"Right on! Now, what the hell is Dawdle?"

So, perhaps you saw this image on the Child's Play website, decided to click it, and were magically whisked away to Dawdle. Then maybe you were thinking "what is this Dawdle thing?" and decided to click on the Blog link.  Welcome.  Sit down, have a drink, and be merry.

First, Dawdle is proud to be a corporate sponsor for Child's Play.  We're a site by gamers, for gamers, and in this Holiday season, we wanted to support the gamers' charity.

As to what we do and how we're different: Dawdle is a totally new way for gamers to buy and sell video games, systems, and accessories with each other. We're not an auction site, a trading site, or a classifieds site.  On Dawdle, we use what we call our Intelligent Matching Engine to put together buyers and sellers. 

What this means is that you can tell us what you want to buy before someone has listed it for sale.  Because we match buyers and sellers, if we know what you want and what you're willing to pay, we can match you up with a seller who comes to Dawdle three days later.  Instead of bidding on an auction that ends in a week, you're bidding on every single listing for sale for that week (or month or whatever you choose). 

Basically, buyers come and tell us what they want and their best price and sellers come and tell us what they have and their minimum selling price.  Dawdle does all the rest, and if there's a match to be made,  we put the buyer and the seller together, charge the buyer's credit card (then and only then), and both sides get an e-mail saying the item's been sold. 

It's a really simple way for people to buy and sell stuff without having to jump through a bunch of hoops - or having to walk into one of those terrible, terrible stores (Who Must Not Be Named).

You can read why we started Dawdle here, and feel free to comment here or drop us a line.  We'd love to hear from you.

Comments

[Will]

Just sold a game on Dawdle.. very cool. I'm actually not a huge gamer, but have had a few consoles and have 30 or so games sitting around. Just sold one of them for $13, and it was ridiculously easy. I'm gonna try to sell the other 29 for around the same price... decent cash. I never bothered selling these games on Ebay, and I'm glad. Dawdle has a much better user experience. I'm even trying to buy a game that caught my eye, and again, I really don't play very much. I have a bid out, so we'll see what happens.. great job with it guys.

[Skiffer]

Saw the ad today and decided to check this place out - ended up placing a bid...then listing some games to pay for it :)

Couple comments:

1) UPC look-up should account for missing first and last digits (I forgot about the small ones at start and end).

2) Listing fee payment page should have a link to the fee schedule (maybe I missed it - I know there's no fees for now)

[The Dawdle Team]

Will,

Thanks for the praise!

Skiffer,

Thanks for the comments - here's our take:

1) Yeah, this is a tough one, especially because the first small one is so important - the first 6 digits identify the manufacturer, so it's tough to account for. It would be nice to make it a fuzzy search so it could find the 10 digit string, which in all probability, is unique in our database. We're going to try to add images to make sure that Dawdlers know to include all 12 digits to those fields.

2) We have no listing fees for now - but we still charge our commission on the sale of 11.99%. I wanted to make sure that you got that; we're not trying to mislead anyone. We didn't make a standalone fee schedule page, since that's covered in the FAQ and TOS and on the confirmation page. That said, we should probably make it more prominent, since we are cheaper than Half and Amazon for everything and cheaper than eBay for stuff under $10.

Thanks for taking the time - good luck in the Wii contest!

[Crash]

In Safari, the text is overlapping itself on the very first page. You might want to check that out.

[The Dawdle Team]

Crash, we can't replicate this error. Can you give us a URL and useragent?

[Anthony Goodwin]

Hey there. I really love the concept of this site. I tried putting something up for sale, but it does not show in my account under current listings. What do I do ?! :!