At Auction Site, Items Going, But Not Gone

A duo of budding entrepeneurs have set up an online auction site to help students searching for elusive items like the 2002 freshman facebook or that out-of-print biography of serial socialite Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harrimann.

The website—www.CrimsonXchange .com—is designed to allow Harvard students to quickly find and purchase textbooks and other items of interest and evade the high prices at the Coop, said co-creator Sam W. Lessin ’05.

“No one at Harvard has any kind of time for shipping,” he said. “You want things when you want them. Here, everything is local, everything is going to be pertinent.”

There were 139 items up for auction on CrimsonXchange as of yesterday afternoon, although 121 of them were posted by the site’s three creators. Lessin hopes that more people will use the site as the school year kicks into high gear.

Students must register to begin posting and buying items. The cost of using CrimsonXchange is a $2 fee charged to every buyer for every item except furniture and electronics, for which the fee is $5.

Webmaster Nicholas D. Elprin ’04, who is also a Crimson editor, was hired by the creators because of his computer science expertise. He said he is optimistic about a future increase in traffic on the site.

“We had over 500 freshman sign up at registration,” he said. “We had a booth at freshman registration, we’re putting stickers up in places like Pinocchio’s and we’ve been sending emails to House lists. The personal feedback so far has been great.”

The items for the sale on the website include a collection of four wood chairs described as “standard, but perfectly fine for sitting” (current value: $15), a third edition Introductory Quantum Mechanics textbook (current value: $70), the Charlie Sheen classic Platoon, described on the website as a “Crazy Nam movie” that “comes up in a bunch of MR classes” (current value: $2) and a $500 gift certificate to The Wrap (current value: $400).

The idea for CrimsonXchange was hatched “in the extremely long winter of ’02,” according to its website.

Lessin said the concept emerged as he and co-creator Tali B. Rapaport ’04, who is also a Crimson editor, were hanging around in Mather House, where they lived across a fire door from one another.

In the months that followed, the pair slogged through the paperwork and legal intricacies, and recruited Elprin to design and oversee the site.

The site officially kicked off on Sept. 1.

Lessin says they are still working out the kinks in the system, but that he expects it to be very low-maintenance once it is up to speed.

He also said he would not be surprised if it takes a semester for the service to take off.

“It’s kind of a chicken and the egg game; people don’t want to register unless there are useful things posted, but they don’t post useful things if they’re not registered,” he said.

To promote the site, they are auctioning gift certificates to Square businesses, tickets to concerts and the upcoming Dalai Lama speech at Harvard, and an iPod (starting bid: $1).

Lessin said he wants users to post more creative items and services, noting that most of the items posted so far have been text books.

“We’re waiting for someone to realize they can post two hours of their time to help people move in,” he said. “I’m a little disappointed that there have been no outlandish auctions.”

—Staff writer Nathaniel A. Smith can be reached at nsmith@fas.harvard.edu.