Top Webapps - Commerce

By Benjamin | May 2, 2008

Every probably has their favorite shopping sites. So I thought I would list my recommendations. Yes, most of us have used Amazon, Ebay and probably utilized Paypal to make payments. But here are a few others:

Craigslist - Craigslist is a free, online classifieds service that’s localized by geography. Do you need to sell that old refrigerator this weekend? Put it on Craigslist. Users can post items they want to sell and get responses by telephone or e-mail from people who live around them. It cuts out the middleman and often results in quicker sales than you’d get with other services such as eBay or your local newspaper.

In addition to a free-for-all buyers-and-sellers market, there’s also a job board that’s populated by many employers who agree to pay the $75 per category to list their openings. There are also house and apartment listings, personal ads, and an active user forum where people can talk about whatever they want.

Etsy - Etsy is an online marketplace for buying and selling handmade goods. Users can create their own virtual shop fronts to sell almost anything they’d want. Etsy has an integrated search tool that lets anyone search the site for goods and services out of a centralized directory. Users can also get into the nitty-gritty and design the specific look and feel of their own shops.

The site is a wonderful place to find the kind of crafts or goods you’d find at a local market–items that are often overlooked or simply diluted in the avalanche of consumer products that make their way onto other classified and auction sites such as eBay. It’s also a great place for people to sell their stuff without having to buy a special domain, write code, or hire someone to build a Web site, and pay for the hosting.

Kayak - Kayak is like Google for travel sites. Its search engine scours the Web to help you find the cheapest deals on travel services around the world. It searches more than 140 travel sites and lets you sort and customize the data. You don’t actually purchase the tickets or hotel bookings through Kayak, it simply directs you to the purchase page.

Some of its most useful features are the Buzz and Fare Alert planning pages. Buzz shows you the cheapest deals as discovered by other Kayak users in their searches. These prices are aggregated from historical data and listed when you do a search from your city. The Fare Alert service will send you an e-mail when a trip from one city to another becomes available at a low price, letting you pick when you’re going to travel by the cheapest price.

Woot! - Woot is an online retailer of goods. Most of the items sold are electronics, although you never know what will be next. The site sells a new product every night at midnight Central time and will keep it available until the next night or until it sells out. Unsold goods are then later sold (usually at a discount) in what’s called a Woot-off, where the retailer continues to sell new or previously listed goods until they run out of stock, replacing it with other items. Woot offs are well known for ending with the notorious “bag of crap” which contains a random grouping of items that are undisclosed to the buyer until it arrives in the mail. Bags of crap have been known to randomly contain high value items such as big-screen TVs and popular electronics.

Besides its standard store, Woot has three other variants that use the same, or a similar sales model. Wine.woot.com sells a new selection of wine or alcoholic items each week, while Shirt.woot.com sells a new user-created T-shirt every day. Woot’s other site Sellout.woot.com is a partnership with Yahoo’s Shopping site, and usually sells the second string items from Woot.com.

Zillow - Zillow is an online house-buying service. Instead of having to go visit houses in person you can do so online, browsing by neighborhood and narrowing down what you’re looking for based on a variety of parameters. It’ll do some of the legwork for you by figuring out how your house stacks up against other houses in the area, including how much it is per square foot and how much other houses sold for that were in your area.

One of the neatest features, however, is the option to ask a question to the sellers or the real estate agents. You can do so without even having to register. In turn, the service has effectively created a very large directory of real estate agents whose entire properties can be browsed, including houses they’ve sold in the past.