I found out about OfferUp from a comment on [email protected] to post https://lemmy.world/post/1953789, by commenter @[email protected] .
The OfferUp site doesn’t let me look around as it’s geoblocked, and VPN didn’t seem to help. So I went off the Wikipedia description and Googling:
- Competitor to eBay and CraigsList.
- It seems to be around in some major cities, and shipping is available for inter-urban or less urban locations.
- It’s both for buying in straight-up transactions as well as bidding (a’la eBay).
- Most item categories are free to list items in, but it costs to put up more than a limited number of listings a month in certain categories.
- They have fees for the sales based on the transaction value
- They have some form of moderation
- They have some user based moderation based on ratings
- They tie user accounts to actual persons
- They don’t handle food transactions (?)
Based on these points I would be inclined to not considering it as a thrifting resource to add to the stickied list, on the other hand I’ve listed an auctioning site in Sweden as a thrifting resource, and might as well include eBay as well.
Your thoughts?
Yeah I use offerup but like you said it’s pretty much only active in certain areas. I’ve bought stuff locally on there occasionally but in my area it’s not super active, it’s something to check sometimes.
I am not keen about their site and app though, you can only search by zip code, not names. And you have to be careful about looking at the listing age because it’s just a chronological results list, not bad in theory but when you wonder why you’re getting no response from the seller then see it was posted 4 years ago…yeah.
Offerup seems to hate vpns which I’ve turned off begrudgingly to use in the past until nord locked me out of my account over some shenanigans on their end, which prompted me to get proton and now offerup works fine on it. Probably not a popular enough VPN for them to ban their ip addresses.
Anyway, it’s just one app I check sometimes. Fb marketplace being the most active in my area unfortunately
Thank you for the response, it is helpful. I’m leaning more towards not adding them to the list. I also saw that their user ratings were really bad for a “20+ million user base”.
I noticed the VPN part, and they seemed to block pretty much every exit point in the US for my VPN provider, even though I cleared cookies, caches and used different browsers to surf in incognito. Unless I left some sloppy crumbs.
