What do you guys think of cryptothrift.com?
Since bitmit closed down, I've been looking for an alternative, and some weeks ago, I made an account there. Unfortunately, so far, my experience with them has been quite negative...
Minor problems:
- Annoying animated ads on the frontpage. This is already a site centered around selling me goods for money, why do you need to annoy me with animated third party ads on top of that?
- Altcoins everywhere. Normally I just ignore altcoins, but in this case they just help clutter up an already cluttered page layout.
- When clicking on a category on the left, not only is the layout completely switched around, there are no subcategories offered to click on, the search bar disappers, and the (broken) location filter is not even offered any more.
Problems of moderate importance:
- The location filter simply does not work unless you are logged in. For an internationally operating site like cryptothrift, it is really important for visitors to be able to filter out stuff that the seller won't even ship to them, otherwise finding things you are looking for is only that much more of a chore.
- There are too few categories, and only two levels of them.
- There are no category-specific attributes for searching (for example video memory, chip manufacturer and connectors for graphics cards).
- In the background, all prices are in USD. This is not useful for me. I live in the EU, USD prices are not important to me in every day life. I'd like to price things (including delivery options) in any currency, including Bitcoin if I so choose!
Major problems:
- You can give only two shipping options when listing an item, local and worldwide. This is a major problem for someone in the EU. Back when I was selling on Bitmit, the majority of my buyers were from inside the EU but outside my home country. In cryptothrift, I can now choose between offering those potential buyers really unattractive shipping rates or exposing myself to the risk of making a major loss on shipping if someone from Australia, for example, decides to buy my item.
The items I put up for sale are only visible when browsing the appropriate category when I'm logged in. When I'm not logged in, they just don't show up. I don't see myself ever selling my items this way.
On the plus side, the support is usually pretty quick to answer. On the downside to the plus side, they don't always manage to solve my problems...
As of right now, the only reason I'm still even using cryptothrift is because they are the only game in town when it comes to selling small time items for Bitcoin. I'm hoping they will step up their game and/or get some serious competition. If things continue like this, I'll probably rather just sell my things on ebay (or maybe hood.de) and exchange the proceeds for Bitcoin manually...
*edit 2014-04-09:
The issue with my items not being visible when I'm not logged in has been solved. I still don't know what happened there.
