ZTail is an interactive pricing guide. When you list things on eBay, you can easily check more than eBay to get an estimated listing price. ZTail will show you Craigslist, Shopping.com, and other related sites as well as let the community at large serve as amateur appraisers of the item. TechCrunch really hit the nail on the head when they described Ztail as a “mixture of Antiques Roadshow, The Price is Right, and eBay.” I especially see The Price is Right comparison.
ZTail lets you play appraiser. People list objects they’re thinking about selling. Other people assign a worth to that object. You can create a ZTail widget to put on your web site, allowing people outside of ZTail to assign a worth to the object.
As a user, you acquire a score, based on your accuracy as compared to the average price. You can grow your score by linking to other locations where a similar object has sold, which validates the price you chose.
ZTail also makes it simple, once you’ve set a price, to list your object on eBay with easy-to-use templates.
Right now, ZTail is a great idea but lacks, well, something. I suspect that something is people. ZTail depends on user-generated content – worth estimations, reviews, and products – to survive. It’s new, so it doesn’t have much of that yet. With a strong user base, this site could become a hit, and a lot of fun. Who doesn’t like the The Price is Right?
Here’s a great video from DemoGirl that shows all of the ZTail features:
Discussion
I agree – the monkey is soothing in a big brother sort of way.
To all the hard work that Ztail and their staff did – great job, but this to will not work – their original offering to help people list items for sale on eBay and then publish those listings on blogs or social networks failed. This is why they’ve morphed to this new “What’s It Worth” model. The problem with this is no one cares what “you (or I)” think an item is worth; only what someone will actually pay for it. Epinions reviews and other similar “wisdom of crowds” sites work because there isn’t a “definitive authority” – so there is value derived by viewer from the collective group input(s). With Ztail there is a “definitive authority” it’s what that person who is interested in that item will actually pay or has paid (on a historical basis – those less relevant based on current price fluctuations) – so what a group says means really nothing.
This site and its model is fundamentally an eBay listing tool which doesn’t materially assist households to overcome the challenges inherent on eBay which keeps them from selling on eBay or Amazon today. Households/consumers don’t have reputations so buyers are less likely to purchase due to the potential of fraud, the cumbersome listing and time consuming auction process, fraud from buyers and if you have multiple items to list (say DVDs, CDs, mobile phones, iPods, etc) you have to sell and ship each one individually – so if you have dozens of CDs/DVDs, a few cellphones and an iPod or two you potentially would dozens of shipments – and the vast majority of us are to busy for this versus the potential return.
The only real answer is the “Buyback” sites of BuybackDirect.com, SecondRotation.com, BuybackMadness.com, Nexworth.com and many others. Here you’ll get a price for the item (consumer media and electronics) immediately, ship all of the items to them and receive your funds via check or Paypal, many times in less time than to conduct an auction. Its a little bit less than you would receive on your own, but a lot less hassle and a better use of ones time.