Hotswap.com - Video Classifieds for Used Cars

Welcome to the new generation on classified videos. While people have been toying with this idea for a long time, it is finally coming to fruition. With the tagline, "Seeing is Believing," Hotswap.com is the place for video ads for used cars. It is free - anyone can list a used car for sale and they can list the car by category, cost, size, mileage, color, etc. They have a great search function for those categories on the homepage which add some creativity and fun to the search. The site is new, but they have a contract with a major used car dealer to add content and credibility to the site. (Dealers pay a small fee per listing and also pay for more advanced software to keep track of listings).

"Hotswap.com is the first company offering direct video to assist people selling cars online. Our technology, created at top universities, offers you the most visually rich and compelling way to sell your vehicle. Our wisdom community is completely user generated and Hotswap is completely free to use."

The creators of this site are right: seeing is believing. One learns a lot more about a car by seeing it in a video, particularly if the video does close ups and shots of the interior, which all helps to streamline the grinding search for a used car. The site is professional, creative and innovative...but still has a lot of bugs.

Are people ready for online video ads? Do enough people have video cameras and feel comfortable making their own video ad? Why haven't Craigslist and other common classified ad sites embraced online videos yet? Are they just slow? When I entered in a zip code for San Diego, no matches came up for that area, but offerings came up in Texas? Why is that? If there are no cars yet for sale in San Diego, they should not be showing me cars in Texas. They could tell me, "While there are no cars that match your request in San Diego, here are some offerings in a 50-mile radius" or something like that. In other words, the site idea is good -- the implementation needs some work.