The founders of a new startup called Wigix are calling eBay old school, and don’t hesitate to target boycotting sellers incensed by recently imposed eBay seller fees. The name is short for WantItGotIt Exchange, and is modeled after the stock market rather than the competitive bid auction model.
The site boasts the process is easy, and it may be once you’ve wrapped your head around it. Wigix allows people to build a portfolio of possessions, all of which don’t have to be up for sale, and to select items out of it with an open sell price. On the other side of the transaction, a Wigix user wanting to buy a specific item can announce that desire and put up an open bid price for it.
If the two match, let the dealing begin. If a user is just shopping, they can just browse listings of course, and buy or bid. A Nikon digital camera, for example is listed at the market price of $600, which is about $95 below MSRP. A quick Google search brings up several listings for the same camera, though for significantly less, so Wigix isn’t yet living up to its potential pricing-wise.
Users can search by product or category. Finding a listing doesn’t mean that item is available. For example, nobody is currently selling a 2008 Audi S5 4.2 Quattro Coupe, but if that’s something you’re in the market for, you could hit the buy button and place an open bid. Or you could add the Audi to your wish list or gift registry and hope one of your community friends buys you one.
The reason there are listings without actual sellers is because as Wigix continues in public beta testing, they are trying to expand their catalog of potential items to make it easier to browse or post bids and sales. Adding a social networking/community aspect to the marketplace, Wigix actually offers payment to “homesteaders” to add items to the catalog or perfect an item description with missing information. Homesteaders can earn 5 percent of advertising revenue the item brings in and the transaction fee.
The founders are relying pretty heavily on the fee aspect to lure away disgruntled eBayers. The current slogan is “Keeping fees at bay,” and the site boasts fewer and less costly transaction fees. In an interview, Wigix CEO and co-founder James Chong opined that the online auction industry was stuck in the 1990s, and the site admonishes users to “Stop buying in a Web 1.0 world.”
The Web 2.0 aspects are fairly obvious: Portfolios serve as a profile, and users can discuss with each other, review items and sellers, communicate what they want fairly efficiently, and the community, much like Wikipedia or other publicly-edited resource has a stake in improving the site. Plus the site loads pretty darn fast for all the features added, so kudos to the team for making a fairly seamless experience.
Whether the eBay community embraces it or eBay finds a way or need to upgrade and update remains to be seen. EBay’s command of the online auction market is staggering, even in the face of a would-be killer in Google Base, which failed to materialize into anything even remotely scary. But Wigix approach to ecommerce is most certainly unique and could be attractive to sellers and buyers. The site has already attracted $5 million in venture capital funding.
