One-Click Selling

I recently came across this article about a startup that wants to enable one-click selling. As someone who just sold a whole bunch of textbooks online, I found the idea interesting. Basically, they will send you a proposed sale price based on a picture and a short description, and if you accept they will send you the proper box for you to ship your item.

While I do love the idea of selling as quickly as I can buy, and not having to go through the hassle of writing up a description of every product I want to sell, this doesn't seem to be enough of an improvement on our current selling options unless detecting the item by the picture works so well that it's all I have to do. If I have to write a description, then I pretty much have my eBay ad ready.

Given my poor experiences in trying out Google Goggles on my phone, I'm skeptical that we can actually get good results when searching by images. Also, the easy products, such as textbooks with ISBN numbers that are just as easily typed as scanned, are already too easy to find on sites such as Amazon. And for electronics, too many of the differences affecting the value are inside the product. So even if the image search works well, I'm not sure it will add much value.

Seems to me like all they are doing is helping me find a box.