StartupSD

San Diego serial entrepreneur Ryan Sit is at again, but this time with a sure-fire, can’t miss hit. PicClick is a nifty little tool that’s you visualize eBay and listings. Use the handy search boxes at the top to narrow search, adjust the image sizes to your liking, and voilà everything you ever wanted to see from both sites is right in front of you.

I’m certainly no power user when it comes to online auction sites, so I turned to someone who is—my mom (she’s really shy so don’t tell her I quoted her below). Though she would never be able to find the site on her own, I sent her the link, asked for her feedback, and got a glowingly positive review.

That’s pretty cool. It is a lot easier to follow than the regular e-bay. I don’t have to scroll through tons of stuff to see what I want. The graphics weren’t the greatest when I enlarged the pictures, though. I think I’d use it if I were looking for something to buy.

Sit was kind of enough to answer a few questions via email about PicClick.

Why develop PicClick? Who’s the audience, and why did you feel compelled to build it?

Sit: Well, I first built it for myself. I do a lot of buying on eBay, and found eBay’s standard website too slow and cluttered.  I really just wanted to see a ton of photos all on one page, without all the banner ads, wasted space, and paging that is on eBay’s standard website. It was the same problem I had before with Craigslist that resulted in listpic.com. Unfortunately that got banned by Craigslist a while ago.

I’ve been using it myself for the past 3 months and it has helped me find more deals faster than anyone else on eBay, and now I wanted to open it up and share it with everyone else.  Hopefully it helps people out this holiday season with the bad economy and layoffs.

What technologies are you using to display the images and meta data from eBay and Amazon?

Sit: I am using the standard eBay and Amazon open APIs.  On top of that I use standard PHP, XHTML/CSS, Javascript (Prototype & Scriptaculous), and MySQL.

Some of the design elements of the PicClick site look a lot like what you’re doing on Swurl, was that intentional?

Sit: Well, after developing a number of websites you sort of collect a bag of tools. Actually the visual interface was first pioneered at listpic.com.

Essentially the site is a straightforward tool to make it easier to find stuff on eBay on Amazon, are you trying to get Amazon or eBay to buy it or are you planning to build out more features?

Sit: No, I have no plans for selling PicClick.com. I hope to build it up to a self sustaining website. I would love any feedback anyone has, and based on the feedback I hope to make it even better.

PicClick works really well and could easily appeal to an audience removed from the web2.0 world, so how do you plan to reach those people and get them using the site?

Sit: I hope to be able to reach out to the existing large eBay community. Right now I’ve been trying to just talk to and participate in the current eBay forums/communities and make some friends.  Hopefully it helps enough eBay users that they help share it with other people.

Sit is also behind another functional site called Favtap. In his own words, Sit states…

Favtape is the easiest way to play music online. Favtape currently has over 20 million playable songs, and a large growing group of users listening to Favtape everyday. You can make your own custom mixtapes, play the top iTunes songs, top songs by year, and top artist songs.  It’s a pretty fun website to have local to San Diego. I would love to hear from local music people in San Diego.

So what you do think of PicClick? Plan to use it to make your online holiday shopping easier? Got any feedback for Sit on how to make it better? Let us know in the comments.