMINDER: How to Feature Your First Item for Free

It’s really simple to get your first item to be featured for free. Just follow these few steps:

1. Post an item for sale.
2. View the item (either right after posting, or right from your user profile).
3. Hit the “FEATURE” button at the bottom.
4. Open the “Coupon Code” bar.
5. Enter “FIRSTFEATURE” coupon code into the field and hit “APPLY”.
6. Click the “Feature Your Listing — FREE”.
7. Done! Congratulations! Your item is now featured!

Here are these steps in screen shots, so you know exactly what I am referring to:

It’s really that easy. Everyone can use the FIRSTFEATURE coupon code once to feature one of their items.

Stay tuned for future updates. At our blog, you’re absolutely at the right place. Feel free to sign up by email to stay on top of the game.

Have you tried Swapit yet? It’s free. You can get it here: http://get.swapit.la/now

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Swapit Update: How To Feature Your First Item for Free

We’ve just updated Swapit again and this time with a great new feature that allows you to enter a coupon code to feature your own stuff for free!

Get Your Swapit Update Today: http://get.swapit.la/now

 

At our last update we introduced a special “Featured” listing on Swapit. To get featured in that list, we charge a small fee of HK$8 / US$1. However, with the latest Swapit update that just went online on Google Play and the iTunes App Store, you can now also enter a coupon code to feature your listing for free. Everyone who wants to give it a try, can use the following coupon code:

Swapit Update: Feature Your Items

We’ve just updated Swapit again and this time with a great new feature that gives you the power to feature any of your items all by yourself!

Get Your Swapit Update Today: http://get.swapit.la/now

 

After our last update with the brand new home of Swapit, we’ve now added a feature many of you have been asking us about: You can now feature your own items inside Swapit.

Feature

Getting featured on Swapit is really easy. You can simply open any of the items you’ve posted and click the FEATURE button at the bottom of that screen. Follow the instructions and your item will be featured. At a rock bottom price of $1 per feature, your item will remain featured for a full week on the home screen of Swapit.

Here is how that looks like on the new Swapit home screen:

Large Profile Pictures

Again, due to our users’ great feedback, we’ve now made it possible to view the profile pictures of sellers in big format. That makes it easy for people who want to meet up, to know what the meeting partner looks like before they are at the spot.

Stay tuned for future updates. At our blog, you’re absolutely at the right place. Feel free to sign up by email to stay on top of the game.

Have you tried Swapit yet? It’s free. You can get it here: http://get.swapit.la/now

Swapit Update: A New Home

We’ve just updated Swapit again and this time with a big new revamp of Swapit’s home screen!

Get Your Swapit Update Today: http://get.swapit.la/now

Note: The crash that occurred on startup of Swapit on iOS in the last release has been resolved. Please get the latest version.

After several smaller changes in previous versions, Swapit’s latest update was a rather significant one. At least in terms of user interface and navigational entry points. We’ve been conducting extensive tests with our users, competition analysis and constantly collect feedback on the usage of Swapit. As a result, we believe this current change brings a lot of benefits to all users of Swapit.

New Home Screen

The new Swapit home screen has been carefully designed to offer easy to understand entry points to our Swapit marketplace. A few months back, we did introduce Quick Select to Swapit’s navigation. Now, we’ve basically blown up our Quick Select choices with beautiful pictures and a clear name, and we have extended them to cover more topics of interest.

As a result, it is now much easier to quickly jump right into a category that might of interest to the buyer who is browsing Swapit. It’s a quicker way to get to the product you’re really interested in.

Preventing Subconscious Compartmentalization

While that’s a mouth full, it clearly boils it down to the point. We’ve always been strong believers in the fact that people should be able to browse our catalog of 220,000+ listings (that grow by the minute!) as quickly and as easily as possible. That was the main reason, why right after starting the Swapit app, you previously saw a list of items posted nearby your current location. While the beauty of that was, Swapit’s content looked different for every user’s app launch. It was customized to that current location.

Compartmentalization. The problem with the above described situation, was that first-time users saw whatever items were being offered nearby right from the onset. If a nearby seller was specializing women’s fashion, then everyone in that vicinity would see women’s fashion when they first opened the app. The human’s nature of compartmentalizing first-time impressions kicked in, and for those folks Swapit was right away an app just for women’s fashion. If that user was a gadget fan, he would then most likely close the app and never open it again, because he is not interested in women’s fashion. Yet, Swapit has some really great gadgets listed on its marketplace.

To prevent such kind of compartmentalization that happens when first opening Swapit, we’ve now got our beautiful list Quick Select images that show right away the vast diversity of items and product categories that are available on Swapit.

Several other small improvements and bug fixes did also make their way into this release. It’s needless to say, that they improve stability and performance. We’ve also strengthened our fight against spam and scam attempts. That is running in full steam and we’ve already suspended several accounts, ensuring Swapit is a secure and trusted marketplace to conduct safe trade.

Stay tuned for future updates. At our blog, you’re absolutely at the right place. Feel free to sign up by email to stay on top of the game.

Have you tried Swapit yet? It’s free. You can get it here: http://get.swapit.la/now

Preventing Scams

With growing popularity of Swapit, more people are joining every day. Besides many great and enthusiastic folks, there will always be that small percentage of people who just come to your platform trying to scam other users. Every platform with a large enough user base has this issue. Swapit is no exception to this.

Over the past weeks we’ve seen an increase of users joining Swapit, who then approach as many sellers as possible for the sole purpose of driving the conversation with them out of Swapit into their personal email accounts. They do this not for the purpose of closing a sale, but much rather to scam the sellers and get access to their private information. That is something that’s annoying to all users who have been contact and it also damages Swapit as a trusted marketplace.

2 Columns

To solve this issue, we now do not allow to compose comments or chat messages that contain email addresses. Previously any sort of web link, email address, phone number may be clickable directly inside the app. We believe in convenience and making our user’s lives as easy as possible. However, in this particular case, allowing such email addresses to be sent and then being clickable, created an opportunity for scammers who started reaching out to Swapit users. To protect the Swapit user base we have now deactivated this functionality for email addresses.

While generally, we’d be fine with buyers and sellers choosing their preferred medium of communication, we do encourage all buyers and sellers on Swapit to keep their conversation exclusively on Swapit. That provides various advantages:

1. All conversation is in one place
2. A conversation about a particular item can be easily found
3. All conversation is traceable in case of any dispute

As a result, Swapit is now even more secure than it was ever before. It’s the trusted marketplace where sellers can easily sell their items to buyers nearby – may it be second hand or new items. Swapit brings them together.

Have you tried Swapit yet? It’s free: http://get.swapit.la/now

Swapit Update: Faster Post Creation, Faster Sale

We’ve just updated Swapit with several changes, performance improvements and a rather neat change that makes it more efficient and faster to post an item for sale or give it away.

Get Your Swapit Update Today: http://get.swapit.la/now

Besides all those small changes and something really big we are preparing to launch soon, we’ve just added a small change that makes everyone’s life easier when it is about selling.

When you now press the “+” button in the main Swapit screen, you can easily select either “Take a photo” or “Choose from gallery”.

Swapit already had one of the fastest ways to post an item for sale, but now we’ve increased that by such a simple change. I particularly like the small subtle animation you get when clicking the “+” button.

At the moment, only the Swapit Android is up-to-date on the store. Swapit for iOS will hopefully be approved soon.

Stay tuned for future updates. At our blog, you’re absolutely at the right place. Feel free to sign up by email to stay on top of the game.

Have you tried Swapit yet? It’s free. You can get it here: http://get.swapit.la/now

Swapit Update: Top 10 Seller Rankings

We’ve just updated Swapit with a lot of small changes, but one very exciting new feature:

Top 10 Seller Rankings

Get Your Swapit Update Today: http://get.swapit.la/now

Swapit Update: Single Column Browsing for Easier Discovery

We’ve just updated Swapit with many small changes, but one more significant one:

Single Column Browsing

Get Your Swapit Update Today: http://get.swapit.la/now

Swapit Update: Follow Sellers and Build Your Social Graph for E-Commerce

We’ve just updated Swapit with these key changes:

1. FOLLOW sellers for new items they post
2. User profile re-design
3. Minor bug fixes and performance improvements

Get Your Update Swapit Today: http://get.swapit.la/now

While the “follow” feature sounds like an easy and simple addition at Swapit — and it was technically easy and simple for us — the following of other Swapit users catapults the Swapit platform into the universe of social media or more so, social e-commerce.

CREATING A NEW DISCOVERY CHANNEL

When buyers start following sellers, all of a sudden, a new channel for product discovery is created. Sellers with more followers will have a higher chance of selling their products faster.

BUILDING A SOCIAL GRAPH FOR E-COMMERCE

Swapit’s great and engaging community can now connect directly with each other and follow each other on a 1:1 social connection. Through that, Swapit will be able to build up a social graph based on the user to user following that allows us to better serve both our sellers and buyers on the Swapit platform. In the future, we will be able to provide more targeted content to buyers compiled from their following profile, combined with the items they like and the categories they have been posted in. Traditional classified media are not able to do this. They will lose in relevance over time because they can not provide targeted content to their users. This simple “Follow” feature is one key part to provide very targeted content to our Swapit users. Stay tuned for more changes on that front.

MAKING IT DEAD SIMPLE

As always, we only add a new feature to Swapit if it is super easy to use. At Swapit, we aim for a “zero-learning-curve” product, which can be used out-of-the-box without the need for reading any user manual. Our latest “Follow” feature is no exception to that. In any user profile you can now easily hit the “Follow” button and you’ll be following that user from now until you unfollow that person. It’s really that simple.

LISTENING TO FEEDBACK

Besides the fact that we had this feature on our roadmap from the onset, the great feedback we collected from our loyal Swapit users via surveys and other channels, has led us to raise the priority for this feature. As a result, we’ve added this now and not at a later stage. Our roadmap for product improvements to make our marketplace even more efficient, is almost endless. We constantly receive feedback and suggestions from our user-base, which is extremely valuable to us and is always put into consideration when we make adjustments to our roadmap. Therefore, thanks a lot to everyone who has provided their feedback thus far. We trust you will keep it up and we love you for it!

Have you tried Swapit yet? Give it a try, it’s free: http://get.swapit.la/now

Swapit Update: Quick Select & Post Title/Description Translation

We’ve just updated Swapit with two key improvements:

1. Quick Select popular categories and filter settings
2. Translate Post Title and Description to and from 100 languages.

Get Your Update Swapit Today: http://get.swapit.la/now

We’re constantly improving Swapit and all changes Swapit introduces are based on our user feedback and demand.

This new update is already available on Google Play and will soon also be available on the Apple App Store.

HOW QUICK SELECT WORKS

We’ve added a small horizontal bar at the top of our list where you can now quickly select popular categories and filter settings. Here is how it looks like:

The top left image shows the standard way our Swapit product browse list looks like. After clicking one of the pre-defined “quick select” buttons, you can now quickly narrow down the content that’s shown to you. It’s easy, useful, and works like charm.

One of the reasons, why we introduced this feature, was that people didn’t realize – at a first glance – that there is such way to narrow down and filter the choice of products you see. From the onset, Swapit has some quite sophisticated filters, which allow you to only show what you’re interested in. However, many people don’t discover that at their first use of Swapit. As a result, they see a lot of items they might not be interested in right now, and as a result of that, they believe Swapit is not for them.

It’s that psychological compartmentalization, which then puts Swapit as an app and marketplace into that corner of the user’s brain where it might be useful, but is not at this moment in time. Swapit got used less because of that. In order to reduce this behavior, we’ve introduced our Quick Select bar. On purpose, we want Swapit to require as minimal or best no education on its usage at all. It just simply needs to work out-of-the-box and feel natural to our users.

Anyhow, just give it a try. We’re sure you like it.

HOW POST TRANSLATIONS WORK

Again, we’ve built this in the most easy way possible. If an item post is in a language you do not speak (check your profile settings), you will see a simple “See Translation” button in it. By clicking that button, the post’s title and description is being translated into the language your phone is set to.

The translation might take a second or two as we are using cognitive background processing to ensure a close-enough translation of such text.

Have you tried Swapit yet? Get it from: http://get.swapit.la/now