Dawdle Blog

Quick Construction Notes

We're doing some work on our blog and will have something cool to announce soon.  Until then, some things might be a little wonky.  Please bear with us as we work through these issues with the TypePad folks.

Also, we apologize for not making the Under Construction image an animated GIF.  It's not 1997 anymore, and they're surprisingly hard to find around the Intarwebs.

Why Penny Arcade is wrong about GameStop being a pawn shop

Penny Arcade recently ran a comic that compared GameStop to a pawn shop.  And in the post accompanying the comic, Jerry equated the two.  While we're no fans of GameStop (honestly, one of our goals at Dawdle is to put them out of business), it's patently unfair to compare GameStop to pawn shops. 

It's unfair to pawn shops and their patrons.

Welcome TechCrunch Readers!

Thanks for dropping by Dawdle!  Hopefully, the servers will hold up under your benevolent onslaught.

I figured that I'd take this opportunity to highlight some things about Dawdle that may not be so obvious at first glance.

• Everyone, not just retailers, can get their free online storefront with their custom username.  Get yours now before someone steals your Gamertag!
• When you set up your storefront, links to your profile on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and LinkedIn pages are automatically created if you've put that information in on your Personal Info page in MyDawdle.  In addition, we'll display your Xbox Live Gamertag, PlayStation Network ID, and Wii Friend Code if you've entered those.  You can turn the display of all of these on or off in your storefront settings.
• Credit card entry is really easy on Dawdle.  You can use dashes or spaces to separate numbers that you enter; you don't have to input one long 15 or 16 digit string that's hard to double check.  We'll automatically strip out spacer characters.  This makes it so much easier to enter your numbers so you don't get accidental declines when you try to buy things.
• We have bulk upload via FTP for professional sellers, defined as people who make a living selling video games and gear.  They also get the option to display their store's name instead of a personal name.  We have partnerships with FillZ and others to help them list their product on the site.  All of these tools are free; see Dawdle's Professional Selling section for more details.
• We're really, really proud of our screening.  We're the only marketplace that lets buyers screen by price and seller reputation from the get-go.  You can daisy chain screens with free text search to drill down to exactly what you want.  The free-text search is a little wonky, so if it doesn't work, try
• We have tools that everyone can use.  (Yeah, they're free too!)  We have a Dawdle toolbar and a Dawdle Search Firefox extension that you can install on your machine.  They're great to search the site quickly no matter where you are on the Web.

There are also a few hidden Easter eggs throughout the site and we've done our best to be playful and funny and non-offensive with our jokes and error messages.  And, if there's anything you want to add, just go to the Dawdle UserVoice page.  We use it pretty much as a public roadmap, so add and vote for the suggestions for the features you want.  You can see that we try to respond to messages and add the features <vw> that the people vant. </vw>

Thanks for dropping by!  We hope you... linger for a while.  :)

Dawdle.com 2008 Year In Review Navel-Gazing Blog Post

Inspired by our Chicago neighbors, I thought it would be fun to do a Year In Review post to go over all the things we've done and the progress we've made at Dawdle.com this year.  We've done a ton of things this past year, and made a lot of changes.  The changes seem to be for the better - sales, users, etc. are all up dramatically.  But, no, we're not going to give you raw numbers.  Sorry.  :)

The Big Change

• We essentially did a 180 on how the site works.  Prior to May, Dawdle essentially was Priceline for video games and gear.  You could name your price, but you couldn't see what prices sellers were willing to sell at.  We did it this way to solve the sniping problem on eBay.  If you can't see what other people's bids are at, you can't outbid them by just a penny at the end.  And, if you know that other people can't see your bids, you could bid whatever you really felt the item was worth to you.  We called this our Intelligent Matching Engine, as we matched buyers and sellers the same way that eHarmony matched men and women.  The idea was that people could come to Dawdle once, name their real price, and then wait for the listing to expire to see if they won or not, saving them the hassle of having to come back over and over again to up their bid by a quarter.

Bye Firefox 2.0!

A few days ago, Mozilla released it's final version of Firefox 2.0.  With that, Dawdle will no longer be officially supporting Firefox 2.0 for use on our site (as you should be using Firefox 3 anyway).  Old video games and video game systems are cool.  Old browsers?  Not so much.