Selling on Craigslist and eBay sucks; try ShopSpot instead

Sure, many people use Craigslist and eBay to sell stuff. But they’re designed in an era where PCs were cutting edge and smartphones were nothing more than curios carried around by geeks.

Now, with smartphones replacing laptops as the primary Internet device for consumers, there’s a gap in the market for apps designed to make buying and selling on the mobile phones easy.

That’s where ShopSpot comes in. It is a mobile marketplace that promises to make shopping as simple as tweeting. The iOS app, which is now available for download, is developed by Thai national Natsakon Kiatsuranon and team. They are incubatees at the JFDI-Innov8 Bootcamp in Singapore.

They came up with the idea as a way to scratch their own itch. They wanted to get rid of the clutter lying around at home, but found it hard to sell in a traditional online marketplace.

“It could take you half an hour trying to sell on a website. Wouldn’t it be better if we can cut it down to half a minute?” Natsakon thought. And that’s how ShopSpot was born.

In part, ShopSpot fulfills that promise. I had some initial problems with the app crashing on my updated iPhone 4 and being unable to register with my Facebook account. But the app seems stable otherwise.

It’s simple enough to use: Putting up my $1,000 mouse from the year 2020 was a smooth process. But the app is still a raw product that could use more features, such as sorting items by category. I guess that will come in the future as well.

As is usually the case, there are plenty of such apps around in the US, like Tradyo, Antego, and EggDrop, but Natsakon claims they’re the only ones in Southeast Asia right now.

They’ve also laid down the gauntlet for any foreign companies who wants to enter the region. “We understand local market, our competitors don’t,” he says bluntly. They may need to watch out for Snapsell though, which has a very similar value proposition. They were the winners of the recent Startup Weekend Singapore.

But ShopSpot does have a headstart. They’ve been bootstrapping in Bangkok for three years, earning revenue via web consultancy and developing other web products. They’ve raised USD 28,000 from friends and family and another fifteen grand from JFDI.

Update: ShopSpot reaches #5 in app store category in 12 hours