review of Zwaggle

Been reviewing swap sites lately. One that has been sent across my radar is Zwaggle. Here is a first impression:

good:
- have virtual currency “zoints”
- have wish lists
- have simple “items in my neighborhood” button (searches zip codes near you).
- has ability for charities to register and for you to direct your gift to a charity.
- condition of items having drop down values
- some algroythm used year of purchase, condition and original value to calculate “zoints”.
- four options on shipping, drop off, shipper pays, pick up, receipent pays.
- choose fed ex or usps media mail
- groups is good.
- decent marketing, press coverage, but very thin for how long the site has been up.

bad:
- terrible UI, very 1980.
- Too long a sign-up procedure, ask for too much information before I can use the site. Ask for duplicate information.
- no standard for Zoints assignment.
- national footprint from get go means only 700 active listings, very thin geographically.
- no integration with meta data provider
- forces you into massive item categorization. This is good for search results, but bad as a user experience. User should have option to use lots of categorization or little.
- five screens to fill out when posting an item. way too many.
- when you donate to charity, you don’t actually donate the item to charity, you donate your “zoints” to charity. Apparently then the charity can come to the site and get stuff it wants from the site. This is a weird transaction.
- no ezplanation of how zoints are calculated or how they are valuable. The zoints calculation does not relate to any real world “garage sale” value. For example it estimated my VHS tape was worth 11 zoints, when that tape would be worth $.25 from good will.
- internal message system very kludgy.
- way to many clicks to do anything.
- when making an offer for an item, you can only choose shipping methods that the “giver” clicked. what if i want to offer to pay shipping but the giver didn’t select that? i should be able to make that offer. Maybe the giver would change their mind.
- i tried to “take” five things. 100% failure rate. Nothing was available. Got back messages from the system saying the items were no longer available.
- the site crashed 3 out of 5 times I used it.
- very limited product focus to “family” items.
- facebook applicaiton is confusing and takes you to another app.
- twitter integration is lame.

Conclusion: Missed the mark. ignore for now.