If you have second hand items (or new ones) that you are going to throw away, why not swap them with something else?

Of course, you also have a choice of selling them on eBay or on other web advertisement services. If you are lucky, you may get some good money out of it. If the item is a few years old, then good luck! Some time I’d rather give it away to my friend than selling it.

I was talking to my friends some time ago, wishing to build a site like eBay, but instead of selling your items, exchange/trade them with something else. What you want to throw away might be useful to other people and vice versa. Little that I know, such site already exists!

At OurSwaps.com, you list your items (for free) on the site. You are required to register, of course, before you can list your items there.
Listing the item is easy. You pick the category, name your item & its description, its value, and most importantly, what you’d like to swap it for. You can leave the field blank and let other people to simply make an offer for your item.

My list of items that I want to swap

As I said before, listing your items is free. However! 5 Credits will be deducted from your account when a “transaction” is made successfully. Yes, you are given a set of Credits (10 for a starter, 2 more for every friends you successfully invited, and also you can buy 1 Credit for $0.20).

So as a trial, you can make 2 successful swaps. If you think the site is worthy, then having to pay $1 for a swap is not really a big deal, rather than having your second hand junks piling up in your house The credits are only deducted upon a successful transaction from both parties.

You can browse the items on the “marketplace” by browsing its category or through a search. Item categories are varied: books, musical instruments, computer stuffs, furniture, automotive, etc. At the moment when I read this post, there are already around 120 items in there (including my 3 items on the screenshot above heh heh)

I received a report that they are in the process of getting a good delivery service and also a seller/buyer protection scheme.  It will be interesting to see when this happens (especially the delivery service).

Feel free to give the site a try. The site is based on Australia, so at the moment there are lots of Australians putting their items for an exchange there. The site is also available for other countries, though.

In the meantime, if you are living in Australia, feel free to swap my Rush Hour 2 DVD with another DVD of yours. Make an offer!

Check out OurSwaps.com.

You can also buy the DVD from the sponsors below:

Stay updated and get my latest posts delivered to you by subscribing to my main feed via email or your favorite feed reader. If you are a blogger, feel free to leave a trackback to this post.