Ztail.com can help you make the sale
When you’re ready to get rid of that junk – or rather, valuable used merchandise – you have Craigslist or eBay as your main choices. But there are times you don’t want to go through the trouble of eBay and pay the fees. And sometimes Craigslist doesn’t reach a wide enough audience to sell what you have.
Newly launched online selling site Ztail.com offers a solution. It creates sales listings for eBay and other sites and walks you through the process, helping you reach a wider audience for that item you’re trying to unload.
Its major innovation is a vast database of consumer and electronic products, so that you can browse and find your item, then click your way forward to list the item online. That database comes with a gazillion images of the products, so that your online listing, more often than not, shows buyers what it looks like.
The Ztail “network” that will feature online listings includes Google Base, Edgeio, Vast, and Oodle. If you like selling on Facebook, Ztail gives you a widget to add to your blog and reach people visiting your page on that network site.
Of course you still pay fees if you sell something on sites that find a buyer. But that’s the price of progress.
Ourstage.com
No doubt hundreds of entrepreneurs have said to themselves, “Hey, let’s do the ‘American Idol’ idea online. Let’s put together a Web site and have our fans vote for their favorites.”
Startup site Ourstage.com is one example of that genre. Its intentions are fine: It wants to be a neutral, wide-ranging site to give musicians and visual artists a place to show off their work, and then receive cash prizes based on fair voting.
Right now Ourstage has music and video competitions in progress. The site says it will add contests for photos in time.
Definitely worth a look, Ourstage has already lined up backing from a number of prominent music partners, including the Bonnaroo Music Festival and music sites Relix and Noise Pop.
How it works: Musical acts or performers upload recorded music to the Ourstage site. Each month the site invites users to pick the winner in selected “channels,” or musical categories.
The organizers say they’ve designed the site to keep people from gaming the system. Good luck on that. A bigger question is whether fans will really dive through large collections of new music and fairly pick their favorites. At least on TV they can’t make audiences go through more than an hour or so of tunes.