Jay Review

Jay,

Your site has a lot of potential to become an integral part of the student experience.  A site which manages to provide a means for students to easily swap goods is extremely valuable.  

One thing you need to work hard at is differentiating yourself from other websites.  Whether you do that through a higher level of ease of use, extra features, or very good advertising, it is essential that your site be seen as different.

I was researching your business model and came across a very informative article from the Stanford Daily archives.  This article which I've attached an url to describes several trading websites.  The thing that is most interesting about this article is that since its older, you can see how the sites are doing now.  For example, the site swap-swap.com is no longer a valid url, which means that the site failed, but with some details of the site in the article you can see what they did, figure out what it did wrong, and work to avoid the same problems that they had.

Also, just yesterday I received an email to a website that was taking SU-market posts and putting them up on the site with the email address of the person that posted it.  It is unclear whether or not SUPost is actually reading the data from SU market and classifying it, or if it is independent, and just fueled by emails sent out.

I like your site, it is very well done and looks to have a lot of potential.  However, because there is a lot of competition, and market penetration is especially difficult and important, I would look to differentiate yourself from other services by offering features, services, or organization that is completely different than those already around.