The Listia Blog

When I was a kid, I was an avid collector of all sorts of nifty things: In elementary school, I prided myself in having the best sticker collection in my class (even carried around my sticker book during recess), then along came Beanie Babies like the one I found here. In junior high and high school, I collected stationary and my mom even got me into collecting new quarters that were issued for each state. By the time I entered college, I took a break from all of my childhood collections and invested in school supplies and textbooks.

It’s a shame to know the things I used to love and cherish so dearly are now sitting at home collecting dust. Do you also have that same problem? That’s why it’s so nice to have a place like Listia where I can give away the things I no longer need to the next happy owner.  There are lots of other Collectibles on Listia right now and some of these things bring back great childhood memories.  Remember Teddy Ruxpin, My Little Pony, Smurfs & Transformers?

Regardless of what you’re currently collecting or have collected before, tell me your story about your collectibles, past and present. Maybe this will spark some interest in new collectible items or encourage others to do some Spring cleaning.

Until next week,

ListiaRosie

Hi everyone!  In our quest to improve the shipping and handling rules on Lisita, we’ve made a few changes to our rules and site.  First, you will notice that our rules page now contains a short list of items which have a “maximum shipping” charge associated with them, effective Monday, May 23rd.  For these items, you must either provide free shipping, exact shipping, or flat rate shipping under the listed amounts.  The only case where you can charge more is if it will actually cost you more than that amount to ship (ie, if you are selling 10 books).

Additionally, to make shipping options more noticable, we are now highlighting them on the auction pages.  This will help bidders immediately see which auctions to bid on and which to avoid.  We’re so happy that a huge part of our community is providing free shipping, and we encourage everyone to follow their lead… you’ll be rewarded when its your turn to win something!  

Thanks again for everyone’s continued input!  This is a small but important step in the right direction, and we have much more in store for you in the near future!

Our latest version of our iPhone app, Version 1.2, is now available to download on the Apple app store. We’ve heard what our community wanted and created an “add to watch list” button in the app. Other improvements and updates include:

• Bug fixes
• Ability to load more pages to view comments
• Uploading up to 5 photos and faster uploading time
• Fixed login issue

If you had problems logging in with our older version, Version 1.2 fixes these issues and you’re now able to use the app on-the-go with ease. Don’t forget to rate our app and leave a comment!

We’re continuously improving our mobile app and website. Stay tuned for more features and updates!

Hi everyone!  We just added a cool new feature to help users show off their reputation from other social networks such as Facebook or Twitter.  This is especially helpful if you haven’t been able to build up your Listia reputation yet, and you want other people to bid with confidence on your listings.  In addition, it helps bidders identify real users and weed out the fake and throwaway accounts.  There’s still a lot more to come as we continue to improve the way we deal with verification and reputation, but we think this is a big step in the right direction.

Starting today, if you have connected with Facebook or Twitter, your public profile links from those social networks will show up on your auction listings and on your profile page.  Other users will be able to easily click and check out your public profiles on Facebook and Twitter.  Of course, you can also opt-out of showing these links by visiting the “Privacy & Sharing Settings” link on your “My Listia” Page.  Remember, you can control the amount of information displayed on these public pages by changing your settings at Facebook.com or Twitter.com directly.

Hope everyone finds this useful… and stay tuned for more new features!

We have a couple site changes we’d like to announce today!  We always love to hear what our users have to say so keep those suggestions coming.

First, we’ve changed the way comments are hidden.  Now you can permanently hide comments on your own auction and other users won’t be able to click “show comment” to see what was written.  The place to do this is in the same location as before, but the results are slightly different.  Hopefully auction owners enjoying having more control over the comments on their auctions.

Second, we’ve added a way to perform routine maintenance on the site and give our users notification ahead of time.  When we have scheduled maintenance you will see a warning message on the top right of the site that says “Scheduled Maintenance” and you can click this to see details including start and end times.  Auctions that end during and 1 hour past this down time will end 1 hour after the end of the scheduled down time.  For instance if down time is scheduled for tonight from 9PM to 10PM, auctions ending from 9PM to 11PM will all end at 11PM.

Lastly, we’ve changed the way the search function works when you select your region.  Previously, you could select “US” or “Worldwide” where “US” would show all auctions with a specified location in the US and “Worldwide” would show every auction available.  These options would not take into account any of the shipping options associated with the auctions.  We’ve changed these options to “US” and “Outside US” where each will show auctions that are available in the specified region (shipping to that region or local pick up in that region).  For instance if you have selected “US” you will only see auctions that ship to or are available for local pick up in the US and likewise for “Outside US”.  We’ll be adding more ways to drill down to specific regions in the near future.

Stay tuned for more updates!

Today, we’re excited to share some great news about our company and our products!

Starting off, we’re bringing you a whole new way to experience Listia – on your iPhone! Download the app now in the Apple app store. The free app is a snap – you can browse, bid and list items directly from your iPhone. Use it to quickly find what people are offering near you, walk around your home to snap photos of things you want to trade and upload them directly from your phone. Our mobile app will make listing items so fast and easy that you’ll actually want to do spring cleaning this year.

Here are some of the features:

• Quickly browse through popular listings and use the location feature to find listings near you for easy local pickup

• List items directly from your iPhone using the built-in camera to snap multiple photos

• Use the advanced search to find exactly what you want

• Comment and ask questions on-the-go directly from your iPhone

• Manage your auctions and never miss items you are watching or bidding on

• Snap a photo of yourself and use it as your new profile picture

In addition to the iPhone App, we recently raised $1.75M in funding from some of the best investors in the valley. The deal was led by Andreessen-Horowitz with participation from some great people, including SV Angel, Founder Collective, High Line Venture Partners, Max Levchin, Naval Ravikant, Alex Zubillaga, James Hong and others. We are very fortunate to have these investors working with us to take Listia to the next level. For you guys, this means we’ll have the resources to continue to build a great product and improve the service that all of you love so much.

Listia was founded with the idea that it should be fun, easy and rewarding to trade things that you don’t use anymore, and get things that you want in return. The site has really evolved since we launched in 2009, and our community is growing at a rate of 15% a month. There is still a lot more we have planned, and we will be using the funding to add amazing people. If you’re interested check out our jobs page here http://www.listia.com/jobs

Check back for updates as we continue to grow!

If you haven’t seen it already, Listia has gotten a new menu bar!  After a lot of thought we’ve come up with something we hope you all will like.  It may take some getting used to, but overall we think this is a great improvement and our early vote results have confirmed that too.

As always we’d love to hear your feedback so be sure to let us know what you love or hate about it!

We just completed some big server upgrades and optimized our code and infrastructure to provide even better service for all of you!  Hopefully, you’ve noticed the site is faster and more responsive today and will continue to improve over the next few weeks.  As always, if you spot any bugs or issues..  feel free to let us know by visiting: http://help.listia.com

Better service and a better experience are our top priorities… thanks again to all our awesome users out there. Happy Listing!

photo via: tonysphotos

We are giving away DVDs for all of the movies nominated for Best Picture!  Check them out on the Rewards Auctions page and vote for the ones you like best by clicking the “like” button on the auction.  These auctions will only run for one day, so bid quickly!

Here is the entire list of movies: Black Swan, The Fighter, Inception, The Kids Are All Right, The King’s Speech, 127 Hours, The Social Network, Toy Story 3, True Grit, Winter’s Bone

Which one is your favorite?

See the full gallery on Posterous