Rick T.

On October 9, Listia credits were sold at 4000 per $1. As of this review, credits are now 4650 for $1. That's a destruction of your credit value of 16.25% in only TWO WEEKS.

Listia better find a way to stop this credit value demolishment, or their site will be come even more irrelevant than it is now.

MY ORIGINAL REVIEW FROM OCTOBER 9,2015:

The problem with Listia starts and ends with the value of credits. As of this review, Listia credits are worth roughly 10,000 per dollar value. Listia will argue otherwise, but I'll deal with that in a moment.

First, let's look at how I value the credits: Listia sells Amazon gift cards, and other goods which have a set dollar amount. The number of credits it takes to buy them has skyrocketed in the last few years. And, this is true for all items on Listia where there is a SET and STANDARD dollar amount attached.

The prices in credits continue to move higher.

At the moment, if you want to trade your credits for something with real value you are looking at spending 8,000 - 10,000 credits for every dollar of value you receive.

The reason Listia credits continue to spiral downward in value is mainly twofold:

1) Listia continues to offer credits to people for doing nothing. You can "earn" EASILY 5000 credits in the first hour after you join. This is because Listia will give you credits for things that are virtual tasks, and that add nothing of value to the marketplace (watching a video, filling out your profile, etc). Listia will give you credits for referring others to the site. They will give you credits simply for listing items, and sometimes with special deals where the more you list, the more credits you get.

2) You can earn credits for doing outside tasks for Listia "partners." These "partners" no-doubt pay Listia for the privilege to advertise to you and capture your information for marketing purposes. Now, this would be fine IF the money Listia made came back to Listia users. One way Listia could do that is to BUY CREDITS BACK from users. Another would be to stop offering all the other free credits for doing stuff that adds no product to the Listia marketplace. There are other ways, but it really comes down to Listia's greed VS the strength of the ecosystem. At the moment, it seems Listias greed is more important than the marketplace.

Now, Listia would claim that the value of their credits is more. For example, they sell credits at the rate of 200,000 for $50. This would assign a value to the credits of 4000 per $1. And, although that is a disasterously-inflated number compared to just a few months ago, it does, at face-value, seem to be a better deal than the 8,000 to 10,000 I wrote about at the top.

So, what's the difference in the two numbers?

The difference is known as "the spread." As in, the "spread" between what Listia will give for credits (ie what they sell Amazon gift cards for), and what they want YOU to pay when you buy credits.

Look at this real-world example: Let's say you buy 200,000 credits for $50 from Listia. Then, you decide you want to buy an Amazon gift card. Well, as of this review, a $35 Amazon gift card is bid up to 245,000 credits. That's 45,000 MORE credits you will need to get something you could have bought in the real world for $15 less in dollars, but in credits, you need to come up with at least ******* MORE.

In REAL dollars, listia sells credits at the rate of 4000 per $1, or $0.******* each. But, they will buy them back from you (in the sale of gift cards and hard goods in the "rewards store") if you pay them roughly 10,000 in credits for every $1 of gift card or hard goods* (see below for "hard goods" commentary). When Listia takes the credits back, they are doing so at $0.0001 each.

The bottom line on the valuation of credits is this: It's like you bought a house for $250,000 and when you went to sell it, you were offered only $100,000.

That is ridiculous. No excuse. Totally unacceptable.

Listia must literally be LAUGHING at you.

Listia's founders are Gee Chuang, James Fong. They received nearly TWELVE MILLION in funding on top of whatever else they are scraping out of Listia. You can find out more about them and their investors at:

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/listia#/entity

If you use Listia, you better be good with a calculator, spreadsheet, and willing to lose money in transaction after transaction. Until Listia changes the mathematic-certainty that your credits are worth less each day, the site will be used less and less by people willing to do real trading.

*As for the other "hard goods" that Listia sells in their "rewards store," there is no way to know what Listia's cost is - if any - on those goods. Thus, it may be that Listia makes an infinite percent market up on those items. Those items may be part of marketing efforts by Listia partners where they give the items to Listia, Listia sells them for credits, and the partners get a new name added to their list of potential customers to market to. There's just no telling how much Listia makes on those deals.