We just launched the swapit beta 6 on Google Play.
Download the latest swapit version from:
There are actually quite a number of changes the new swapit version comes with. We hope you will love them! Let me explain two key changes in detail.
1. Categories
You can now add a category to the item you are posting. This has been one of the most wanted features for swapit ever since we launched our private beta back in January. Based on our market research of trading activity in Facebook groups and the activity we see inside swapit, we have chosen to focus on two categories at first: “Baby” and “Gadgets”. If the item you are posting, does not fit into any of those two categories, you can choose “Everything else”.
We know that many of you are looking for a much broader spectrum of categories and we will bring that to you. We started with those two categories, because we believe they are the largest item groups that are being traded in Hong Kong. These two initial categories serve as an experimentation playground for us to determine many different approaches we are considering to use for categorizing content in swapit. More details about that will be posted later on this blog. This is how the category selection now looks like for the buyer (i.e. filter) and seller side of things:
2. Select “Potential Buyers” and “Unlikely Buyers” (seller only)
Beta 5 was the first beta, in which we officially encouraged our users to post and go through with real trades. All of a sudden, we discovered different use cases – especially from the seller’s point – that we did not take into account before.
For example, if one posts an item that is very popular (or very cheap, which makes it very popular very quickly), many interested buyers might actually show up. That means, as a seller, you might actually start to chat with each person. Our chat integration in beta 5 worked incredibly well, by the way. Now what came up was, several chats might stall because the interested buyer just stops messaging, or (s)he can’t find time to meet up or pick up, or (s)he is only interested in a lower price, but the seller is not. In many of those cases, such interested buyers become “not interested” anymore. In beta 5, the only way to find out which person is still interested and which was is not, was to go into each chat and check the last messages. Especially when you’re selling multiple items at the same time, having several interested parties at each item, this can get really quickly really hard to keep track of.
To make it easy for a seller to keep track of interested buyers, we now introduced two new statuses for a potential buyer:
“Potential Buyer” — the potential buyer of an item, i.e. the seller will sell to that person
“Unlikely” — it is unlikely to sell to this person, i.e. that buyer is not interested anymore
Please note, that this “marking” of buyers is for the seller only. It will not be published to buyer nor will it be shared online. It is a mere reference for the seller to make his or her life easier.
As usual, the user experience is very important to us. So we have built this capability into the item detail view as well as into the chat. That way the seller can easily take action when needed. This is how it looks like in beta 6:
There are actually over 50 changes in this latest beta 6 release. Many of which are not quite noticeable to the naked eye, but they were essential for swapit and its future-proof development.
The full “short-list” of changes looks like this:
What’s new in beta 6:
- Added categories “Baby”, “Gadgets” and “Everything else” (more to come)
- Select a person to sell to (only visible to seller)
- Mark a person as ‘not interested’ (only visible to seller)
- More refined notification settings
- Added list scrolling in stages (faster listing)
- Several bugs & crashes fixed
Note: there is a character limit in Google Play as to how much we can write there. So we had to keep it short and lump certain things together.
Swapit Blog 