Show HN: Sell anything through instagram | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Sell anything through instagram

paytagz.com

16 pointskhamoud14 comments

I built something very similar earlier this year (http://thingsy.co), but pushed the idea even further by posting items to Craigslist/Kijiji/Backpage (using mechanical turk for item recognition).

Unfortunately, this couldn't scale because of classified ad websites limitations.

To this day, I don't know of any classified ad website that allows massive item listing through an open API. This would seal the deal.

That's awesome! I always figured that there had to be a better way of selling things than Craigslist currently offers. The issue is building an audience. I thought I would try and piggy back on instagram to maybe push me ahead.

Nobody is going to look for stuff on your website.

You need to:

A. Find a way to automate posting to Craigslist (good luck). B. Build a better marketplace (semantic?) that aggregates/pull content from Instagram, Vine, Twitter, Etsy, etc. If you do that, you'll need a kickass item recognition system.

Soldsie also did something similar with Instagram. http://new.soldsie.com/instagram-selling/. Looks like social commerce is heating heating up as companies are looking for a way to really get social to contribute to overall ecommerce.

I had a friend that was selling about 20 items a week on instagram. This seems like it would make it easy. Good job!

Neat! 20 items/wk is impressive. Would love to hear more. (link? :) Are they explicitly running a store? (Rather than posting items from their personal account.)

What kind of stuff is he/she selling?

She lived in Hong Kong and were selling small electronics (USB sticks/Gadgets/Key rings) Nothing major, just more for fun.

EDIT: *was

Chirpify did the same thing.

http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/23/instasale-chirpify-takes-it...

> Internal Server Error

Should be back up. Sorry about that. I upped the instances which might have caused it.

still down (or, down again?)

I'm so sorry about that. It went down again.

Great job! What do you think about www.depop.com?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com