Swapit Updated: You Can Now Always Go Back To What You Like

We’ve just updated Swapit for iPhone and Android worldwide.

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

Several changes were introduced in this update. Here are some highlights:

MY LIKES

You can now view all the items you’ve liked on Swapit, right in your profile. So it is easy for you to get back to the items you found interesting while browsing Swapit. By clicking on an item on the list, you’ll get directly to that item’s details. It’s that easy.

Due to popular request from our great users, we’ve added this feature. We love such great feedback and we are always open to add features that make everyone’s life easier. So again, thanks a lot everyone for reaching out to us and keep the feedback coming. Just drop us an email at beta@swapit.la and we’ll make sure we look into your suggestion.

SELL BADGE

It’s always time to sell and make some extra cash! Now, we’ve made it easier to navigate through your inbox and identify your chats about items you’re selling, quickly.

We believe in the unified inbox concept. It’s a great way to keep all communication about everything in Swapit, in one place. What we’ve noticed with users who are very active on Swapit in terms of buying and selling, was that sometimes it was hard for them to find the right chat about a particular item. Pretty much all the time, they  remember that they were either selling it or were interested in buying it. So we needed to find a way to identify chats more quickly.

In this update, we’ve added a small “SELL” badge to the inbox’s list of “Chats”. It’s a rather simple addition to our inbox, but it has tremendous benefit to users who need to quickly separate chats about items they buy or sell from each other.

MULTI LOCATION (for iPhone)

We’ve been having multi-location support for Android users since January this year. Now it’s finally available on iPhone as well!

As a seller, you can now easily post your item at multiple locations. As you know, Swapit connects you with potential buyers who are nearby right now. Often, you’re selling some items you’re not really bound to one location. Say for example, you’d like to sell your old iPhone 6, like Simon does here. You don’t really care if you’re selling your iPhone to your neighbors near your home, or to people who work nearby your workplace or to people who pass through the same subway station as you are every day. So now you can define up to 3 different locations home, work and meetup as your preferred trading locations. Swapit will take that information and find buyers near all of those locations. Thus, you can triple the chance to sell your item faster. Android users had this feature for a long time, now the iPhone has it too.

SUSPEND USERS

This this recent updated on Android and iPhone, we’ve introduced a mechanism that allows the Swapit team to suspend user accounts. If a user gets reported and (s)he violates our terms, we can now suspend that user’s account and he or she needs to explain him or herself. Previously, we only had the capability to remove a user completely from Swapit. In many cases, that is a step that’s a bit too harsh.

It has come to our attention that there was one user who solicited other users in Swapit last week. One of such “victims” was myself, and we’ve received reports from other users about the same. To me, it happened like this: I am selling a great Micro-USB to Lightning Adapter. The person showed interest in my product and sent me this chat message:

Hello dad is really interested in your item I will like you to email him your last price at XXXXXXXXXX@gmail.com thanks

I replied with the following:

I keep all conversations about all the products I sell right here in the Swapit app. Otherwise it gets too messy and I’m missing stuff.

Please feel free to invite him to this app.

The item is brand new, by the way.

Then he replied with:

I will like you to email him now

That’s where the conversation stopped for me. I just really don’t want to message outside of Swapit. Yet, some other users seem to have gone down that path and have received emails that are obviously looking at collecting as much information as possible from such users. Here is an email of the person in question:

Thanks you for the response according to the description, am okay with the price and the condition pasted on the offer up. I am ready to make instant purchase. My mode of payment would be in Certified Check and i will arrange for a local pick up as soon as you get the check, because that is the only inconvenient means for me and due to my work frame i can not be able to get there and i promise everything will go smoothly. I really wish to be there to check out the item but i don’t have chance cause am very busy person (US MARINE). Concerning the pick up, i will arrange for it after you receive the payment and it clears… Pls get back to me with below info so that i can proceed with the payment immediately if you are selling to me.

Full Name:
Address: Not P.O.BOX
City:
State:
Postal Code:
Total amount for the item
Phone Number: That i can send text
Item Name :

And as soon as this is provided, the payment will be overnight to you and i will let you know when its mailed out. Thanks and i hope we handle this in good faith while waiting to hear from you. i will add an additional $50 so that you can hold it for me till the check reach
Best Regards

There is obviously some sort of scam going on and that user has been suspended now. He / She might appeal to that suspension and we will look into that. As of now, that user can not use the Swapit app anymore. At startup, a dialog pops up and shows the user that his or her account has been suspended. A “Contact Support” button is provided, which can be used to reach out to us.

We believe in transparency. Therefore, we openly explain this current here, to ensure everyone, we are taking this kind of action very seriously. Any sort of fraudulent behavior on Swapit will not be tolerated.

Swapit will remain a save place to privately trade second hand and new goods with people nearby. We will do everything in our power to ensure that. Therefore, all users will be required to upgrade to this latest version starting today.

IMPROVEMENTS UNDER THE HOOD

We’ve also done a lot of “under-the-hood” improvements of Swapit to increase the performance of our apps as well as to increase the ease of use for everyone to trade items more efficiently. We should see an uplift in new users and more and more items being posted on Swapit. It’s been great so far and we’re getting more and more people upgrading to our latest version.

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

Advertisement

Swapit Launches World’s First Multi-Location Sale for Pre-Loved Items

We’ve been working hard to get this release out the door and to be honest, this is the largest single release Swapit has seen so far! In a nutshell, these are the main changes in our latest Swapit release:

1. MULTI LOCATION
2. LIKE ITEMS
3. SELLER SNIPPETS
4. VIEW COUNTS
5. MULTI PICTURE SELECTION

Do you want to check out the latest release right now? You can download it at: http://get.swapit.la

---

Now, for those of you’d like to know more, let’s explain all new features in detail.

MULTI-LOCATION

You can now post an item at up to 4 different locations.

HOME. Our research has shown that most of our Swapit users do use Swapit at their home and post items which are located at their home. So this can be clarified now. At the same time, many of our Swapit users do work at a place which is further away from their home.

WORK. For several smaller items (e.g. fashion products, consumer electronics, etc.), people are willing to bring them to their work place and trade them their — say, during their lunch break. So when posting an item, it is now possible to just flip on the work location and offer your item there as well.

MEETUP. Many people commute from their home to work every day and usually they take the same route and the same mode of transport. So we thought, it might make a lot of sense to be able to define a certain “meetup location” which can be set freely by the user. In most cases, we believe, this will be an MTR station somewhere across town.

All three HOME, WORK and MEETUP locations are user-specific because those usually don’t change often and if they change, they should take an effect on the user’s items. This means, that they are set and remembered in the user’s account. Once either of the locations is changed, all items using that location, will be updated automatically.

OTHER. On top of the three user-specific locations HOME, WORK and MEETUP, we also introduce an item-specific location which we call “Other”. In many cases such an item-specific location makes sense. Think of properties, cars or yachts for example. If you publish such items on Swapit, you might want to actually show their location on Swapit. Let’s take a property: When you post a property for sale with the actual property’s location, Swapit will let people nearby that property know, that you are selling a property that’s nearby their location.

LOCATION-INNOVATION.
Swapit is a very location-driven service. Our core has always been to bring buyers and sellers together who are nearby each other; in real-time. Up until the last release of Swapit, each location had exactly one location and when an item was posted, everyone nearby the sellers actual location at that moment, was notified that a new item is available. Swapit is now the world’s first marketplace that introduces multi-location for items and people. This now means, that each item can be published at up to 4 different locations (see above) which means, Swapit can reach 4 times more people than before. Thus, it increases the chances for an item to be discovered by an interested buyer, by 4 times. At the same time, each user can have his own home, work and meetup location stored in his user settings. Besides that, (s)he also has a current-location which constantly changes. That makes a total of 4 more locations, Swapit can use to match buyers and sellers. So in turn, Swapit’s reach based purely on location has increased by 16 times (4×4).

In a nutshell: Our latest multi-location feature, increases the chances to close a trade by 16 times compared to our previous versions and especially compared to what our competitors are offering.

 

LIKE ITEMS

Sometimes, you see an item someone posts on Swapit and you just like it. You’re not really interested in buying it right now, but you do somehow find it interesting. Or perhaps you just find it absolutely cool that someone posts this sun tanning tower. To give you a tool to show that you like an item, you can now just hit the LIKE button. It is available in the list of products that shows up at the launch of Swapit as well as in each item’s detail view.

Besides publicly showing that someone likes that item, Swapit does not publish the name of the person who liked the item. That is not shown to the seller nor to other buyers. We might actually change that in future, but as of now, this is how it is.

When liking an item, you do also subscribe to updates about that particular item. So if someone leaves a comment there or if the item is being sold, you will get a notification so you can check out any changes made there. At any time you can just unlike the item or turn off notifications for that item, in the item’s menu at the top right corner.

We believe this is a very convenient way to show your interest in an item even though, you’re actually not looking to buy it, right now. Perhaps at some point in time, you might be willing to buy it and therefore, it is now very convenient to just keep track of an item’s changes.

 

SELLER SNIPPETS

In our last beta release, we introduced chat snippets. These are small pre-defined texts which you can use while chatting. Our first set of snippets was geared towards making it easier for buyers to communicate. Now, we have added another set of snippets just for sellers. It includes common phrases like “The price is fix.” or “Make me an offer.”. If you’d like find out more about seller snippets, just go to Swapit and post an item for sale. Once you are in a chat as a seller of an item, you’ll be seeing the seller snippets right next to your chat input field.

 

VIEW COUNTS

Swapit is now tracking the number of views and visitors to an item. Users need to have the latest Swapit version installed for views and visitors to be tracked. Hence, if someone with an old version views your item, Swapit doesn’t track that view. So for a short little while – until everyone has upgraded to the latest Swapit version – the view and visitor numbers might understate the actual number of views and visitors.

A view is being tracked each time any user views your item. A visitor is being tracked only the first a user views your item. Both numbers can be very important for the seller. For example, say you have 50 views, but only 2 visitors, then you know that 2 people have your item 50 times in total. If you still haven’t sold your item or no one attempted to buy it, you should know that something is wrong with your item’s presentation. Perhaps the description is not well formed, perhaps the photos are too low in quality, the price is too high, or there is something else. It is always good to check out our Tips for Making a Sale series which gives you practical tips on selling your item faster.

 

MULTI PICTURE SELECTION

It is now possible to select multiple pictures from your photo gallery at once. This was one of the most-wanted features ever. We do constantly conduct surveys with our users and during those surveys we usually have a list of upcoming features we’d like people to rank in terms of importance to them. This helps us a lot in prioritizing our release roadmap to ensure, we are bringing features our users are looking for, as soon as possible. While we can’t do all at once, we try to get as much done as possible. We want to make our users and ensure we create the right product for the right people, with the right set of features that makes everyone’s life easier.