Zilok Café > Zilok's business model / pricing strategy

Zilok's business model / pricing strategy

I'm new here (although I guess that's redundant, since we all are) but a couple of observations on Zilok's pricing strategy:

1.  Is it free or not?  I clicked on a nice big button, telling me I could rent my stuff out and get paid for it, and it had a big flashing FREE graphic on it.  But when I read the pricing page, it told me I have to pay 10p per item per month to have it listed.  So which is it?  Is it free or isn't it?

2.  I'll be cynical and assume it's not free, so my second point is:  Zilok is a new operation with (VERY) few items listed and presumably very few users.  That's OK - everything has to start small - but why would I pay 10p/month to list an item which, frankly, has (IMHO) very little chance of being found by someone who wants to rent it?  There are clear parallels between Zilok's pricing strategy and that of ebay but ebay has 2 huge advantages:  1) it's pervasive - it has a huge user base - so lots and lots of people will see an item I list there.   2) most ebay transactions are done through the post but for renting things that's not realistic (except for very small/light items) since the postage charges (both ways) would be too large a proportion of the rental charge - this further reduces the target audience for any of my listings.

I'd like to see Zilok succeed (for many reasons) but I doubt it will unless you encourage users to list items by removing the listing charge, at least until the user base has reached critical mass.

Absolutely pip! You are free to list and unlist any item at any time. But there is no fee once you have listed items, so you might as well leave them posted online. You never know, one crazy bloke could want to kayak in december !

Georges the Giant