Why we started Dawdle

I started Dawdle after I had a terrible experience selling a barely-used Sony PlayStation Portable. I initially listed it on eBay, spending a good hour to create an attractive listing with a long, thorough description and nine or ten pictures. After a fair amount of bidding over the duration of the listing, there was a furious rush of activity right as the auction ended. The item "sold" for $170, but the high bidder was a Nigerian scammer who wanted me to ship it to his "cousin" in the UK and receive a money order afterwards. Having not been born yesterday, I cancelled the transaction.

Wanting to get the PSP off my hands, I went to a GameStop store in my local mall, where they offered me $80 for it, even though it was like new, with no scratches, and with all of the original manuals and pack-ins. The coup de grace was that they were advertising used PSPs for $159.99, an even 100% mark-up over what they were willing to pay to buy my item! Needless to say, I said "no thanks," and walked out.

Wanting an easy solution, I put the item up for sale on Craigslist. I took the four best images (out of the eleven I had) from my eBay listing, copied and pasted my description, and changed it to free pickup and delivery. All this, for the low, low price of $175. No one, not a single person, was remotely interested. Not only didn't I get any e-mails offering to buy my PSP, I didn't even get a counter offer. I was feeling pretty discouraged and just let the PSP Value Pack, a $250 dollar value new, sit back in the corner to collect dust.

A few weekends later, I decided to list it on Amazon's Marketplace. I chose to list it for $140, twenty dollars less than it was in GameStop, but a fair discount since I would have to ship it to the winning buyer. Also, I really just wanted the PSP off my hands. After a couple of weeks, I received no interest in the item, save for a couple of e-mails from my Nigerian friends who had some sort of variation of the "cousin in the UK" story.

I then took my item off of Amazon and re-listed it on eBay. This time, I restricted the auction to U.S. buyers with a feedback score of 10 or higher. This time, the item "sold" to a woman in San Antonio for $160. However, try as I might, I could not get her to respond to my e-mails. Wanting to rid myself of the PSP once and for all, I went through the bid history and made a second chance offer to a bidder in San Francisco for $140. He wasn't the second-highest bidder, probably the tenth-highest, but he had a feedback score in the 300s. Thankfully, he accepted my second chance offer. I received a PayPal payment from him a couple days later, and shipped off the item the very next day. Having sold on eBay before, I waited until the buyer gave me positive feedback before I gave him positive feedback as a buyer. I even wrote a note saying "Great buyer means great seller!" Of course, there's no real reason to think that's true at all.

An item that I could have sold in a weekend took six weeks to get off of my hands.

Based on this experience, we designed Dawdle from the ground up to be a quicker, better way to buy and sell online. Dawdle makes it easier for buyers and sellers to place bids and create listings -- an item can be posted to the site in as little as five seconds. The platform automatically matches buyers and sellers, so that buyers don't have wade through pages and pages to find what they are looking for. Finally, our system combines the bidding and payment processes, guaranteeing payment to the seller and allowing buyers to get their items faster.

So, we think we've built something that will be easier, faster, and more enjoyable. Let us know what you think. Happy Dawdling!

Cheers,
Sachin Agarwal
President and Co-Founder, Dawdle

dawdle

Why we started Dawdle