Photo shows Will Frederick (left) and Keith Rudder (right).
CULLMAN – Local Cullman citizens, Keith Rudder and Will Frederick, have created http://cullmanonlineyardsales.com, a Cullman County-only website for online sales. The site, which launched at 4 p.m. on Wednesday afternoon, has had over 6,000 visitors in the first 26 hours, 94 percent of whom were visiting the site from a mobile device.
“The idea has been around for about a year,” said co-owner Frederick. The site provides a safe and appropriate place for online activities that are normally conducted on Facebook or Craigslist.
Craigslist does not have a Cullman-specific market because the company does not view Cullman as a large enough community for that, according to Frederick and Rudder. Facebook, on the other hand, is an improper place for commerce, they say.
“What our site allows users to do is to have user reviews, 1-through-5 stars,” said Rudder. “This provides a kind of accountability for sellers and helps buyers learn about who they’re buying from. Facebook doesn’t have user reviews or anything like that.”
Along with the user reviews, the new website allows users to browse through hundreds of specific items, with subsections and filters to help buyers find exactly what they want, another feature that yard sale pages on Facebook do not have.
“You can’t look through or filter through items on Facebook,” said Frederick. “You really just have to catch them as they come.”
Once a buyer finds what they want on the website, they can contact the seller with the information provided on the website and schedule a drop-off for the item.
“We didn’t want to get into people mailing things to each other within Cullman,” said Rudder, therefore buyers cannot purchase directly from the website, but can contact the seller directly.
The website has been built and is run by the two men, and they are trying to keep the site as advertisement-free as possible to provide users with an as clean and unobstructed experience as possible.
“We could just use Google Analytics like every other site and just make money and go,” Rudder said. “But this really is for the community. We do want advertisements, but we want them to be all local businesses advertising there.”
Rudder and Frederick have another interesting aspect to the website built in: the community events and local yard-sales page. This page allows the hosts of community events and yard sales to post the info about their events on the page for any cullmanonlineyardsales.com visitor to see, which will work much more efficiently than a handwritten sign in sharpie stapled to a paint stirrer and stuck into the median at an intersection.
There are virtually no charges for users of the website.
“We wanted to keep it as cheap as possible for everyone,” Frederick said. “Now, there is a charge if you’re posting a lot, $6.99. But that is to help us cover all our costs. We have our own private server and that helps pay for that.”
Rudder said a year from now, he can see the pair contacting local law enforcement to ensure that there will be a police presence at the handful of secure drop-off points for buyers and sellers.
“Again, this is only for Cullman (County) people. This website is not for any other town or community. We could build another one for another county, but it would be its own separate website with nothing to do with this one,” said Rudder. “We’re just a couple of Cullman guys who want to help out the community.”
