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

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Swapit Introduces: Swapit Premium Day Pass, WhatsApp, Sorting (Distance vs. Date, Global vs. City)

We just updated Swapit with several new additions.

You can get the latest Swapit app from Google Play and the App Store or by simply clicking here: http://get.swapit.la/now

You told us you love Swapit Premium, but you’d like to pay for it on-the-go. We’ve been listening and now we have finally released our latest Swapit app update with the Swapit Premium Day Pass, which gets you access to the full range of Swapit Premium features for a full day for just $0.99 (HK$8).

We’ve added a lot more in this release as well. Let me highlight some points.

SWAPIT PREMIUM DAY PASS

Back in April this year, we launched Swapit Premium as a monthly subscription. While some people have picked this up and were happy they could access to such additional features, we knew that a monthly subscription was more attractive power traders. Yet, Swapit was build by individuals for individuals – as a true consumer-to-consumer marketplace.

To make sure, individuals can access Swapit Premium when they need to, we’re introducing the Day Pass now. It costs the lowest price we can charge through Google Play and the Apple App Store: $0.99 (HK$8). It’s a one-off payment. You won’t get charged again and you can use all Swapit Premium features for a full day starting from the time of purchase.

Of course, at any time, you can purchase a Day Pass again and take advantage of another full day of all Swapit Premium features.

WHATSAPP SHARING

With our last release we’ve introduced a much easier way to share Swapit items you like on your favorite social media. Besides supporting Facebook, Twitter, WeChat and LINE, we have now added WhatsApp to the list of 1-click shareables. It was a quick and easy change for us, but we feel that many of you will take advantage of it and enjoy telling your friends about your listings on Swapit.

SORTING THE SWAPIT ITEM LIST

You might not have noticed that, but we’ve been experimenting with different kinds of default sort settings in Swapit over the past couple of months. Initially, we’ve had our default sorting of the Swapit item list set to “Distance” – meaning, the items closest to you showed up at the top of the list. The further down you scrolled, the farther away such items were from your current location. Then we switched to the default sorting of “Date” – meaning, the items at the top of the list are the most recent ones and the further down you scroll, the older such items are.

Now there are limitations to such sorting settings. Swapit has been built as a globally applicable app, which connects buyers and sellers that are in very close proximity to each other – no matter where they are located at.

[start of tech talk] One of our main goals was to build a truly scalable backend. That means, we use the most modern technologies (NoSQL database, insanely scalable, easy to extend) in order to be able to have one single database for the whole world. Every Swapit item that is stored on the Swapit backend has at least one location reference to it, so we can match it with potential buyers nearby. [/end of tech talk]

So the very simple task of sorting your items by distance or by date created a bit of a challenge. If you see the closest item listings that are nearby your location first, it is very likely that those are actually relevant to you – in terms of language and currency. But if you sort by date – remember, we have one huge database for the whole world – you quickly realize that item postings in India, Philippines or the USA might show up at the top of your list. Those might be in a different language and usually have a different currency. Remember? Swapit supports 148 currencies. It was imperative to ensure that you only see items there, which make sense.

Solution. In the end, we came up with the solution of listing the whole world’s items when you sort them by Distance, but we only show you items within your city when you set the sorting to Date. That way, you will always see the most relevant items (in terms of language and currency) at the top of your list – no matter you’re sorting by Distance or Date. That’s why you now see clearly the distinction between “Distance Global” and “Date City”.

Currently, the default “sort by” setting is Distance Global, which makes the most sense for the on-boarding process of new users. Sometimes those users are located in cities where no items are available yet. So a sorting by Date City would return no items. That in turn, prompts the majority of such new users in new cities to deinstall the app – even though they might actually like the app itself. No content, no fun, right? So we would have created an artificially high churn rate ourselves. In order to prevent that, the default “sort by” setting is set to Distance Global. So you will always see the item that’s the closest to you – even if that item is in a different city, country or continent.

Should you change your “sort by” setting, Swapit now also remembers that setting and every time Swapit launches, it will use that same sorting again and again – until you change it.

A nice side-effect of all of that is: By sorting your list by Distance, you can browse all Swapit items that were listed in the whole world. The location of the item listing just gets farther and farther away, the further down you scroll. I sometimes try to challenge myself to reach the bottom of the list, which takes a lot of scrolling and could almost be considered a workout.

Besides all those changes above, we’ve done a lot of “under-the-hood” improvements and bug fixes to make the Swapit experience a lot more seamless.

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

Swapit Updated: Make an Offer and more…

We just updated Swapit with a bunch of great new features.

You can get the latest Swapit app from Google Play and the App Store or by simply clicking here: http://get.swapit.la/now

In a nutshell, these are the most important additions: Make an Offer, Duplicate Items, Easy Chat List Access, Easier Social Sharing. They’ve made it to both the iPhone and the Android app.

We’re always listening to all of your feedback. Not so long ago, we ran a survey with all of you and we’ve receive absolutely great results. This current update of Swapit comes with many of the features you were looking for. Let’s take a look at them in detail.

MAKE AN OFFER
The most wanted feature is here! With just one click you can now send an offer to the seller. It’s easy, it’s quick and it’s made for you.

To make an offer, just open any item and hit the “MAKE AN OFFER” button. Adjust the price and hit “SEND”. That’s it.

Give it a try at this great bag from Winsome Lee: Kate Spade Handbag for $680.

DUPLICATE ITEMS
For all of you who are selling similar items, you can now easily duplicate an existing item post and your new item post is completely pre-filled with the content of the item you’re duplicating your item from. Especially some of our power sellers were asking for this feature and we’re happy to make that available to you now.

To duplicate an item, just go to your item list / user profile, select the item you want to duplicate, hit the three dots at the top right corner and select “Duplicate”.

EASY CHAT LIST ACCESS
This is the most convenient way for sellers to get access to all the chats you have open with all potential buyers. It’s a great way to be efficient in your sales process, especially when you have many interested buyers.

EASY SOCIAL SHARING
Sharing is caring and we care a lot. So we made it dead simple to share your item post with your friends. The brand new sharing toolbar in each item makes it easy and accessible by just one click.

1-click supported are currently Facebook, Twitter, WeChat and LINE. Through the general “Share” button, it’s possible to share through any app that’s installed on your phone.

More social networks will be supported depending on demand. Please tell us which one you’d like us to add here.

 

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

Hong Kong’s Unfair Advantage: How Pokémon Go helps Swapit – The Hyperlocal Marketplace

I admit, I am hooked to Pokémon Go. It launched yesterday in Hong Kong and some in the Swapit team went along and downloaded it. Personally, I really wanted to know what all the hype is all about. After all, I tried Ingress (from the same developer) and wasn’t particularly impressed by it. Yes, it looked nice and had some Augmented Reality (AR) components, but it just felt way too complex.

Pokémon Go on the other hand feels simple enough, so I can actually handle it. It’s not a game you have to play constantly, but it is one that pulls you back in and you want to play it constantly. You quickly feel that urge that you have to check if there’s a Pokémon nearby that you don’t have yet. It pulls you back into the app and I have utmost admiration for that. Creating such kind of addiction level for a game, is really hard to achieve.

Hyperlocal Awareness

Like Ingress, Pokémon Go is based around our real world. Items, monsters, Pokéstops, gyms are all placed at real locations. So you have to physically go there to get access to them. Only nearby Pokémon can be caught. So in the end, digital information that rests in your mobile device is being combined with your current physical location.

Perhaps that’s what it takes? Perhaps it takes a game like Pokémon Go, so people realize how important location is in our life. Through this game, people are sensibilized to the whole topic of location and what’s happening all around you. By playing Pokémon Go people become more and more aware of their surrounding and the place they are actually located in. It’s also a great way to teach you spatial understanding, which is something many people lack in.

Swapit Hyperlocal

Swapit has been built with the very same core idea of Pokémon Go or Ingress: Your location is at the heart of what you can do. When you post something for sale on Swapit, people nearby your location will receive an alert; i.e. potential buyers nearby will receive an alert. We connect buyers and sellers who are nearby each other right now.

This allows a trade to happen really quickly. People nearby can seamlessly communicate with each other and meet up within minutes to close a deal. That’s all made possible because they are closeby each other and Swapit connects them based on their locations.

Property is big business in Hong Kong and everyone in the property business knows:

It’s all about location, location, location!

That’s exactly what Pokémon Go is all about and that’s also what Swapit is all about.

Hong Kong’s Unfair Advantage

Hong Kong has an unfair advantage over most parts of the world.

Hong Kong is one of the most densely populated cities in the world.

In the case of Pokémon Go, our players here have the advantage that they don’t have to leave their comfy office chair to catch new Pokémon, collect some new balls, fruits, accessories or go to the gym. I’m referring to the Pokémon Go gym here 🙂 All of these are nearby and because we have so many people in close proximity to each other, they put a Lure there and Pokémons just come by for us to throw some balls at them.

Here are some impressions of Pokémon addicts in Hong Kong:

You can read more about that on the Pokémon Blog: Pokemon GO arrives in Hong Kong, and it looks like everyone there is already playing it

What happens after the Pokémon Hype?

That’s a very good question. Firstly, I assume this game will take a lot of screen time away from other games in Hong Kong. In the long run, though, I believe it’s location aware aspects will educate people. It will make them more aware of the possibilities of using your location to your advantage. It will make them understand how powerful location and information combined in a smart way, can be.

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

 

Photos of Pokémon Go players in Hong Kong by Nash Jenkins.

Swapit Updated with Redesigned Inbox

We’ve just updated Swapit on Google Play with some very nice new features. The iPhone app will be updated by the end of this week.

GET THE SWAPIT UPDATE NOW:
http://get.swapit.la/now

Some of the main changes in our latest update are:

REDESIGNED INBOX Simplified and yet more powerful.
We’ve been collecting a lot of feedback and one topic that always came up was our inbox. While we wanted to provide as much information as possible to all of you, all that information was quite cluttered across many different tabs inside the inbox. It made total sense to us, but there are many users who were a bit confused by this. 

We don’t like to reinvent the wheel for things where really smart people have thought a lot about. So we’ve taken a look at a lot of “inboxes” out there to see which approach will be the best solution. Facebook’s “inbox” in terms of separating “Messages” and “Notifications” seemed to be an approach that made a lot of sense.

So we went forward and re-designed our own inbox accordingly into: Private Chats and Notifications. On the right you can see a screen shot of that and we believe it is now much more clear that chats inside Swapit are actually private. In matter of fact, there was some confusion about that out there as well. So by simply calling it “Private Chats” instead of just “Chats”, we believe it’s much straight forward to understand the meaning.

The content of each message in the list has also been slightly polished to make it look more like our notification tab.

ALL NOTIFICATIONS At a glance.
Swapit communicates with you a lot through notifications. They usually come into your Notification Hub on Android and your Notification Center on iPhone first, where you can take direct action. At the same time, we keep track of all notifications you’ve received in Swapit’s inbox and particularly in the “Notifications” tab there. 

Previously, we had several tabs for notifications: buy interests, comments, new items. That was confusing and cluttered up the whole area there. At the same time, we didn’t show other notifications like “likes” when someone likes an item you’re liking too.

That’s now all combined into one simple yet very powerful “Notifications” tab. It collects all push messages you receive and provides a one-stop-shop to come back to, should you want to check out some older notifications too.

Previously, some notifications could be swiped away in the Notifications Hub/Center and they were gone forever. There was no way to get back to them. That is in the past now, and you’ll find all your notifications in our “Notifications” tab.

BULLETINS Keep you up to date.
We’ve now also integrated a way to reach out to you when we have some important news about Swapit. Say for example, we have some super cool new feature we’d like you try or we are again giving something away for free, then we can now let you know directly.

iPhone APP SELL
While this is not a new feature per-se, we believe not enough people know about this. So please spread the word and tell your friends that Swapit is now available for their iPhone too. 

It’s as simple on iPhone as it is on Android to post your items for sale. Give it a try today.

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

iOS Users stay 4x longer in Swapit than Android Users

We recently updated Swapit for iOS with the feature to sell items through your iPhone. We’ve also updated our Android app too. In fact, we are constantly updating Swapit with workflow improvements, new features to make the live of our users better.

Now, we are also constantly looking at how our users use Swapit. A while ago I mentioned we are using Crashlytics for in-app analytics. After having the iPhone app on the App Store for a while and the Android app on Google Play for about a year, it is time to compare the two. Though, the number of Android users still exceeds by far the number of iPhone users, we have enough to do a meaningful comparison.

Retention Retention Retention

For everyone, it is hard to acquire users. We are no exception to that. However, it is also hard – if not even harder – to retain them. We believe by providing a great platform from the onset and adding more and more value (i.e. through our constant app updates), we can retain our loyal users.

One metric we like to look at, is Session Length. Session Length means, how long are people in our app and for how long are they using it at each session. I.e. how long is each session in minutes and seconds. That’s rather easy to track, but at the time it’s an important indicator – especially for marketplace apps, like Swapit. If we have enough marketplace liquidity and the content in our marketplace (i.e. the items posted) are of interest to our users, then we can achieve a high session length. Interestingly, Android and iPhone users have a rather different usage pattern.

iPhone users stay 4x longer in Swapit than Android users.

To put that into numbers, yesterday on July 7th, 2016, the Median Session Lengths were:

• Android: 29 seconds
• iOS: 1 minute 54 seconds

Even when we’re looking at the whole period of the last 30 days, we can see that those numbers are pretty stable across each platform:

Android Session Length:

iOS Session Length:

We can even see a little uplift on Android over the past two weeks. I believe our core fan base on iOS are the first ones to use our iPhone app right away. I am talking about the great folks who signed up for the iOS beta even before it launched. Those are our most loyal users and they have much stronger relationship with Swapit, which in turn results in longer usage time. At the same time, on iOS we have a lot more of those in terms of overall percentage compared to Android. So therefore, I am assuming that has partly an effect on the higher session length. However, a 4x higher session length is a rather significant number.

Global Comparison

Besides Crashlytics, we also use Flurry for in-app analytics. In there, we can also compare Swapit to the industry’s benchmark. With 30 seconds of median session length for “Shopping” apps worldwide, Swapit hits exactly the benchmark on Android. On iOS however, Swapit seems to beat the benchmark significantly.

Nature of Swapit Sessions

If you look at traditional shopping apps like eBay, Amazon, Lazada, etc. you will notice that they’re structured differently. They are B2C apps where you go into the app, search what you want, if you find it, you add it to your shopping cart, go to check out, enter your shipping address, check the price and shipping costs again, enter your credit card number and finally confirm the order.

On Swapit, though, the whole experience is different and much more engaging. Let’s say you find this beautiful Armlet and want to buy it from Julia, you’d hit “Chat to buy” and you’re ready to chat with her. You send a message and perhaps leave Swapit. Your session has ended. You leave the app and crush some candy. 20 seconds later Julia replies (she is usually super fast, I can definitely recommend her!), you receive a notification in your Notification Hub (Android) / Notification Center (iOS) and you go back into the app to confirm you’ll meet up with Julia and close the deal.  Thus, you just had a quick short session to send your message. So actually, some of Swapit’s sessions are much shorter due to the nature of the app with built-in chat. That kind of user behavior is not expected with the eBay, Amazon, Lazada kind of apps. Therefore, I am actually surprised we can even hit the shopping industry benchmark on Android.

The Future of Swapit Retention

Is bright 🙂

In fact, we are right working on putting more features in place that allows us to even increase our retention metrics and add more value to our users. There are of course, many other metrics we are looking at and they all have their individual purpose and meaning. It would take a little while to list them all here, but I am sure, I will share some more retention stats in future — especially with all great secret sauce we are currently brewing at the Swapit HQ.

Stay tuned for the next Swapit update. It might actually surprise you!

Have you tried Swapit yet? You can download it at: http://get.swapit.la/now

Swapit Update: Sell with your iPhone (second hand and new)

After launching our very first version of Swapit on the Apple App Store a while ago, and numerous updates and feature launches in between, today we launched the most wanted Swapit feature on iPhone: You can now Sell your items whether they’re new or pre-loved, you decide.

GET THE SWAPIT UPDATE NOW:
http://get.swapit.la/now

We’ve been working hard to get this feature out as quickly as possible. Sometimes it just takes a little longer than expected. In this particular release it’s not just about allowing people to post items for sale. You also need to be able to edit an item, take it offline, mark it as sold, manage your buyers and so on. There are all these little bits and pieces that take user experience to the next level and we are meticulously working on making them available to you in just the best way we can imagine.

In fact, this update comes with over 30 changes. Here is a quick list of some of the most important changes:

• Added SELL and GIVE AWAY of items (incl. edit, mark sold, active/inactive)
• Added push notification handling for
  • incoming interested buyers of your items
  • reminder for posted items you sell or give away
  • new likes on items
  • new comments on items
• Added “Notifications” section to the Inbox
• Resolved an issue with “Open Chat” button in item details

Furthermore, we’ve put in some important performance enhancements and resolved several other minor bugs and issues.

IMPORTANT NOTICE to iPhone Users: Do Not Kill!

Swapit uses push notifications to deliver chat messages and notifications to your device. If you force-close Swapit you will not receive any such notifications until you restart Swapit or your device. We recommend not to force-close Swapit.

84% of iPhone users we asked, are force-closing their apps. That’s a surprise to me — especially as it does NOT save any battery, like it used to many years ago. So if you’re one of those 84%, you’re not making a difference in terms of battery savings by force-closing your apps, but some of those apps might actually stop receiving push notifications then. That’s also the case for Swapit. It’s nothing we can do about, it’s a special case defined by iOS and we have to abide by that. In short, force-closing apps just makes your phone’s performance worse rather than better – generally speaking.

Read more about this topic at: Apple’s software SVP says quitting multitasking apps not necessary, won’t offer improved battery life

 

ANDROID USERS

Your app has been updated too, earlier this week. You can head directly to Google Play and get the latest update too. Though, our changes weren’t as significant as on the iPhone, we’re always looking out for you and you got quite some nifty little tweaks and enhancements under-the-hood with the latest update.

Get the latest Swapit today from: http://get.swapit.la/now

 

iPhone Users: Do you kill apps?

Hey iPhone users, we have a very simple and quick question:

 

Why we ask

We are currently working on iPhone app and we’ve noticed some issues regarding to PUSH notifications that are sent to apps which have been killed by the user manually. Therefore, we’d like to find out how many of you are actually killing your apps manually. Your feedback will have direct impact on how we integrate our PUSH notification mechanism in Swapit on the iPhone and iPad.

 

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

Swapit iOS App Launched on the Apple App Store

Hello iPhone Users!

We’ve just launched our first public version of Swapit on iOS. You can go directly to the App Store or download it from there.

Swapit Download: http://get.swapit.la

It is currently possible to browse the whole Swapit catalog of items, interact with sellers and actually buy items from sellers. It’s not possible to post items yourself yet, but we will be adding that capability soon. Stay tuned!

As an avid reader of our blog, you’ve probably been aware of our Swapit iOS beta, which we’ve been running for a while. We believe in building native apps with a native look and feel for users. In very simple terms: iPhone users who open Swapit on their iPhone for the first time, need to feel right at home. Without any need for a tutorial or instructions, they need to be able to navigate Swapit in the way they are used to navigate other apps. The same counts for Android users who also need to feel right at home, when they’re launching Swapit. Therefore, our iOS app and our Android app look a bit different in terms of user interface. We’ve been discussing a lot about that internally (read To Tab A Bar Or Not To Tab A Bar – on iOS for more).

We’ve also had to overcome many requirements imposed by Apple during the approval process of Swapit. Check out Getting Swapit approved on the Apple App Store is not that easy, for example. While that was only a first taste of their feedback, we’ve had many more conversations with the Apple Review team, but in the end we managed to launch Swapit on the App Store. Here is how it looks like:

So again, if you’re an iPhone user, feel free to download Swapit today: http://get.swapit.la

Sprinting to Swapit for iPhone and iPad

As you might remember, we’ve started our race for launching on iOS in the middle of February by hiring Vito for that very task. It took us a couple of weeks to get up to speed and build the core foundation of Swapit on the iOS platform.

As you also might remember from my blog post over a year ago about Choosing a Platform for Swapit,  we’ve been building our backend infrastructure on top of the Google Cloud Platform. The great thing about that is, we are building Swapit for massive scale from the ground-up. Our current growth rate of 100% month-over-month over the past 2 quarters, we have so far seen zero impact on the performance of our backend platform. At the same time, out Total Cost of Ownership remain very low as well. So that was an outstanding choice of platform.

Going, Running, Sprinting to iOS

Now, one of Swapit’s major road blocks to world domination is our missing presence on the iPhone. It’s not the only road block, but it’s a major one. When we raised our funding in December and again raised in February, one of the milestones we have attached to that funding was to bring Swapit to the iPhone and iPad as quickly as possible.

Just an hour ago, I submitted the Swapit beta 1.2 for iOS to Apple’s TestFlight. That is actually our 3rd beta, which we are testing with a very small group of testers right now. With each beta, we are increasing the number of beta testers for Swapit. In fact, we are building sprints every week that are being released to our beta testers. We a somewhat much leaner version of how sprints are defined in Scrum. Our goal is, to ship a new beta release each week, which we have been doing for the past 3 weeks already.

It is very challenging for developers to be able to deliver a working product release every week. Our team is doing their best to hold the schedule. It’s hard work, but it is definitely worth it! Having a working release of the whole app at pretty much any time during the development process, offers so many upsides: launching every week keeps our beta testers happy, they know we’re progressing and moving fast forward. At any time, we can fix a serious issue might arise in a release, which was launched a couple of days ago. So in the worst case scenario, users need to wait only a very short while to get their app fixed. At the same time, these rapid release cycles force us internally, to define small enough feature tasks that are doable within a day or two or at most a week.

Sprinting Around Corners and Cutting Short to Make the Goal

At the same time, we need to always keep our weekly release goal in mind. Even though, we might define small enough features and tasks to be completed within a week, sometimes some tasks and features suddenly turn up to be much more complex than anticipated. Therefore, we adjust the set of features and tasks for the next release in a very flexible way.

THE #1 GOAL IS TO SHIP!

There can only be one most important goal for any software / product development or basically any business related team, and that is to bloody ship your product. If you have the greatest product and never ship, who cares what it is? No one will ever use it, never ever will you be able to build a business out of that product. Almost everyone can build a product, some people might be able to finally ship and even fewer might be able to build a profitable business out of that.

We at Swapit believe, with a lot of passion and a lot more of hard work, we will be able to see it through and keep growing Swapit to a revenue generating business with very attractive profit margins.

At The Swapit Office: Get A Fresh Free Coffee And Remember What Is Really Important!
The Sign Reads: “TO SHIP is the most important feature!”

Swapit on iOS so far

Our Swapit beta 1.2 release is the most feature rich release we’ve launched so far. It is now already possible to view all items nearby, view item details (incl. pictures in gallery, price, category, condition, viewing statistics, locations, title, description, likes, comments), share items, report items, search items, show featured and highlighted items. All items in the list also sport all the information you need: image, price, distance, name, seller’s photo, likes and category.

Next week’s release will definitely sport some more features in Swapit on iOS. We’re constantly increasing the number of our beta testers for iOS. For those, who have left their contact details and haven’t received a download link yet: We will get to you very soon. We’ve got quite a number of people interested and we’re on-boarding new beta testers FIFO style. So please stay tuned. You’ll hear from us very soon!

Got an iPhone and want to check out Swapit?
Put your name on the Swapit for iOS beta list!

 

About the Author
Patrick is the Co-Founder and CEO of Swapit Limited. He has over 11 years experience in mobile and business in Asia through various ventures across very different domains. You can find our more about Patrick and the Swapit team at: http://www.swapit.la/#team