eBay and Amazon don’t let you sell guns, and their refusal has led to a number of websites popping up on the Internet that try to give you the same ability to buy and sell used guns online. The only issue is that their design is universally terrible. Seriously, go look at Gunbroker or Guns America and try to resist the urge to stab yourself in the eye. But all that might change, as a new website, Defense Auctions, is launching this week that plans to give you all the features you want in an easy to use interface. And the best part is that right now its 100% free . . .
The way auction websites work is that they take a cut of your listing price as their fee for hosting the auction. And while this site will follow suit, they’re offering anyone who signs up this month 100% free listings for life.
Once the month is up, they plan on introducing an interesting fee structure. Apparently there’s going to be a mechanism that lowers the fees for people with good feedback or high ratings. From Adam, the guy behind the website:
DefenseAuctions was formed as a response to a limited market space in an environment that is increasingly hostile to gun ownership. When looking at online options for buying guns, the current choices tend to be limited, the sites not always easy to navigate, and the general consensus being virtually no concept of customer service. Our goal was to create a modern, clean, and easy to navigate marketplace to connect firearms enthusiasts whether buying or selling. Not only do we want to provide a high standard of customer service for all members of the site, we also want to encourage the same from users by implementing rewards for sellers that keep up a good reputation – this is done by reducing seller final fees for members with high feedback. We also believe that the challenges present through constant attempts to not only limited, but in many cases outright restrict gun ownership need to be met by providing more opportunities for folks to exercise their rights to ownership or simple enjoyment of firearms. It’s our hope to provide a simple, trusted, customer focused marketplace for like-minded individuals and to also help add positively to the firearms community.
So basically, their plan is to provide awesome customer service and an innovative fee structure all wrapped up in a sparkling site design. Sounds like a winner to me.
The site is launching this week with the bare bones features and some minor hiccups, but given that the people behind this work for one of the top three hosting companies in the world and bring some big guns in terms of coding and web design, the future looks fairly bright for Defense Auctions. The guys are asking for anyone with ideas on how to improve the site to step up and ask — I’m sure they’ll be watching the comments here for any ways to improve as well.