Here's how I would make it. No guarantee that I know what I'm doing... When you arrive there is a very brief 1 or 2 line summary of your service. "A place to

Here's how I would make it. No guarantee that I know what I'm doing... When you arrive there is a very brief 1 or 2 line summary of your service. "A place to buy and sell used university textbooks". Below there are two options (perhaps use an accordion type thing to expand the option when clicked) Sell your books: When clicked, show a friendly looking form: text book title, description, book ID (ISBN or whatever it's called), asking price, etc. Let them fill it in right then, and when they submit, then ask them to login (make it very painless). Buy cheap books: When clicked show the following options: search by name, ISBN, whatever. Or, browse. (Though I doubt browsing would ever be effective for this type of thing, but whatever) Now, words on how the site currently is: What am I looking for drop down... what is this? Am I looking for university textbooks? Duh, of course I am... What is this option even for? There are two things I'm looking to do: buy books, or sell books. No need for a dropdown here. I couldn't for the life of me figure out what I would do if I wanted to post my book for sale. I clicked "show all" and then saw a button to "add a new listing" which should really read "sell your book". Back at the frontpage, I realized that the top area is actually a link. This is not at all obvious because it just looks like header text and not a call to action. Add a button that says "sell your books" or something like that. And, final words that are probably the most important: Your sites needs user to be useful, and nobody will join if it's not useful. It's a chicken and egg problem, so you're going to be facing a very steep uphill battle to get enough people using the site in order for it to be useful... and frankly it's not that original of an idea so it's likely somebody is doing it better than you are already. Perhaps this place exists in real life, such as the university bookstore? Ideas to boost chances of success: Target your specific university ON the website. That's all I've got for now. Check out my idea here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1574127 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1574127