SilkFair is claimed to be the true rival of EBay alternative for buyers and sellers online. It comes with a Web 2.0 looks and feels which made it more trendy and sleek. Sometimes E-Bay can be confusing and troublesome for the End users and not to mention there were a lot of E-Bay Boycott campaigns going on, even though I really doubt how to boycott e-bay since it’s been around for quite a while so they manage to have a large user base. But why SilkFair counts on my opinion cause It’s simpler and more easier to navigate, so for day to day general end-users will have more flexibility for what they are looking for and at the same time similar experience will cover for the buyers. Addition to all these SilkFair offers a SilkFair SandBox to test out their system, which is IMHO is just effective for anyone to find what lies beneath the hood. Signup and start a store for any buyer or seller is free. They are offering integration of popular payment gateways such as Paypal and also with google checkout. Enables users to rate products, items etc. More impressive part came when I’ve seen the actions to promote your profile on social networking sites like Digg and Reddit. SilkFair is going to be the leading Web 2.0 Socialized Shoppers and Sellers place. Each shop offers permanent urls, blogs for the shops and Individual Shop forums. I found it quite interesting that they have RSS feeds assigned with product categories. Quite Unique features are search by Color and Visual Search, you can see below such examples.

Search by Color is a unique feature which really brings different level of impression on the search feature.

Accompanying with Color search there is another Search Utility called visual search.

The Web 2.0 style ajax product hover options are not only handy it also added the overall advantage of quickly get the summery of the product without actually browsing the product page. Nifty! yeah..

At last but not least there was a question buried under my thoughts that why they choose the name “SilkFair” and I was able to find the my answer on their about page, which describes

“Our name takes its roots from the trade routes for commerce called “Silk Route” or “Silk Road“, established by the ancient civilizations of China, India thru the Middle East to the Mediterranean Sea. The ancient trade routes bridged the East and the West and greatly influenced the development and flowering of these great civilizations, and helped to lay the foundation for the modern world.”

Fair Enough! .. I am expecting SilkFair to expand more opportunities on Asian Market as well as European market soon.

Features at a glance:

For Shoppers

• Easy steps to become a member
• Great color search and item search
• View cool videos from stores on their collections
• One-step cart checkout
• Easy order processing
• Easy payment processing

For Sellers

• FREE store / FREE listings
• Unique URL with every store
• Easy to use, easy to setup
• Sell your products with video
• Import/export listings
• Integrated payment gateways:
  GoogleCheckout,
  PayPal Standard / ExpressCheckout,
  Authorize.net
• Customizable product attributes
• Blog and forum for each store
• Link existing ebay rating
• Double-blind feedbacks with unique Feedback Mapping. Ability to track feedback sources.

You can have your TestDrive at SilkFair SandBox or you can just try it out by signup for free. Another alternative Review can be found at AppScout.