LOCSale.com: Website for Moving Sale

LOCSale.com

was developed in an effort of assisting people who are having a moving sale and those who are going to move to a new place and need some stuff from moving sale. I have been working on this website and that’s why my blog is not updating for a while. This post is to demonstrate the usage of the website, and a thorough starter guide. Although the interface of LOCSale.com is pretty straightforward, there could be some minor confusion because this website has two account system simultaneously.

The following article falls into several parts: Introduction, Registration Routine, Login Routine, and User Management.

Introduction

Simply put, LOCSale.com is a localized selling platform which provides you a uniformed personal portfolio page.

• The Idea

Basically, the original idea of developing this website is that I am going to have a moving sale in the coming future. And right now, how you having moving sale is just to take pictures for the items for sell, adjust them using Word or other editor, write down some descriptions, make a contact tab on the bottom of the flyer, and that’s it.

After making the flyer, you will stick it on your apartment elevator wall and wait for the calls. However, it is probably not only the tenants living in the same apartment are interested in your selling items but also those who live in the apartment just next to yours.

• What this website offers?

By using this website, the work you need to do is exactly the same as before. Taking pictures, writing some descriptions…but this time you just create your selling items on LOCSale.com, after you finishing your description and uploaded the photos, you will have a personal portfolio page where you can find all of your stuff as well as your potential buyers.

Furthermore, you can also just print the portfolio out which looks pretty much like what you used to make by yourself before, and stick them on the walls wherever you want.

In conclusion, LOCSale.com is offering an alternative way to get your stuff exposed on internet, so that not only the residents in your apartment can know what you are selling, maybe someone who is going to move into your neighborhood could also be interested in them.

• What’s the difference between LOCSale.com, CraigList and eBay

The major difference between LOCSale.com and CraigList provides local classifieds and forums and most of the items on it are just a single post, where LOCSale.com is focusing on assisting people who want their stuff be sold ASAP and do not care too much about the price(just as the moving sale holders want). And in LOCSale.com, if you are interested in something, you need to contact the buyer on your own and pick it up in person.

Speaking of eBay, it is an auction-based platform where you would rather care about how long does it take to sell your item but how much does it eventually get bought. That is a profound difference to LOCSale.com, the users here care more about how soon can their items be sold and sometimes they don’t even mind just sending their items away for free.

Registration Routine

As mentioned above, there are two account system existed simultaneously in LOCSale.com which provides you an alternative way to register and login with just several clicks. We integrate Facebook social plugins to make everybody’s life easier, and taking advantages of that, you can register and login to LOCSale.com real fast while normal registration and login is also supported.

1. Register using Facebook Account

If you haven’t logged into your Facebook account, you will see this page where there is a Facebook-style login button on the right side. By clicking it, a dialog pops up and asks you to log into Facebook first. Once you entered your Facebook account credentials correctly, you are done. You don’t need to fill out the form on the left, you don’t need to worry about the format, just log into Facebook, you are just one step left to get your sale done.



If you have logged into Facebook, you will see the page below where the register button is slightly different, but the great thing is all you need to do for registration is also simply clickin


.


2. Normal Registration

Of course, if you don’t want to use your Facebook account, you can always register by filling out the form on the left. After completing the form, just click the 『Register』 button on the left bottom side. If there is any error, for example, say you just chose an unavailable username, the system will ask you to pick another.

Login Routine

It is as easy as register is to log into LOCSale.com, as shown on the image below, if you haven’t logged into Facebook, you will see a Facebook-style login button on the right side of login page. Click it and a login dialog pops up, enter your Facebook account email and password, then you are logged into Facebook as well as LOCSale.com

.

On the other hand, if you have already logged into Facebook, the login button on the right side will look like the following image where the button is a little different, just click

and you are logged in in a few seconds.

After you registered using Normal Registration mentioned above, you can use your username and password to log into LOCSale.com by completing the form on the left side of login page.

After Logged In

After you successfully logged in, you will see the page like the following image where you can manage your items. However, in order to finish your basic profile, you need to specify your address first. As shown as the following image, there is an info box where its background color is light yellow which notifies you that you haven’t setup your address, and you should modify it first(details come in the 『Edit Info』 section).

• On Sale

This page is the place that you can see your portfolio as what other people see. You can choose whether or not to display the address and contact information in 『Edit Info』.



After creating all your items, you can go to this page to print your flyer out. And we even create the contact tab for you as shown as below. The contact tab is the URL to your own portfolio page on where your contact information and all the available items locate.



• Manage Items

You can click the 『Manage Items』 tab on the left to come back to this page to manage your items. One important thing to do here is to update the general information about your sale such like why are you having this sale, when is your deadline, or anything you want to provide. You just type some words into the textarea in the middle of the following image and click


. This information will be displayed on your portfolio page.



Create New Item

Now, you should get your pictures of items handy and click


. A form will show up, fill it out, choose the picture for it, and then
. That’s it, you just create all the items you want to sell.



Modify your items

After your creating some items, you can find them on 『Manage Items』 down the page. It looks like the following image where there are three items each row. You can modify your items’ name, description, category amount and price here. Also, it tells you what is the current status of the item.

If the item is Available, you can make it Sold, which means it is no longer available to public; you can Update its content; and you can Delete it. The difference between Sold and Delete is that once you Delete an item, it is deleted from database for good while you can still Unsold an item.

The status Reserved indicates that someone is intersted in that item and has clicked


. You should expect to get contact from someone in the following hours, and if the deal doesn’t work out or no one contacts you for the item, you can just Activate the item and it will become public again.



• Edit Info

Choose your unique portfolio ID

As you can see on the image below, the first part of 『Edit Info』 is to choose your own portfolio ID which is critical from other people to remember your own page. The format of the portfolio URL is:

http://www.locsale.com/show/{portfolio id}

or

http://www.locsale.com/view.do?show={portfolio id}

Your default portfolio id is your user id which could be just a number like 591329480 which is totally meaningless to other people. As a result, you can pick a good ID as you like as long as it is not yet taken by other users. For example, I just chose ifanchu as my portfolio ID, and my personal page URL will be

http://www.locsale.com/show/ifanchu

or

http://www.locsale.com/view.do?show=ifanchu

Edit personal information

You can modify your personal information using the form on the left side. Remember to Update after you fill out a form.

Edit portfolio display preference

The Portfolio Title will be displayed on your portfolio page. The default title is your full name, so you would possibly want to change it.

Edit your address

Since this website is focusing on in-person sale, you should always keep your address info updated so that the buyer can know whether you live near them or not. Moreover, if you did not provide the address information, other people can not find your portfolio by using Search because you even don’t have zip code available for searching.

Your Own Portfolio Page

After all this settings, your portfolio is public which will pretty much like mine. The URL for your portfolio is http://www.locsale.com/show/{portfolio id}, you can post it to Facebook using the Share tab, or, you can go to 『On Sale』 page to print your flyer out.

Conclusion & Feedback

This website was a product of my habit, and I sincerely hope that you will find it useful. Please leave me a message here, any recommendation is welcome and I really appreciate it.

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