Like pictures? Like Craigslist and Kijiji? Try Shopcaste.
About a week ago, I put up a small pet project online that lets you easily search across Craigslist, Kijiji (in Canada only), eBay and other online stores. It's more of a simple, small and fun project while I played with Ruby and JQuery, but I created it also out of personal frustration from using those sites.
While I love having free local classified sites that let me buy and sell stuff (mostly geek toys), I find a typical "shopping workflow" on Craigslist/Kijiji to be less than optimal. Here is a typical one:
1. Go to Craigslist, search for "foo".
2. Scan each item text, and then click on the ones that look interesting to see the pictures.
RANT: I think Craigslist is one of the wonders of Internet. The UI has hardly changed over the past 10 years, yet it is still the most successful and widely used classified ads site. That speaks to early mover's advantage in a big way.
3. Open a new browser tab. Go to Kijiji (I do this only when I am in Toronto)
4. Do the same search again. Kijiji is a bit better because it shows pictures in the search results, but they are a bit small, so I usually still have to click on the link to see the larger pictures.
5. Open another new browser tab. Go to http://shopping.google.com/ (I do this when I am in the US), to see how much online stores sell the same item for if it's new.
6. Repeat step 5 with Amazon.com.
I don't know if I am the only person who does this, but I basically just got sick of doing that each time I want to buy something used.
So now, with a single search, you can easily search across Craigslist, Kijiji (Canada only), eBay and other online stores (US only) visually (yes, you can see photos even for Craigslist items). I also have the code to search on Amazon already, but I haven't incorporated it into the site yet.
Since I don't make any money out of the site, I have just hosted it on Heroku with a single Web Dyno. So the site might be a bit slow, but it should work ok.
You can try it out at http://www.shopcaste.com.
