Got extra parts lying around or struggling to find what your team needs?
BotSwapShop.com is here to make life easier. It’s built for teams like yours — teams that know the struggle of stretching a budget or tracking down that one perfect part. Whether you’re buying, selling, or trading, or donating, it’s all in one place, with features that let you sort by price, location, or brand. Plus, you can even handle shipping right through the site. Low-resource teams can make wishlists, and high-resource teams can fulfill part or all of your wishlist!
It’s fast, it’s easy, and it’s designed to keep resources moving to the teams that need them most—yours included. Give it a try and see how much smoother your season can be!
Currently, the monetary transactions must be handled outside of the website but that will be added in the next few weeks. When that is available on the website there will be a fee of one dollar for each sale. That money will go to our non-profit TECH Equity and will solely be used to maintain the site.
So we think this can be a difference maker for a lot of teams. If you have a part or two lying around that you could part ways with, please post it here!
Sellers have to go first - If there are no parts listed, it isn’t useful to buyers.
I’m sure there is no shortage of buyers, teams in need of resources, but it starts with sellers.
Please consider creating your account and posting an item or two today!
Its also unclear; is the price/qty each? Or the listed price for the lot (i.e. 4 units)
Additional feedback: not all required fields have * when inputting data for listing an item (like address’s). So its a little unclear what exactly is the minimum requirement to list an item.
@Jwal Great feedback. I appreciate the thoughts and we will try to add more clarity to the things you mentioned.
@PanicLemming we’re hosting it on a site that provides marketplace templates - mymarketplacebuilder
@Omuzder We are working out a few bugs with shipping, but by tomorrow shipping should be able to be handled within the site. International shipping can be arranged through the site as well - but be aware of any of the recipient country’s import taxes!
Last year we sent a used Falcon to Brazil - it was almost $200 to get it there. Then the BZ government wanted another $300 in taxes before they would release it to the recipient. The team couldn’t afford that, not that anyone would spend that much, but the Falcon was eventually shipped home.
My husband who coaches our team too is from Brazil - alumni of 1772 Trailblazers. When we have talked to Brazilian teams, and other international teams about their experiences getting parts, it really makes us see how we take the relative ease of getting parts for granted.
Our experience with these situations and others locally inspired us to make this marketplace.
This is such a great idea. Makes a lot of sense to serve this niche since sites like Ebay lack any robotics-specific search or categorization functions.
I didn’t want to ask about it until later, but on the swap site it mentions a future maintenance fee for transactions. I’m assuming that would be to offset that cost. That does seem steep to me as well, but I haven’t done any research on what all is included for that price versus other shop/marketplace style website builders.
@vegas_jen I’m not sure you would know how much of a % fee will be applied eventually? Or does it depend on how many transactions the site sees on average and it’s too soon to put a hard number out there?
@PanicLemming Yes, that price is steep! In our research, we could not find another Marketplace template site that did not require a good deal of web design knowledge and we wanted something that could be maintained easily for the foreseeable future, regardless of the current students’ skillsets on the team. Admittedly, this is a little too limited, and it does not allow us to do simple modifications (like how @Jwal suggested adding an indication whether the price was each for for a full set).
@kingc95 - We have not determined what the future fee will be, but we would be using it to offset that cost as well as others (accessing Google’s API, incorporating shipping into the site, & financial transactions). We pitched the idea to our sponsor, John Deere, and they funded the first year of the site. We are hoping to make it self-sustaining in this timeframe. The price does drop some for paying for a year rather than monthly.
We also are not allowed to link the baking to the school, so my husband and I created a non-profit, and when we have that fully set-up, then we will conduct the banking associated with the site through that.
The site can now handle shipping within the transaction. The seller can choose local pick-up or shipping as options when listing items. The shippers that are integrated are FedEx, UPS, USPS, DHL, and CanadaPost
We can also handle transactions within the site, so those people that need invoices for school/company credit cards - that issue is solved.
There was a request, as a buyer, to create a wishlist of things that you are searching for (that aren’t already listed on the site) - kinda like a wanted ad. We have added that to the bottom. It is a little crude now, but we are developing it out this week.
Please keep the feedback coming! It is helpful towards our goal of making this site worthwhile and valuable to teams.
And MOST IMPORTANTLY - if you have any products you could list, please do! I can see from site traffic, there is no shortage of buyers, but without sellers, the site is useless.
!!NEWFEATURE!!!
Hi everyone, you are now able to create item requests on BotSwapShop. There is a tab that now says “wants”. So when clicked on it, you are now able to create an item that is not listed but you would like to see or need. This will allow for other teams to see what you are in need for and get in contact with you!
