I used Kijiji for the first time on the weekend, and I’m quite impressed. Kijiji is a free classified listing application created by the folks at eBay. It’s kind of like if craigslist and eBay had a baby.
My wife and I just bought a new house, and like most houses, it came with appliances. They weren’t the greatest, though, and we decided to replace them. The problem was, I didn’t know what to do with them. I don’t have a truck to take them to the dump, and I didn’t want to put them out on the end of the driveway and wait for them to be scavenged. The fridge I was able to give to a friend who needed it, but I didn’t know anyone who needed a stove. I didn’t want any money for it. I just wanted rid of it.
I thought of craigslist, but my local niagara.craigslist.com isn’t very active, and I doubted I’d get a reply in a timely fashion. My dad (of all people) suggested I try Kijiji. So, I posted it on Kijiji for and within an hour I had 10 replies. By the time I heard back from the first respondent, 3 more replies had come in. It was astonishingly fast for an area of this size. I really didn’t expect there to be so many users watching the listings.
The “winner” was from about 20 minutes away, and he came right over with his truck and his son, and loaded up the stove. We shook hands, he said thanks, and that was that.
Good things about Kijiji
One of my favorite things about Kijiji is how easy to use it is. You don’t even need to sign up to post a listing. Just your email will suffice, provided you confirm it. The listings themselves are sparse, consisting of just a title, a description, a price, and up to five image uploads. The images have a live preview and upload with a nice progress bar, so you can see what you’ve uploaded before you save your listing. If you enter your address with your listing, it will be automatically linked to a map, so people can tell whether or not you’re close by. (Unfortunately it’s a primitive non-Ajax mapquest map.)
The control panel (if you can call it that) is incredibly light. You can see your listings and choose to edit or delete them. You can also change your password. That’s it. When you’re done with your listing, you simply delete it.
People communicate with you by filling out the captcha-enabled contact form that’s on every listing. The email arrives with the sender’s name in the reply-to header, so you just reply to the email directly and call it a day. Nobody ever sees your email address unless you choose to reply.
They avoid listing spam by limiting the number of communities you can simultaneously post to, and by limiting the number of listings you can create in a single day. I found there was a lot less cruft in the listings than on craigslist. It was a lot more focused, and things are easy to find.
All in all, I found it a lot simpler and a lot more approachable than craigslist. Especially from a friendly-interface perspective. I could never get my parents to use craigslist, but they’ve already been using Kijiji for a few months and love it. They’ve sold a few antiques, a riding lawnmower, and have even made a few purchases.
