Adding a New GearTrade section to Forum

:fm:

Maggots and minions
We (TGR) are thinking about adding a new section to the forum for selling used gear. Its based off of GearTrade.com. We will not mess with the Gear Swap section, only add this additional section for another option.

Upside to this is it will get your gear more exposure by putting your listing out to the entire GearTrade.com site which they will be advertising. They will also faciitate the transacations and provide customer service. Downside is that GearTrade.com will take 10% as the fee for providing this service and exposure. Basically its the EBay for gear.

I am just putting out the feelers to everyone to see if there are major issues with doing this. Could be a good way to unload more unused gear so you can buy the next best thing.

Most people that sell here are aware of ebay and gear trade but would rather sell here to avoid all that goes along with selling in that way. I'm not saying don't put a gear trade link on here, I just don't think it will get used very heavily.

I dunno,
I'm sketched out and I don't know if I should be. I've let stuff go for free or for real lose prices because its going to maggots. I don't want some random person off geartrade coming in and sniping stuff thats for the community.

Maybe I've got the situation wrong, but I think too much exposure sells out and changes what we have.

Good feedback. We just want to provide new things for the web goer but if its not a benefit then we wont waste our time. I will see if anyone sees it as a benefit before I completely abandon it. thanks

I feel like the "private" use of Gear Swap for maggots, in addition to the ability to buy and sell any good publicly on EBay is sufficient. However, since I rarely make use of Gear Swap there may be some others who should chime in on this with a more valid opinion.

I'm totally against it unless it generates revenue to TGR that leads to more free beer.

Yeah, I am liking this idea less and less.

Except the more Beers part. You are onto something there.

dont do it.......if i wanted ebay i'd go to ebay. no costs here and people who ski

Agreed. It's a bad idea, not in motivation, just in actuality.

Ebay is all the exposure you would ever need to sell gear and I agree the community of gear trading/selling on here should not be infiltrated by outsiders. That's why it works, because we mostly trust most maggots on here.

all i can see this doing is opening the forum to people who will scam maggots for gear/money. one vote against:nonono2:

Damn, I wish response time was this easy for everything I did. Efficiency at its best.

Ladies and gentlemen, this coversation is done, we are not doing this GearTrade site.

Thanks. Enjoy the pow that seems to be hitting everyone lately.

thanks

I aggree with what the others have said

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ActionJackson

Damn, I wish response time was this easy for everything I did. Efficiency at its best.

Ladies and gentlemen, this coversation is done, we are not doing this GearTrade site.

Thanks. Enjoy the pow that seems to be hitting everyone lately.

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ActionJackson for President!!!!!!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ActionJackson

Damn, I wish response time was this easy for everything I did. Efficiency at its best.

Ladies and gentlemen, this coversation is done, we are not doing this GearTrade site.

Thanks. Enjoy the pow that seems to be hitting everyone lately.

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Thanks man. Solid call and good lookin' out.

Agree. Ditto. Kudos. Thanks.

Good...ebay will do that part of the job...and i agree..ActionJackson for president!!!

Hey, I have huge respect for the communities viewpoint…however, I feel the community didn’t give GearTrade a fair hearing. Here are some facts to consider.

GearTrade is creating a “Gear Exchange” for TGR with our software. TGR will have their own “TGR Gear Exchange” It will not be a link to GearTrade.com. We are creating this for the maggots. If you don't like it, TGR will remove it from the site.

Here is how it would work:

1. Ebay charges on average 15% of each order. TGR Gear Exchange is a flat 10% .

2. TGR Gear Exchange processes the credit card payment, which would cost you another 3% on your own. We kick back another 3% to TGR (they'll use for beer). TGR provides an awesome service, this is a chance for maggots to support the cause.

3. So our cut is 4%, which we use to run the whole sha-bang. We think that's pretty fair. We still haven't come close to breaking even.

4. Compared to eBay that’s an extra 8% in a maggots pocket to blow on whatever he/she wants

5. A big concern is that these deals are just for maggots…fair enough, maggot only deals should go on the forum…we don’t want to steal your good karma. We have no intentions of taking away your "Gear Swap" forum

6. If you do list gear on our swap, There is a barter function, which allows potential buyers to make the seller an offer. If a fellow maggot is looking for a deal, you can accept their lower offer.

7. At GearTrade we believe that people would rather have $200 in 3 months than $100 in seven days. That’s why we allow you to list at a fixed price for a full year.

8. Ebay charges a listing fee, we don’t

9. We aren’t a huge conglomerate, we’re two guys in Utah working with the owners of Backcountry.com. We hope to be successful some day…but right now, it’s just a couple of hippy’s selling gear.

10. We want to provide customer service for folks looking to buy and sell gear, cause hassle free trading is what it's all about.

11. We mediate all questions between buyers and sellers so you can be out on the hill all day.

12. We process the payment and send you a check for your gear. You don't have to collect payment, and this payment is guaranteed. If a buyer is fraudulent, we still guarantee payment to the seller. This way you'll never get burned.

13. As you can see our goal is to provide a user friendly and hassle free outlet for people to sell their old gear. We do take a small cut, but our customers know it is well worth it.

I'm more than happy to share the many praise emails we've received since we started in July. I hope you can see us for what we are worth.
Call or email me anytime, and I'd love to explain all the ins and outs of GearTrade.... but I would prefer to talk about how it is dumping out as we speak.

Thanks for listening,
Rob Reinfurt
Site Manager
GearTrade.com
rreinfurt@geartrade.com
801-746-7567

Rob, thanks for a well written and thought out message. I think what you're hearing here, is that if folks here wanted to use GearTrade, they would go to GearTrade.com and list their goods.

Maybe there's a way you can just set up an affiliate link, so if people here want to sell their stuff on GearTrade, they can click through TGR and that way you get your money, TGR gets their money, and the goods get sold? I know the backcountry.com affiliates work that way....

Just heard about this thread. I would have to give Geartrade a big thumbs up. I've sold six pairs of skis and a couple pieces of clothing on the site. It's super easy to use, has a great tracking system for peace of mind, and generally kicks ass!

I think the biggest concern that people have is people clicking through from GearTrade and ending up here, sort of taking advantage of the community or even scamming us. Obviously anyone can post on here now but there aren't any road signs pointing the way here. If you can address this concern I don't really see why people would object to having another readily available avenue for selling their gear, particularly if that sale ends up putting some cash in TGR's pocket as well.

my .02

I say no. Gear Swap is pretty good how it is, but the idea of throwing TGR a few bucks in the process ain't too bad.

You should put a poll explaining everything in Ski/Board forum, and the results will say do it or not.....

I can understand why the maggots would not like this, but I also would be all for helping TGR out as well.

Just my opinion...I like this idea if it's done right. And Rob is a solid, solid dude, so I trust what he is working on here.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by XtrPickels

I dunno,
I'm sketched out and I don't know if I should be. I've let stuff go for free or for real lose prices because its going to maggots. I don't want some random person off geartrade coming in and sniping stuff thats for the community.

Maybe I've got the situation wrong, but I think too much exposure sells out and changes what we have.

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Agreed. 100 freakin percent.

AJ, awesome to see so much consideration, (asking our opinions). Thanks, mang.

Gear swap works just fine. People taking money from my transactions can fuck off. What a stupid idea. How about you pay everyone who has referred someone to this board?:rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes:

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Bob O

5. A big concern is that these deals are just for maggots…fair enough, maggot only deals should go on the forum…we don’t want to steal your good karma. We have no intentions of taking away your "Gear Swap" forum

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OK, the explanation of your service makes it sound reasonable enough. Even possibly pretty cool.

although I'll greedily admit that i love getting all of the profit from any swap I've done on here, I also wouldn't mind supporting the TGR guys.

However, the community thing is what's so cool about this board. I'd want to know for certain that in no way could an outside community start accessing the maggot hookup. I love that we all keep each other accountable here, that we look out for each other, that we do cool shit gearwise for each other. That must not be tampered with or even mistakenly opened up to a larger community IMHO. It's not about the profit either, it's the "feel" here. there's a lot of unspoken trust here and it just plain rocks. cheers.

Considering that many mags waste time bickering/whining about prices being too high, I think it's a good idea. "Take it to TGR gear trade" is the answer.

Suggestion - -> maybe do a 6 month pilot program and let us decide after the period is up?

Also, I think Iceman's concern about random folk being "pointed" to the TGR forums is interersting.

Thanks for the feedback.

I can understand your concern of outsiders infilitrating the boards, but this program is stuctured so this will not happen.

The reason we created our partner program, instead of adopting a normal affiliate based program, is that we wanted to create this especially for these types of communities. We wanted to let other forums and websites have their own gear swaps for their communities.

GearTrade feeds product to the major search engines for exposure, but the TGR Gear Exchange will only be advertised on the tetongravity.com website. GearTrade will not link to the TGR Gear Exchange, nor will the TGR Gear Exchange link back to GearTrade.

This way you don't have to worry about outsiders on the boards.

Our partner program is designed to allow other websites to have their own "gear swaps". This is essentially TGR's site, it is just powered by our software and managed by our customer service. We did this so we could preserve the communities, instead of just creating another affiliate link. We want other communities to benefit from our services, and allow them to keep their identity.

If you feel this might be a cool thing, and the boys at TGR agree, we'll give it a try. If it doesn't work, we'll pull it off the site. If this does not come to light, it is by no means set in stone.

It's pretty late, I'll chime in tomorrow. Hopefully, it won't be a junkshow getting up the canyon in the morning.

Good Night.

I forsee dismal failure here. Nice idea, but just not enough volume.
Particularly if the free maggot gear swap still exists.

How much gear actually goes through TGR gear swap in a year?
$50,000? ?
(I don't know, but you must have done the math. There ain't that many new full price skis there. Mostly used and abused)
Even if all of that goes through you, that's $1,500 in revenue for TGR and you make $2,000 for your efforts??
And that's assuming none of those sales get put on the regular free gear swap forum.

We'd be better off holding a bake sale or a fuckerware party.

I understand your eager desire to increase market share and get your name out there, but there may be other ways.
What about partnering with companies like TGR to offer their users a coupon for discounted purchases?
Or do the gear trade deal like you mention above, but have them go through a portal via clicking on a banner on this website to get a reduced listing fee (with a TGR kickback) on the full GearTrade website.

I just dont expect a lot of demand to pay to use your service to get a higher list price and yet not actually getting on the full gear trade site and reaching your full audience. Its the worst of both worlds.

What you need to save GearTrade is more volume on GearTrade. I tend not to check it because there ain't that much there.
Getting new customers but not having them on the main website seems pointless.

I didn't know about geartrade before, looks like a cool site, I bookmarked it and will probably check it often. I don't think that TGR really needs something like that though. The current format works great and the elevated risk in transactions may actually function to keep some of the gapers out of here. We've all seen our local pow stashes get found out by some rookie loud mouth that doesn't know enough to not tell anyone else. Currently this is our own community pow stash, any change could risk that, I just don't see a need for this type of change.

Ok. My turn.
I apologize for no response today buy I am always running around and forget to check in. What I do know and feel is the same thing that we feel in the TGR office. Its a tight knit crew and you don't want anything messing with the system. Thats the beauty of the forum. Freedom to avoid the man.

I dont see Geartrade or Rob O as an outsider by any means. He is one of you and the people that buy gear on that site are probably the same people too. But an organized company coming into the forum kind of takes away from its outlaw feel.

I want to help Rob O and obviously TGR always needs funding to keep our movement alive but I think I will hold off on doing this. Hopefully there is something else we can help Rob O with.

...and if you righteous folks that said you would love to help TGR make some $, go to our store and buy some things for Christmas presents. Watch our Untracked shows on FUEL TV and the films. And, damn, just keep skiing and boarding and feel the quality...
Thanks

The gearswap thing sounds like a good idea. It actually sounds very well thought out. It seems like having this avaiable would do nothing but good for the web site as well as the maggots. Pesonally, i dont sell an awful amount of gear on the site, but for some one who does, it makes perfect sense to me.

Might as well try something different.. if it sucks, then no loss.. but it just might work pretty well...

I'm gonna go against the grain here and say give the geartrade thing a shot.

TGR has a tough enough time staying in the black I'm sure, and Rob seems to be a stand-up guy and I would be happy to help give him a chance to make his startup into something that could feasibly take on a giant like eBay down the road. How else could they do it without the support of a community such as ours?

I'm willing to try it out.