Rate My Startup - Dawdle.com Is A "Moronically Easy" Online Marketplace For Gamers

http://www.dawdle.com

by sachinag • 18 years ago

53 69 18 years ago

dawdle.com

khangtoh• 18 years ago

Very well designed. Clean and easy to navigate. Who's your designer?

swdesignguy• 18 years ago

I'd agree.

vaksel• 18 years ago

I don't think they hired one, looks like one of the founders designed it

sachinag16• 18 years ago

Naz Hamid - http://www.weightshift.com

jamesbritt2• 18 years ago

It doesn't render well on Firefox 2 on Kubuntu (FWIW). The white text in the header is offset and is hard to read. And there is a big gap between that top image and buttons below it.

jamesbritt2• 18 years ago

Curious why this got modded down; is this not useful info for people wanting to know how their site looks on a variety of platforms?

simianstyle• 18 years ago

Reminds me of apple.com for some reason.

zhyder• 18 years ago

Design looks great in general. I clicked on Xbox360. Suggestions:

1. Don't show an item in the results if there are no sellers. Or at least say "None available" on the results page.

2. For items that have multiple sellers, indicate the price range (rather than just the lowest price) as well as # of sellers. Similar to how the Amazon.com marketplace does it.

General Q: how will you compete against entrenched players like Amazon.com and Half.com? There's a couple of benefits on your about page (shipping included in price, ability to filter by seller rating + price), but just those probably won't be enough.

potatolicious• 18 years ago

I'm not the OP, but this would be competitive with Amazon.com if they go the individual seller angle. It's a fair amount of work to become a 3rd party seller on Amazon, which excludes all but dedicated businesses.

I think the concept is sound, if only as a meas to replace eBay, which as of late has been stagnant, unsafe for users, and just a pain to use.

sachinag16• 18 years ago

We have access to inventory that no one else does through our partnerships with in-store point of sale partners. Dawdle is the first marketplace, in any vertical, to let retailers list their items online with one click from within their existing POS systems.

Also, our ability to let buyers create StandingOffers - "I know what I want and what I'm willing to pay" - is the first time any marketplace, in any vertical, has allowed buyers to initiate transactions. We're really proud of this technology - there's no back and forth. If a listing comes in that matches your criteria, you buy it automagically.

trickjarrett• 18 years ago

Excellent stuff! I'll be pointing my friends to this site from here on out.

My few notes:

1) I concur with the others, excellent design that is clean and intuitive to navigate.

2) Your seller rating stars in the left column on pages have a grey BG and for cleanliness these need to be on white. I understand you used the same pics from the standard ratings section which is on grey

3) There're two glitches with the top search bar where on some pages it is too long and overlaps the search button (FF3 on Mac). Also on FF3 on Mac if someone activates the thickbox, the grey overlay is under the search bar so it remains white and thus looks odd.

4) Kudos for not diving in head first to the gaming sphere. Most people would add forums and news sources and such and when you're starting out all that does is clutter the site and require more work on your part.

Overall I think it's a sound concept, and the site is very well done. The question becomes how the money is made? Is it per transaction? Ads?

sachinag16• 18 years ago

We process all the payments and take a 11.99% commission for our services. That's less than eBay's 15% plus 5 cents listings for 30 day fixed price and less than Amazon's 15% plus $0.99 for Marketplace listings.

joshsharp• 18 years ago

Great design, easily one of the best I've seen on a 'rate my startup' here. Browsing is also easy to use and simple to understand. I filtered down to PC games > less than $10 and got no results, but figured out within a few seconds how to remove the 'less than $10' filter (before I resorted to just clicking 'back'). Great stuff.

shafqat2• 18 years ago

Is the site down now?

shafqat2• 18 years ago

XMLReader::open(http://feeds.feedburner.com/DawdleBlog) [<a href='function.XMLReader-open'>function.XMLReader-open</a>]: failed to open stream: Connection timed out

jonursenbach2• 18 years ago

Yeah I'm getting the same thing.

if(isset($assoc[0]['val'][1]['val'][4]['val'][0]['val'][0]['val']) && isset($assoc[0]['val'][1]['val'][4]['val'][0]['val'][0]['val'])) {

That's a hell of an if statement on line 235, which is funny because you're running an isset() on the same array key twice.

rokhayakebe• 18 years ago

The site looks like an established website and tells the users that it can be trusted. Very clean and well designed.

sabat• 18 years ago

- pro look. I'd think there was a large company behind this if I didn't know better

- good idea, the ebay for gamers. Marketing is going to be the challenge here, of course.

gwsaines• 18 years ago

Very mature product, I was impressed. Some of the things I noticed:

1) This many sound stupid, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out what the logo was (is it a button?). That's probably just me though.

2) I agree with zhyder that it would be best if you don't show games that have no sellers. The whole offering a price to a seller was a little weird for me.

3) You have an impressive amount of games on the site, and the homepage banner (the guy holding the wiimotes) is very good. Anyone just dropping by gets the feeling that the site is very active, and that's great.

4) How does the 100% guarantee affect the company's bottom line? As a potential buyer I think "Great!" but as an entrepreneur I think "uh oh." How does that work out?

Again, excellent site. My brother's a huge gamer, and I'll tell him to check it out the next time he's looking to buy the next title.

sachinag16• 18 years ago

The logo's a stylized variation on the button from the NES controller.

wallflower• 18 years ago

Love your blog because you seem to meet a lot of people/go to many events. Nice insider perspective into the business of game development.

http://blog.dawdle.com

kirubakaran• 18 years ago

Wow! Lots of things to be learned from your app. Thanks.

oofoe• 18 years ago

Couldn't enter a standing offer for a game. Tried before I created an account and after. Both times, it would only do anything when I clicked "no" on the offer box.

Other than that... It was fairly easy to figure out and use (until the problem above. ;-).

sachinag16• 18 years ago

Yup, fixed.

tyohn• 18 years ago

I'm not sure why but on my computer I can hardly read any of the text? I guess my machine is missing the font you used?

reazalun• 18 years ago

The website is most probably designed in Mac and the designer forgot that Lucida Sans and Lucida Grande do not exist in Windows by default. Although the Arial and Verdana are also declared in the CSS, however for some weird buggy reason, Windows fails to perfectly render the text in either Arial or Verdana, or any other sans-serif font. That's why it looks like sh*t.

In my Linux, the text seems okay and perfect although my computer lacks any Lucida typefaces.

sachinag16• 18 years ago

Awesome - that's the information we needed. We'll fix it. You rock.

zacharydanger• 18 years ago

My only gripe is that the narrow down box doesn't contain a "By Platform" selection. You have to start at the platform of choice then select the genre to get results for Genre X for Platform Y.

Not a huge deal, but I had clicked "By Genre: Role-Playing" link on the home page and couldn't narrow down to platform.

huhtenberg• 18 years ago

You had me at "moronically something for gamers" :)

As others said - a viable idea and it is already very well executed. One major functional issue I see is this:

# Having games and systems and accessories all mixed up is confusing. I would divorce these into separate parts of the website. At the very least I would ensure that games and systems/accessories won't show up on any list (i.e. For Sale) together, at least by default.

Few comments on the appearance and visual design:

# Logo needs to be redone. Right now it's completely unmemorable and bland looking. In fact replacing it with just a word "Dawdle" would improve the appearance of the page. Tag line needs to be removed from the logo too. I'd aim at something simple and similar to GameTap and Valve's Steam logos.

# Front page feels "busy". The "For Gamers, By Gamers" insert is a high-contrast item with too much text. It's largely useless, no one is going to read it. I'd go with a more saturated background color and remove the text.

# Font in the top menu looks funny. One pixel size too small.

# Putting "TM" after a StandingOffer is cheesy.

# Looking at this page - http://www.dawdle.com/product.php/resident-evil-outbreak-pla... - Seller rating in the top-left corner says "3 stars", the rating at the bottom of the page - "4.5 stars". And I am not clear who this seller is to begin with.

# Shaded buttons on the same page are nice. But they are inconsistent with the top menu - I'd style the menu the same way the buttons are.

Lastly, a feature suggestion if I may (I haven't registered an account, so perhaps you already have it). Consider the fact that most gamers are kids/teens and have very little money of their own. It would make sense to allow their parents to fill their dawdle accounts with "buying credits". This is not easy to implement by any means, but it may prove to be a great way to facilitate buying part of the business.

Again, great idea and implementation. Good luck !

sachinag16• 18 years ago

Thanks - we have to use the TM because we intend on protecting the mark. It's a key technical differentiation that we offer that Amazon and eBay don't.

Stupid lawyers.

ardit33• 18 years ago

Great design, but Fonts look awful in windows. The text is unreadable. You are probably using a Mac, but I should remind you that most gamers use PCs. So you should make sure the site looks good in Windows.

sachinag16• 18 years ago

Yeah - I don't know why we had so much trouble with Windows fonts. We'll definitely be cleaning it up. Thanks for forgiving us this transgression. :)

mattmaroon• 18 years ago

The white text on the main image is a little rough to read, especially the last word "gaming". Also, the blue to the left of it being so bright makes the white text there a little hard to read as well. I'm on my laptop which isn't properly adjusted, so it might look better elsewhere, but I'd be willing to be most users aren't properly adjusted either.

sachinag16• 18 years ago

OK, we did a brute force change of making everything Arial while we work out the "Lucida on Mac/Arial on else" stuff. Maybe we'll keep Lucida out forever, who knows?

rjett• 18 years ago

Very nice design...for all the others that love the design and can't quite place their finger on why, visit apple.com. Same font, layout, and a very similar color scheme. (I'm not ripping on dawdle...apple's design deserves to be emulated.)

whacked_new• 18 years ago

Looking at the footer section -- sort by seller rating.

Curious, is there any motivation for someone to sort by the 1-star rating?

sachinag16• 18 years ago

So you can see literally every listing that's available for sale on the site. We'll suppress stuff listed by crappy sellers by default.

Alex3917• 18 years ago

One quick thing is I would change the tagline to "Buy Games. Sell Games." The reason is that the eye isn't really drawn to "Buy & Sell Video Games, Systems, and Accessories with other Gamers Online."

I don't like the middle panel either. The text doesn't say anything meaningful, and the buttons don't really add anything. I would change the buttons to something like "Games", "Consoles", and "Accessories".

wmeredith• 18 years ago

This is really nice. The interface is easy and fun to use.

sutro• 18 years ago

This site appeals to me because I am both a gamer and a moron.

yan• 18 years ago

:) exactly what I thought. Putting "moronically easy" is a bit off-putting.

LPTS2• 18 years ago

remember, when marketing to morons, you have to make sure not to let the morons know you know they are morons, or you have to distract them with shiny stuff so they quickly forget the insult. :)

This is a good example of the second strategy.

sachinag16• 18 years ago

It's moronically easy and I am that moron. (It's a standard line. :) )

azharcs• 18 years ago

Neat stuff, i especially likes the background pic of a guy holding two wiimote similar to Prince of Persia holding swords. Good design, best of luck.

aguynamedben• 18 years ago

the main splash image looks like a broadway dancer holding onto suspenders or something. It took me longer to figure out the point of the site because of this.

almost• 18 years ago

"Buy Now" takes me to a big page full of text rather than to stuff I can buy! And when I scroll down (without reading anything of course) I see a price of $19.99 which I assume is a subscription price so I leave your site never to return...

I'll bet that's how it's going for quite a few of your potential customers.

thasmin• 18 years ago

Here's a bug: I'm looking at Xbox 360 games and I click on "under $10" and the criteria to remove in the box on the top left says "under $25".

I clicked on Bargain Bin on the home page and couldn't find out how to restrict the listing to Xbox 360 games. The links I found removed the bargain bin restriction. When I clicked in Xbox 360, I immediately got a listing which started off with the systems, which I am definitely not interested in. A landing page with recent releases and recent top sellers would be more appropriate, especially if it made it easier to separate the systems and games.

I assume your business is a game-specific price comparison portal. It's not a bad idea, but you may need more content before you provide value over game store sites (ebworld.com) or game review sites (gamespot.com). Along those lines, why would I log in? There doesn't seem to be any community content that would require me to identify myself.

dominik• 18 years ago

I don't like the phrase "moronically easy," but that might just be me.

eru2• 18 years ago

Hehe, I thought you could buy World-of-Warcraft-Gold, based on the title.

Cool site though!

listic• 18 years ago

How can you infer anything from the title? I think it mean anything, like Wufoo

eru2• 18 years ago

I was infering from the title of the post. I agree with you about the non-descriptive startup name.

halo• 18 years ago

Gorgeous design, and I think you could fill a niche with it.

Note that Buy It Now is an eBay trademark for "operating online marketplaces for sellers of goods and/or services" according to the US trademark office so I'd remove any and all references to that term.

pclark• 18 years ago

nice design:

bad fonts

the search button is slightly offline with the search box on the main page

"Buy & Sell Video Games, Systems, and Accessories with other Games online" tweak that?

Can we make the URLs prettier?

I just dont get the word "Moronically"

Why when clicking the blue triangle next to "Bargain Bin" or "Hot Deals!" (drop the ! btw) does it take you back to the homepage? I'm on the homepage.

Can we increase the font size of the "For Games by gamers" blue box?

Kudos for not using a statement like "For Gamers /Buy/ Gamers" or something!

antirez• 18 years ago

Wrong rendering with Firefox 3 / Linux...

Marius• 18 years ago

is there a way of sorting Wii games by price (ascendenting) ?

turtle_22• 18 years ago

Just a couple things I'd note.

1) I swear I clicked a couple times on less than $10, and was shown less than $25. Bug maybe?

2) If there are no items that match a filter, the filter shouldn't show up. If you have items in the $15-$50, and I click on Less than $10, I'm just going to be annoyed.

3) Unless I am missing something, there is no way to sort search results. I would potentially like to be able to sort based on release date (how much are new games?) and price (what's the coolest game I can afford?) and popularity (what's selling best right now, a great deal?)

4) Are you just adding the shipping cost into the seller's cost and then saying the shipping is free? The prices just seem a little weird. I guess seeing the total price is kind of cool.

5) http://www.dawdle.com/help/index.php/buy/ - Your buttons aren't right, and you don't use your Standing Offer terminology.

6) http://www.dawdle.com/help/index.php/sell-problems/ - I don't understand the refund policy. So someone is going to buy my game on the website via CC, and then if we work out an arrangement, I'm going to reimburse them via check off-site? I understand you are trying to limit refund charges, but this seems like one of the weakest portions of the selling process, imho.

7) http://www.dawdle.com/help/index.php/sell-problems/ - I completely don't understand the answer to the question about the damaged item. Am I missing something?

All around, this is looking pretty nice. At first I was a bit skeptical, thinking that this doesn't offer much more than Amazon Marketplace and/or Ebay, with much smaller audiences. However reading the responses here shows that the lower fees and simplicity of the process is a win for the seller, if not necessarily the buyer. You should really stress these advantages to first time and/or potential sellers to get them interested.

Any chance you will let users offer compound Standing Offers? For instance, I'll buy 10 copies of this item at a certain condition for X. Or I'd pay $Y (total) for games a, b, and c.

Keep up the good work. Will bookmark you.

turtle_22• 18 years ago

Also a vote for finding a slogan without the word moronically in it.

songism• 18 years ago

Make your buttons clickable, not just the text. (e.g. http://pixtures.s3.amazonaws.com/misc/dawdle.png)

sachinag16• 18 years ago

You went through all the trouble to 'shop an image? You are a good man/woman/robot. We'll get on it.

richtaur• 18 years ago

My thoughts:

- First thing I noticed is when I clicked "View All" in FF3 in Windows, the menu was WAY over to the right (kinda broken). - Also your URLs are really ugly. This: https://www.dawdle.com/search.php/1/1/Video_Games=1/Systems=... just looks awful. Pretty URLs are important. - I'd guess you'll eventually run into legal issues with the "Buy It Now" links and using Nintendo's Seal of Quality as your "No Listing Fees!" image... - Oh and the server died once when I was browsing :(

AndyKelley3• 18 years ago

You should indicate in the listings if the particular system/game does not have any available to be sold so that the user doesn't waste clicks. After a couple of dead ends, he'll give up, thinking that none of the entries have sellers.

Also, I tried to make a standing offer for a sega genesis system, but nothing happens when I press Yes to confirm. I'm using Iceweasel 3.0.1 which is essentially Firefox 3.

sachinag16• 18 years ago

Should be fixed - give it a shot. There was an edge case we missed.

AndyKelley3• 18 years ago

Yep, fixed. Nice work.

AndyKelley3• 18 years ago

Another thing you should do -

I clicked Yes, then it asked me to register, so I typed in my info. Then it says check here to agree to the terms and conditions, so I clicked there, and it took me to that page (normally I would have middle-clicked, but I was pretending to be a normal user). So I read the terms and conditions, and when I'm done I want to go back to sign up. So I press back, but my browser pops up saying "Do you want to resend the information?" I press Yes, and all the text I entered is blank.

Possible solution: add target="_blank" to the terms & conditions link.

LPTS2• 18 years ago

You forgot mac games!!! Huge oversight.

sachinag16• 18 years ago

Nope, we have Mac - they're under "View All":

http://www.dawdle.com/search.php/1/1/Video_Games=1/Systems=1... http://www.dawdle.com/search.php/1/1/Platform=Macintosh

Rate My Startup - Dawdle.com Is A "Moronically Easy" Online Marketplace For Gamers

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