Buying a Futon Just Got a Little Easier

It’s senior sale time and Harvard Sells, a new website, proclaims to offer a solution to the over abundance of offers.

As soon as seniors started wrapping up what are presumably their last finals ever, House and club lists quickly saw an influx of e-mails from seniors desperately trying to part with their now unwanted possessions.

With offers of items ranging from futons to mini-fridges, underclassmen have been forced to sort through the onslaught of messages to find the best deals.

Students looking to fill their rooms as they prepare for a housing upgrade next year (yeah n+1!) have been sending out generic requests such as “Anyone selling a coffee table/table of decent size $15 or lower?” or “LARGE DESIRE FOR FUTON, PLZ FULFILL.”

Keito Uchiyama ’11, a junior in Adams house and a computer science concentrator, noticed that many of those e-mails were getting lost in students’ inboxes.

His new website aims to solve this problem by allowing seniors (and other students selling items) to upload sale albums from Facebook onto the website.

Students looking for certain items can then filter through the sale items via the search box.

Uchiyama put the Harvard Sells website together in around seven hours after his last final ended, he said. He decided to use Facebook instead of other sites like Craigslist because “people always trust their Facebook friends.”

Since the website was created on Saturday, it has attracted 1,674 unique viewers (a bit under one-fourth of the number of students in the Harvard undergraduate body), tallied over 14,000 total page views, and received 621 item submissions, according to Uchiyama.

The most popular searches are for futons, fridges, microwaves, and other common large-sized items. However, there are also some hidden gems being sold as well.

Uchiyama said that the funniest item he’s seen on sale so far is Jeremy S. Lin '10’s fridge for $50—it comes with a picture of Lin, a star Harvard basketball player, in action.

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

CORRECTION: May 12, 2010

An earlier version of the May 12 FlyBy post "Buying a Futon Just Got a Little Easier" incorrectly referred to Keito Uchiyama as a member of the Class of 2010. The correct year is 2011.