Thursday, August 12, 2004 Buying, selling second-hand items in Cebu with help from Internet
WANT to sell something you no longer need but can’t find buyers? Why not check out the Internet?
eBay they may not be, but three Cebuano websites are now making themselves a venue for people to ditch the things they don’t want and get the things they do want.
At www.wats.cjb.net, clicking on Watsinmygarage will open a world to second-hand items for sale in Cebu.
Site creator Warren So Tan said cellular phones, electronic gadgets, digital cameras, auto accessories, cars, home appliances and comics are among the second-hand items up for sale.
People who have something to sell can post photographs and descriptions of the items they want to sell for free. The site makes money partly by accepting advertising.
Advertisements will appear in the site as well as in flyers.
If you want to zero in on just information technology (IT) gadgets, there’s www.arctech-pc.com.
Site owner Ryan Yu, president and chief executive officer of Arctech Solutions Inc., said that under the Garage Sale forum link, the company website lets Arctech customers sell their second-hand items and “anything regarding IT” free of charge.
“They have to be customers of Arctech to put it in our site,” he emphasized.
If they want to display the items in Yu’s store on Gorordo Ave., that is another matter.
Online board
Another site, www.istorya.net, which started out as a blog page over two years ago, also has an online board where people are allowed to announce what they want to buy or sell.
“It’s a free service for the Cebuano community,” said Gerald Yuvallos.
Explaining the beginnings of the site, he said that with Cebu being the “cyber capital of the country,” he thought it was time the province had its own community for people to exchange views on certain topics.
The site now has more than 5,000 members, some 70 to 80 percent of whom are from Cebu.
Business
The site is becoming so popular, with about 1,225,618 page views and over 51,000 unique visitors for last July alone, that Yuvallos is planning to capitalize on this visitor base to get into business.
“We’re planning to venture into advertising very soon,” he told Sun.Star.
This would enable the site, which runs on a dedicated server, to recover some of its costs.
The site owners say no actual payments are currently being made through their websites, with buyers still needing to physically hand over payments to the sellers. But who knows what the future holds? CTL
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