Neat! 20 items/wk is impressive. Would love to hear more. (link? :) Are they explicitly running a store? (Rather than posting items from their personal account.)
I built something very similar earlier this year (http://thingsy.co), but pushed the idea even further by posting items to Craigslist/Kijiji/Backpage (using mechanical turk for item recognition).
Unfortunately, this couldn't scale because of classified ad websites limitations.
To this day, I don't know of any classified ad website that allows massive item listing through an open API. This would seal the deal.
That's awesome! I always figured that there had to be a better way of selling things than Craigslist currently offers. The issue is building an audience. I thought I would try and piggy back on instagram to maybe push me ahead.
Nobody is going to look for stuff on your website.
You need to:
A. Find a way to automate posting to Craigslist (good luck).
B. Build a better marketplace (semantic?) that aggregates/pull content from Instagram, Vine, Twitter, Etsy, etc. If you do that, you'll need a kickass item recognition system.
Soldsie also did something similar with Instagram. http://new.soldsie.com/instagram-selling/. Looks like social commerce is heating heating up as companies are looking for a way to really get social to contribute to overall ecommerce.
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Unfortunately, this couldn't scale because of classified ad websites limitations.
To this day, I don't know of any classified ad website that allows massive item listing through an open API. This would seal the deal.
You need to:
A. Find a way to automate posting to Craigslist (good luck). B. Build a better marketplace (semantic?) that aggregates/pull content from Instagram, Vine, Twitter, Etsy, etc. If you do that, you'll need a kickass item recognition system.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/23/instasale-chirpify-takes-it...