Finally hammering this last part of the review out was important. I’ve been caught up in work lately but wanted to take some time out of my Sunday to do it. I think most of the relevant and important information one needs to know about the site is already available in the interview.  Despite that I wanted to take people through the process of registering and point out the items of note I saw.

The information required to register is pretty sparse. For me this is ideal as I don’t really want to give my life story to simply have access to an account. I feel that only data needed should be the only data asked for.

Like most websites I had to confirm my email. I had already logged into my email to do this.

Naughty! This was the first pop-up I received when entering the site. Luckily I always block this or run a VPN/Proxy. Luckily, blocking it doesn’t impeded the use of the site what so ever. I have yet to hear back from the founder so I can’t answer specifically why this tries to grab your location. I’m guess it’s one of those convenience/comfort services where it automatically filters to your location or assigns your home state, etc.

These are the trackers they run. All pretty standard for a business or social media site. It helps to be informed about what these trackers do and what they mean for you.

The welcome email when registering is pretty succinct and keeps with the casual tone that is set throughout the site.

During my short time browsing the site I did experience the site itself go down. I’m not sure if it was due to server overload or what. I’ve mentioned this to the founder and I haven’t heard a response yet. I know one of the main concerns of people looking to migrate here as a primary buy/sell site would be the reliability and longevity of the site itself. Nobody wants to build up a reputation for a site that doesn’t stay online reliably or goes under 10 months from now.

You wont find generic categories here which is really nice. The impression that the site is tailored made for what you wanna sell or buy is great. I’ve already mentioned I’d like to see further expansion of the categories in my interview with Justin.

They recently added a chat feature which I attempted to use while browsing the site and got no response. It wasn’t really apparent if there was someone there or not as there was no obvious “Offline” or “Online” notification, just a chat window. I’m hoping the staff can shed some more light on this via email and I’ll update this section of the walk through.

Overall they have a clean UI and website as a whole. I’m not going to go into the buying, selling or posting experience as that is user driven and I don’t think really reflects accurately on the business itself.

As with all second hand markets, especially online. Some items look suspiciously like government property. Some items are also illegal in certain states. BLKMKT currently is not aggressively policing their posts. Shop with care, take due diligence to verify you aren’t buying stolen or illegal items and hopefully BLKMKT will remain under the jurisdiction of big boy rules.

In closing. If you are on the fence about BLKMKT just consider you don’t have to make 35 quality posts to get access to their market. That’s lure enough alone for some people.