Hit flip
Hitflip was a commercial internet exchange for books , DVD movies , music and computer games .
Company history
In 2005, the PhD students Andre Alpar, Jan Miczaika and Gerald Schönbucher of the Vallendar WHU - Otto Beisheim School of Management founded the DVD exchange platform Hitflip based on the model of the American online exchange platform peerflix . The main reason for this was the lack of a video library in Vallendar. In November 2006 the company expanded to Austria . Beginning of February 2007 took to the British competitors SWOPEX amicably and thus became the market leader in the UK . Next, the company planned to expand into the Netherlands and Switzerland . In the meantime, books, games and music CDs could also be exchanged on Hitflip.
The marketplace for media products "Hitmeister", which was launched in November 2007 by the same operating company, became the first marketplace with TÜV certification in June 2008 and has now overtaken Hitflip in terms of growth and is also making a name for itself as an organizer of important e-commerce industry meetings.
In 2008, however, the withdrawal from Great Britain took place, the other expansion plans were abandoned; on May 7, 2009, the Austrian business was connected to the German exchange platform.
As of mid-2015, the service has gradually withdrawn from business without further information to its registered users. E-mails were no longer answered and the customer hotline could no longer be reached. Sometimes there was a complete failure of the website, supposedly for technical reasons.
The hitflip.de page has not been available on the Internet since May 2016 . What happened to the credit deposited by the users and the associated flips for swapping remained unclear. On the part of Hitmeister GmbH there was no comment or a specific contact person in this regard. Most recently, around 275,000 Hitflip customers were registered on the site.
In January 2017 real.- took over the portal hitmeister.de . For February 15, 2017 was hitmeister.de in real.de transferred, the Hitmeister user accounts were too real - changed user accounts.
functionality
Each user offered his articles for exchange, the exchange price of which he set himself in the virtual exchange currency Hitflip . These have been split repeatedly in order to be able to better price articles. For example, 1 flip had an equivalent value of up to 3 euros, 2 flips a value of 3 to 6 euros, etc. If one of the items offered was requested, the seller received the required amount of hitflips from the purchaser . The user could then request articles from other providers again. In contrast to bookcrossing , the exchanged items became the property of the purchaser. A stored database served as an input aid when offering articles so that when entering most articles only ISBN or EAN had to be entered, from which the most important information (author or artist, title, year of publication, etc.) was automatically generated. It was also possible to offer articles without an ISBN or EAN. The reliability of the exchange partners could be rated on a scale from 0 to 5. The seller bore the shipping costs. The exchange platform was chargeable and designed as a FOAF network.
criticism
Hitflip came under fire after operators deleted articles they thought were too expensive. As a result, more and more users left the platform, which in turn led to new criticism, since the remaining users could no longer use their virtual currency hitflips to the extent to which they were used to.
See also
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ David Hugendick: Offer Tokio Hotel, looking for ... Zeit online , February 10, 2007; Retrieved July 2, 2008
- ^ Ralf Göthling: Press release from TÜV Hessen, July 3, 2008; Retrieved November 3, 2008
- ↑ a b Dinghy Hitmeister overtakes Hitflip . In: German Startups , November 13, 2008
- ↑ Hitmeister E-Commerce Day 2011 . Management consultancy Wiechert, March 19, 2011
- ↑ Hitflip.at forwards automatically to Hitflip.de (checked on May 7, 2009, 4:15 p.m.)
- ↑ Real.de takes over hitmeister , accessed on September 7, 2017
- ↑ hitmeister becomes real , accessed on September 7, 2017