If you are completely frustrated that you haven’t received one response about the flyers you posted to sell your couch, “need a roommate ASAP to make this month’s rent,” or “too drunk to write your term paper due tomorrow morning,” then uflipit.com is right for you. A hybrid of eBay and Craig’s List, uflipit.com is a new website designed explicitly for college students, where one can buy, “flip” (a.k.a. sell) and trade just about anything a college student needs. What makes it different? Uflipit allows students to specify their university when searching for buyers or sellers, essentially eliminating the need for shipping.
Uflipit was created by two recent University of Maryland graduates in business and marketing, Jarrad Lewis and Greg Soroka, who were irritated by the problems of trying to find a buyer for their apartment furniture despite the University’s nearly 40,000 student base. Their thought was, “if only there was a way to let everyone interested in buying know they were dying to sell.” Thus, uflipit was born.
Lewis and Soroka are hoping to corner the college market in a way that pre-existing sites in their genre cannot: make the site completely student-friendly. Only two years out of college, “We know what college kinds want,” Lewis said.
Uflipit already exists at almost every college in the country, and students have the opportunity to register their products and filter their search by school, making the market completely localized. The filter is not required, however, and students can also trade, for example, textbooks, with a student at a university across the country, even though that textbook might no longer be used here at UM.
To keep the site only open to college students, with the exception of a limited number of relevant stores selling new products, users need a .edu email address to register. Additionally, for students, the services uflipit provides are completely free.
“We want to emphasize the free,” Lewis said. There are no listing fees for students and the company makes no commission off of student sales. All products sold are student-related as well. According to Lewis, “Uflipit has all the cool stuff college students buy: dorm room d