Used Gear Site Takes the Fun Out of eBay Roulette
By Rocky Thompson on October 20th, 2006
GearTrade.com is like a Craigslist where you don’t have to deal with all the people who waste your time. It’s a person-to-person marketplace exclusively for outdoor gear and the people who run it make sure your brand new Rossignol B-Squads won’t be listed next to my sick 80s bump skis. They also don’t charge listing fees and have fixed pricing so you don’t need to call your friend and ask him to bid on your stuff to boost the price. They even handle all the cash transactions (where they take their cut) so you never need to worry about getting ripped off.
I just checked this site out and there is hundreds of items at or below pro-form price. I can’t believe it. It’s basically like a steepandcheap, only it’s a marketplace. If you need winter gear, this place is loaded with it. Rocky is the man.
This site alright. I think the best part of lsiting things on ebay is having your friends mystery bid to help make you money. Plus, can they really compete with paypal? Also telejoe this place is not Steep and Cheap.
bump. you can’t sell your own gear on Steep and Cheap, and you can’t pick and choose what you get. So while steep and cheap may give you the sickest deal around, geartrade definitely has a very worthwhile niche in the marketplace.
Plus Slizzard- “mystery bidding,” as you call it, is illegal on ebay (maybe a lot of people do it, but now you have to live with the fact that everyone knows you’re a cheater and you’re no better than the other criminals dredging around ebay scamming people. How’s that feel?)
oooo zing!
call me a criminal …………..im paid honkey
yeah, saw this for the first time on newschoolers.com…i think it’s cool that they are implementing a commerce piece of their site…community of skiers + access to the product they all talk about…i won’t miss doing transactions on craigslist at all…the classic reply for a $100 dollar asking price = “hey, man would you do $40″. i call them the kamikazee hagglers.
Free listing for a year is all right.
telejoe was right….basically a full store of steapandcheap deals. there is a ton of clothes……good place for x-mas shopping.
Gear Trade & Steep and Cheap are both owned by Backcountry. Not bad sites, but me thinks some of these blog entries may be shameless plugs by staffers, hmm?
Pow…thanks for the heads up, but quite frankly I dont care who owns it, the deals are sick.
hey,
Geartrade is not owned by Backcountry. It is owned by the guys who own Backcountry but it is an entirely separate company.
[...] Better than SteepandCheap? Maybe. I posted something about GearTrade.com a long time ago, but they recently changed their pricing structure. GearTrade is basically a gear dump for everything that’s returned to Backcountry.com (usually in new condition, just missing tags), and someone at Backcountry.com decided they don’t want to hang onto that inventory for more than a year. Each piece of gear will have its price reduced by 1/365th each day it’s on GearTrade, so after a year it’ll cost $1 whether it’s a kayak or a beanie. The thing to do is start watching some big ticket items and pick a day to buy when it hits your price. Now you’ll have two sites to keep an eye on at midnight. By Rocky Thompson [...]