and time yet for a hundred indecisions

saethyddiaeth asked: How does teetrade work? I have some shirts I am interested in trading, but the site doesn't really seem to have any clear explanation anywhere about how it works.

Yeah, it’s not as self-explanatory or streamlined as I’d like. It’s also not a really organized swap site like PaperbackSwap or anything—basically it just provides one place for people who use various t-shirt sites to post collections of shirts they want to get rid of and shirts they want to own, and then users can message each other and set up trades through their own Paypal addresses. Users can also post feedback on each other’s profiles to give others an idea of whether they’d good to trade with or not, although it helps more with establishing good traders than with warning off bad ones—if someone’s not reliable or not on the site enough, you just won’t get a reply, rather than having your money stolen or something, and there’s nothing to be lost by messaging a user with no feedback if they have a shirt you like. It’s not eBay, in other words, for good or ill (usually both).

TeeTrade works best when you can arrange an even trade with someone—you’ve got a shirt listed that you want to get rid of, somebody else wants that shirt, and they just happen to have a shirt you also want, so in that case you just swap mailing addresses, give each other tracking info when you get it, and then you end up with a shirt you want and so does the other person. No money is exchanged since the shipping costs are probably similar. 

Unfortunately, it’s usually not that straightforward. So, okay, let’s…well, let’s take some of my shirts as examples, and let’s just use the Tennant’s Timepieces one. I want that shirt, so I want to list it that way. I’ve already saved a picture of the shirt from the original site (well, in this case from the Tumblr entry I reblogged, because ShirtPunch has Flash slideshows instead of normal images…but most shirt sites, like Woot, Threadless, RIPT, and Teefury, make it easier to save their images, and if you have some idea of the shirt’s name, it’s usually easy to find just by Googling it), so I go to Teetrade and click Upload, then mark it as Wanted and fill in the information. I pick “Not Specified” for the shirt site because ShirtPunch is new enough it’s not listed there, although most of the big ones (and some that have been defunct for quite a while, like Shivtees and Teextile) are. I check off as many shirt sizes as I think might fit me, because if I want a shirt, I don’t want to be picky about sizes—definitely don’t want someone seeing my posting and going “Well, I have that shirt, but not in the size she wants, so no point messaging her.” I upload the image file I already saved, and I fill in a basic description: the shirt is brown, I want it either new or gently used, the artist is Shirt Punch (because it’s kind of pointless to hunt up the actual artist’s name, and in this case it’s a good place to say what site the shirt’s from), I delete location completely because I figure it doesn’t matter much and I definitely don’t want someone balking at messaging me about a trade just because I’m in Alaska and they’ll think shipping’s more expensive, and under trading terms I write “will trade $ or one of my available shirts”: I’m willing to just buy it from someone, but I’d prefer an even trade. I submit it, and the whole thing is listed under my “wanted” shirts, of which there are a lot. So then maybe somebody comes to the site wanting to get rid of that particular shirt, and they do a search for it and find my listing, and then they message me about a trade. If they like one of my available shirts, that’s awesome, and we’re good to go; if not, they’ll propose a price and if I agree, they give me their Paypal email address, I send them the money and my shipping address, and the shirt goes in the mail. Similar if someone’s looking to get a shirt and sees that I’ve got it available—they message me asking about terms, I check their available shirts and usually decide I don’t want one so I propose a price (oddly, the general response when a price seems too high is to not write back rather than to haggle, so…I don’t know), etc. etc. Or if I’m looking for a shirt (because honestly, the Wanted list is mostly just good for your own cataloging purposes) and I find someone who has it, and I hit “Trade Shirt” on the shirt listing, and I say I’m interested in the shirt, do you like any of my available shirts, usually they say no and propose a price, and we go from there.

Of course, it’s often not as smooth as that—like, there’s this shirt I really want called Wormhole Republic, and exactly one person on the site has it listed as available, and I’ve messaged her and never heard back. In fact, her profile shows her last activity on the site was in March 2010. That happens. I’m not totally sure how, because I get emailed whenever I get a message, but apparently it’s pretty easy for people to fall off the face of the earth on this site. Normally that just means you won’t get a reply when you message about a shirt, rather than that someone will drop out completely in the middle of a trade (I’ve had that happen once too, but no money was exchanged so it wasn’t a huge deal—and as long as you’re using Paypal, I think you’re pretty safe if you never get your shirt).

It’s far from perfect, in other words, and there are absolutely no guarantees in using it that you’ll get shirts you really want and get rid of ones you don’t want. But you might. At least a few times I’ve made good trades and either gotten my money back for a shirt I no longer wanted or got one I wanted more, and other times I’ve gotten shirts that were no longer available on their original site—a Gryffindor shirt for Calli from Teefury, for instance. I’ve also gotten a lot of shirts where I wanted the design but the only ones available were way too big for me, and they’re…sitting in a pile for me to get around to resizing them, which I’ve only done once so far, but it’s doable. So listing shirts you want or want to get rid of can’t hurt even if it’s not at all guaranteed to help you.

I should also add that the likelihood of getting a shirt you want depends a lot on what site the shirt came from and how popular it was to begin with. There’s a lot more from Woot on there than from any of the other sites, for instance, but Wormhole Republic is a (pretty old, I guess) Woot shirt and only one person has it listed as available (plus two as wanted)…which probably means the people who bought it don’t want to get rid of it. Coral Royale has 6 listings, all available, no wanted, so probably nobody really wants it.