July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

StorkBrokers, an online marketplace for child-oriented goods like toys and car seats, announced that it is launching today at the Launch conference in San Francisco.

The site is like a carved out version of the children’s goods sections on eBay. StorkBrokers also has an iPhone app that’s supposed to be easier to sell old children’s goods online. Users snap a photo and set a price and shipping cost for whatever they want to sell, and it goes online immediately.

StorkBrokers is trying to remove the hassle of throwing the same things up on eBay — which can take a bit longer than StorkBrokers — and be a bit less sketchy than Craigslist could be — because anyone is able to communicate on the site without significant moderation. StorkBrokers buyers can also rate other sellers as a way of ensuring the goods that go on the site have some quality.

The site doesn’t seem that much different from eBay, said Mint.com founder Aaron Patzer, a judge at the conference. He said it was still too complicated to post an item online — and that the site needed to focus on making it easier to sell things in bulk rather than individually. It was the same problem Etsy, an art selling site, ran into and was able to overcome because it built a strong selling and buying community, he said.

But StorkBrokers co-founder Sterling Hawkins said he wants the site to be a community, not just a place to post things for sale. The site has partnered with moms that actively blog across the country to promote the site and start building up an active community that wants to trade children’s goods around at a more reasonable cost.