Category: Articles About OddShoeFinder.com

A shoe exchange for amputees is not a new  idea as this article from the July 6th 1943 edition of the Chicago Tribune shows.

At the height of the Second World War, and with a growing number of amputees returning from active service, the Disabled Persons Association of America are reported as setting up such an exchange. The Tribune writes:

The swap and exchange service went into full business swing …setting up files that will help match left and right gloves and shoes for persons throughout the country.

Gloves? Wow.

The Tribune then explains:

The exchange is not a mail order service of actual goods. Rather, it is matching the names of users of the same sizes.

This is not far from what Odd Shoe Finder does over 70 years later. Of course we now have the internet. Like Odd Shoe Finder, the exchange had no fees (like us) and people who completed the exchange did so between themselves. Like Odd Shoe Finder, the exchange didn’t actually buy, sell or even stock shoes itself.

It was considered “considerate” for a person to send along a stamp for his reply to an inquiry.

Although, we’re not sure there’s really a market for odd gloves nowadays, it would seem that no matter how much things change, they also seem to remain the same.

If your shoes haven’t sold by the time the listing expires – don’t despair.

Our system allows you to simply and easily re-list your shoes again. There are no fees, and so, if you’re happy to keep them on the list and out of landfill, we encourage you to do so.

There are many reasons that your shoes may not have sold, many of which may be totally outside your control. However, there are some things you may want to change when you re-list.

Things to consider are:

Length of listing time

There are 3 possible times that you can set before the listing will expire. Set it to the maximum time.

Price

Is the price too high?  What are others charging for similar shoes?

How did you describe the shoes? Did you have pictures? 

A good description, including photos and the proper use of key words in the title can greatly increase the chance of a sale. Read here for some tips on selling your shoes faster.

Enhanced features help your shoes stand out

For a small fee you can add features to your listing to make it more prominent, such as bold and highlighted listings, and being featured on the home page.

Of course, with such a niche site, it still may take awhile to sell your shoes. The best long-term strategy for everyone is to promote the site; the more visitors to the site, the easier for everyone.

How to re-list your shoes

You can re-list your shoes after the sale time has expired by following these instructions:

1. Make sure you are logged in.
2. Go to the “sell” tab at the top of the page
3. scroll down to “I’m selling”
4. Click on “ended”
5. When the shoe comes up that you want re-listed, click “edit and re-list”. You will be able to change any details (such as the price) when you re-list it.

Odd Shoe Finder has introduced enhanced listings to help you get noticed and sell your shoes faster. While you can still buy and sell shoes with no fees, you now have the option to add any of these to your listing at any time.

Note that “automatic re-list” is free, but you must tick the box.

If you choose to purchase one of the enhancements you will be required to pay the amount listed. Currently we only accept PayPal for payments – though you can use your credit card to make payments through PayPal.

Here are some examples of how your listing will be enhanced.

Featured home page will put your listing on the home page for 90 days.

Anyone who visits the site will see your listing in the middle of the page.

Featured home page ads will also be prioritised for  listing on Facebook.

To take full advantage, make sure you follow best practice and include the shoe sizes in the title.

The screenshot below shows how a listing featured in search results will look. Note that this listing also has a bold title via search results. Having both  is probably redundant and is shown here only as an example.

You can also view examples of each enhancement here.

This is new for Odd Shoe Finder as, up until now, we’ve never had any fees of any kind.

It’s possible there may be a few teething problems with the new payment system. Your patience in this regard is appreciated, though we’d certainly like you to let us know if something doesn’t work right.

Finally, we re-iterate that these enhancements are only options and that the site still remains free to use. Any money raised will be spent on further development of Odd Shoe Finder.

At Odd Shoe Finder we’re always trying to improve our members’ experience, and to make our website as functional, efficient and useful as possible.

Feedback from our members directly led to the complete overhaul of our site in November 2014. Now, three months later, we’re still trying to improve – and are happy to hear your opinions on anything we do.

We’ve come up with a few changes we can implement, budget permitting. Depending on our members’ response, it may be better to just spend money on advertising the site in order to increase our user base. You can let us know.

Proposed Changes in 2016

“make an offer” 

At the time of listing shoes, the seller will be asked whether they will entertain offers below the “Buy Now” price. The seller can stipulate for example that all offers below a certain amount are automatically rejected, and/or that offers between a certain price will be considered, and/or that offers above a certain price will automatically be accepted.

A buyer, upon seeing shoes that he/she is interested in, can then “make an offer” for less than the listed price.

We think that this function would increase the likelihood of a sale.

featured listings

Buyers will be able to pay a small fee (Foundation members excluded) to have their listings appear in a Featured Listing section on the front page, and/or in bold and at the top of search result requests.

classifieds

A free classifieds section could be added to the website where members could advertise what shoes they were looking for (although this facility currently exists in the forum, but is not widely used).

The classifieds section could also be expanded to allow the listings of almost any (non-shoe) product. This would hopefully drive more people to the site, expanding the user base, and making it easier to find buyers, and the right shoes.

Mobile Friendly / Mobile App

Although probably the most expensive update, it’s also something we will need to do eventually. We’d like to make the lay-out of our site much more user friendly for smartphone and tablet users.

Would you use a mobile application if we developed one?

Please fell free to give us your thoughts on these or make any other suggestions by comment below – or by participating in our forum.

Since the upgrade to the new site it has become much easier for us at Odd Shoe Finder to add shoe listings to our Facebook page. There’s no longer any need to send us the link or photos as we can easily get them directly from our site.

When we type in the url of your listing to Facebook, and add your photograph, it will appear something like this:

You’ll notice that the title appears in bold and the description appears underneath. One of the four tips for selling shoes that we strongly recommend, is to include the shoe sizes in the title. Think about what you will say in the first sentence or two of the description as this too, will appear in the Facebook post.

We do not make any guarantees that we will add your shoe listing to our Facebook page but will certainly prioritise those who list them in a user-friendly way.

Share the Love

When we post something on our Facebook Page, the Facebook algorithm only sends the post to a percentage of our Facebook fans (Facebook are trying to encourage paid advertising).

If we post your listing on Facebook then you should share it on your timeline. Not only will that expose your listing to all of your friends and potentially their friends – but the Facebook algorithm also rewards posts that are shared by increasing the percentage of our fans who see the post.

If you post your shoes on your own timeline before we do, then send us a message on Facebook and we’ll share your post.

Other Facebook Pages and Groups

Many of you may belong to other Facebook Pages or Groups that might be suitable for advertising your shoes.

There are, for example, a number of Facebook Groups that deal specifically with the trading of odd-sized shoes, and many of you may already be members.

Please make sure that you only list your shoes for sale on another Facebook page or group by providing your link to your existing listing on oddshoefinder.com. This will ensure that you don’t inadvertantly sell your shoes to two different people (when people ‘buy now’ on oddshoefinder.com they rightly expect that the shoes will be available and not have been sold elsewhere). It also helps drive traffic to our site, which ultimately benefits all of us.

Note that you must always check first with the Page’s/Group’s admin as to whether they will permit the posting of shoes from our site. Apart from common courtesy, some Pages/Groups might expressly forbid it, or be reluctant to support something they regard as “commercial” (eg. making $20 from your shoes).

If they do allow for posting, then make sure you only use the url that directly links to your shoes.

In the above example, the url for the listing was

http://search.oddshoefinder.com/item/72087012/new-balance-101v2-blue-and-gold

and this is where users will be directed if they click on the post. If you enter the url, and add a photo, it should appear in a box similar to the example above.

If they don’t permit the posting of links from our site then please do not list your shoes with them anyway.

Grow our Community

If you haven’t already liked our Facebook Page, you can do so here. If you know anyone else who might be interested in Odd Shoe Finder then please let them know.

If you comment, like or share any of our posts on Facebook you are helping to help build our community.

Can you guess what five of these six people have in common?

Everyone knows how important photographs are to successfully selling shoes on Odd Shoe Finder (or any other auction-type website for that matter). So we understand how frustrating it can be when you start getting  error messages preventing you from using your photos.

Problems are usually related to the file size limits we have imposed or the allowable file extensions.

For the record, these are the limits:

Per photo:  up to 450kb 

Total file size of all photos across all listings:  1MB*

Limit of photos per listing:  12

Think about how you should best should use the available space.  The higher the file size of the photo, the less photos you’ll be able to upload. In our opinion, 200kb photos are fine for publishing on the web, but we’ll leave that decision to you.

The reason for a limit ultimately comes down to cost. The more photos that are uploaded on the website, the greater the bandwidth used. As bandwidth use increases, the site eventually slows down until we have to spend more money on hosting the site.  If the site becomes wildly profitable we promise we’ll increase the acceptable file size before we buy our brand new yacht.

Acceptable file extensions are .gif  .jpg  .png  and .jpeg  (as of 1/15/16)

If you have photos with another file extension then please contact us and we’ll see if we can add that extension.

How to Re-size your Photos

Many smart phones and tablets take photos too large for automatic uploading to our site. This means that you’ll need to re-size the photos.

The simplest method is to email the photos to your self.

When you email on your phone or tablet. you should be asked at what size you’d like to send the files.

In the example above, I could select “small” or “medium” and be within the allowable file size. Once, you’ve emailed the photos to yourself, simply save them on your device.

Most digital cameras allow you to change the size of your photos at the  point of taking them, in which case you won’t need to do anything else. If your camera doesn’t allow this, or doesn’t allow for photos less than 450mb, then you’ll need to reduce the photo size.

There are many free tools on the web which can reduce the file size of photos. Here’s a few we found:

http://jpeg-optimizer.com

http://www.imageoptimizer.net/Pages/Home.aspx

https://compressor.io

Finally, if you still can’t work out what’s wrong, make sure you contact us and we’ll try to sort it out for you.

* Foundation Members are permitted 5MB of photos. Other premium members may also have increased maximum file size limits.