How To 5: Swap more effectively
When you are familiar with the Hitflip community and basic swapping, you may be interested in ways to swap more effectively. Here we will show you a number of steps you can take to improve your swapping experience, and increase the chances that people will request to receive your items.
Step 1) Listing all DVDs, CDs and Books you have
To get started swapping, first people need to be able to see the items you own, and what is available to swap. In order to add items to your library simply click on ‘Offer items‘ in your navigation bar on the right side.
You have various options for adding items to your library.
You can either enter the ISBN number, or the EAN number which, as shown above, is the number below the barcode on an item. You can choose to swap items straight away or just to list them in your library. Before you enter items however please read our guidelines for entering items on Hitflip, which you will find below the ‘Add item’ field.
Further down on the page you will find all the items which you entered as available for swapping and also all the items which are in your library but that you do not want to swap yet.
If you want to to import more than one item at once, check out our
‘Import item lists‘ option.
Here you will find several options to import many items at once.
The import item list gives you the option of adding multiple items, either by specify external website (URL) where there is a list of items containing ISBN or EAN numbers. Other options include uploading a text or CSV data file, uploading a Delicious Library file, entering a Library Thing pseudonym, or you can copy and paste your list of products into a textbox.
Step 2) Items in your library
As detailed in a previous blog article, when you upload items into your library either by entering the EAN number or bulk importing item lists, you have the choice of either setting your item to be swapped immediately, or you can choose to keep hold of your item for now.
Once you have listed all your media items at Hitflip you can easily change their status on your library page, if you decide you would like to offer them for swap after all, or if you decide you’d like to keep them a while longer.
Having items in your library even if they aren’t available for swapping can let other users see your interests and tastes, and may make them more likely to want to add you as a friend, or write a message on your pinboard if they feel you have things in common. You however have to make your library publicly available by adjusting your Privacy Settings.
Step 3) Increase Swapping potential
There are many things you can do to increase the chances that someone will request one of your offered items. The more information users can see about the item, the more likely it is that they will want to find out more and request to receive your it.
One of the main things that will attract people to your item is a good picture of it. Often you will find your items automatically have a picture, but if they don’t it is easy to upload one yourself. You simply need to click on the Upload Cover image on the item page, and you will be taken to a page where you have the opportunity to upload a saved picture you have, or to enter the URL of an image of the item cover. Your image will be added as the cover as soon as 3 people have rated it valid or more than 4 users have rated it with more than 60% validity.
You also have the opportunity to add a review of the item. Reviews also appear on the search results page, encouraging people to click and request your item. Just make sure that by adjusting your Privacy Settings, others are able to see your reviews.
It is important to make sure that your item is correctly categorised, so that people searching for a particular genre of films for example, do not miss out on seeing your item.
You can also increase the chances that people will find your item by adding tags to provide a bit more information about the content of your item, for example main elements of the plot of a film, or further information about the style of music on an album. Tags can be added on the item page about halfway down. You have the opportunity to add anything you like as a tag, see our example for ‘Lucky Number Slevin’ below
Another way to enable users to find your item more easily is to add as much information as possible about the actors and director of a film, the author of a book, etc. Then when a user searches for a particular actor’s name, or goes to the actor page, they will see your item and that it is available and may request to receive it. Also when users view an item with a particular actor in it, they are able to see a short list of other items with the same actor, and their availability. See this example below for Jennifer Aniston.
You can contribute by adding information not just to your own items, but also to other items to enhance the Hitflip user experience. This will be covered in more detail in another How To section. For now you can go straight to your Library and start to list all the items you have.
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