There’s no shortage of ways to sell your stuff to the world at large. You’ve got auction sites, classified ad sites, even the mighty Amazon lets you post your products for sale. But there are not that many places which focus solely on helping you sell your digital wares.
Intubus is a new service which is designed to provide a quick and easy way for any artist to sell their stuff directly to their fans and others. The idea is you can upload your e-books, music, video, software, art or whatever to the service, add your profile and fill in the details of the sale, and that’s it. But then comes the clever part.
The service then lets you create a widget which you can place on your site, blog or other online area, which will show off your product for sale. But it will also simultaneously show off some related products, which buyers can browse. And more importantly, your product will be displayed as a related item on other people’s widgets. It’s the power of the crowd…geddit?
You get to set the price, the layout of your widget and all the other bits to help sell your item, then all you have to do is hope enough people see your item on your site/s and other people’s sites to attract buyers. It’s clever all right, but as you’ll already have worked out, it depends on how many other people are also selling their stuff.
One of the super cool features is the fact that you can create an Intubus shop page on Facebook through their app, which means you have a better chance of getting your products in front of more eyes, and since the listings don’t cost you anything (you only pay the service 10% once an item has been sold), it’s a pretty cheap form of advertising.
The whole thing is very slickly done, with a great interface and some very nice intuitive set up pages. It’s extremely easy to understand what you need to do, even for technophobe artists, and so we can definitely see the service appealing to those who are not very tech savvy. The main problem is letting people know that the service exists in the first place.
All in all it’s very impressive, and something that deserves to get attention. We’re hoping that the developers get traction before they run out of cash, but they’ll need to do some serious marketing if they’re to let anyone know they’re around. One to watch.
