Chegg is Throwing Eggs: The College Classified Battle Ensues…
Last week I spoke with the founder of CollegeMedium, another new college classified marketplace. Today I learn of Chegg.com, a well establish university classified site that seems to be winning the race amongst many of these sites popping up.
Chegg has over 650,000 textbooks listed in their database and are currently selling items such as furniture, cars, clothing, etc… With their intuitive and clear design, Chegg is extremely easy to use.
Chegg has an ebay look and feel to it, allowing users to sort the listing by highest and lowest price. On Chegg, students are also allowed to swap their services by bartering their items for something, which is a nice little addition.
Though these college classified sites are becoming extremely commonplace, I don’t think that they are having any real impact on Amazon which is probably the number one place that college students turn to when purchasing books for school. But it’s way too early in the game to even begin comparing Amazon to sites such as Chegg, Dormitem, and CollegeMedium.
And as founder of CollegeMedium pointed out: “facebook seems like the next logical step, I strongly doubt that’ll happen. A classifieds site is simply a different form of advertising, which is already facebook’s primary revenue stream. As such, creating a free-classifieds section would seem a bit counter intuitive.” facebook may not even be thinking about entering the market.
But based upon what facebook has written on Dormitem’s buzz page — “You’re on our radar” — I beg to differ.
Another concern that I have for these sites is the fact that publishers are updating textbooks by the year and sometimes even by the semester. I personally remember my professors demanding that we purchased the latest version of a particular book for class. So will many student purchase outdated books? I doubt it.
It’ll be interesting to see who comes out on top or if all these sites can co-exist? But from the looks of it, Chegg has a clear lead in this race and with the recent acquisition of textopedia.com and the $500,000 in funding, things may only be getting brighter for Chegg. However, this is still a very fragmented market and still up for the taking.
16 Comments
Dan
November 28th, 2006 at 2:49 pm
It will be interesting to see how all our sites do. Chegg has definitely got an edge in textbooks, but as you say, I wonder if there will ever be a site that can compete with amazon or ebay on textbooks. We’ve branched out with DormItem, using our tagging, to allow users to post whatever they want, which is a unique advantage.
Congrats to Chegg on their funding.
Aaron K
November 28th, 2006 at 7:35 pm
Don’t forget our own petaler Rohail’s http://www.walamu.com
David Askaripour
November 29th, 2006 at 12:33 pm
Totally right! Walamu is making big things happen over there in New Jersey. We’re in your corner, Rohail!
Rohail
November 29th, 2006 at 1:49 pm
Good to know I have you guys’ support! Suffice to say there are a lot of worthy competitors out there and Walamu is just getting started, but you’ll be hearing about it soon enough ;).
Dusty
November 29th, 2006 at 5:22 pm
I went to school at Iowa State with some of the founders of the site, and remember back to when it was CheggPost. Great to see that they’ve continued on with the site and are making a go at it. It looks and works great! I wish them all the best!
David Askaripour
November 29th, 2006 at 5:41 pm
Hey Dusty. Awesome that you went to school with those guys. I wish them all the best as well — hopefully they continue doing big things!
Osman Rashid
November 30th, 2006 at 10:35 pm
David, thanks for the article! We are working hard to create a place that is useful to college students. We’ll have a bunch of big and useful features coming out over the next few months.
David Askaripour
November 30th, 2006 at 10:38 pm
Osman, awesome! I look forward to seeing those upgrades
David Askaripour
December 1st, 2006 at 4:43 pm
Dan, you make a great point. The tagging feature is definitely a nice plus to your site
Craig
December 12th, 2006 at 6:14 am
hey guys, congrats on all of your sites. I currently am the co-founder of a similar site called studentbid, at http://www.studentbid.com and we are also trying to tackle the market. look for some updates in the coming month and good luck to all of you
David Askaripour
December 12th, 2006 at 12:51 pm
Good luck Craig. Keep at it!
Gaurav Sharma - A Weird Soul » Blog Archive » College Classifieds
April 8th, 2007 at 12:43 am
[...] chegg. AFAIK Chegg is the leader in this niche. They got $2.2 Million funding in January 2007 and got a $500,000 funding in an earlier [...]
Chegg - Rent Textbooks Instead of Buying | Helpmepaymyloans.com -- Resources, statistics, information and news about student loans, general finance management and more
February 13th, 2008 at 11:37 pm
[...] (and who isn’t) by renting books, check out Chegg.com and learn more about book renting at MindPetals.com. Bookmark to: Posted under Resources Tags: book rental, chegg, college books, [...]
Ahmed Hasan
August 6th, 2008 at 4:10 pm
chegg rules!
Paul
September 5th, 2008 at 10:31 am
Chegg.com is terrible! their customer service department is nonexistant. Over the phone there are no reps so your call is dropped and you are asked to call back. They do not reply to emails and their use of affiliate companies makes it impossible to get the right book if you are sent the wrong book. Do NOT use chegg.com!!!
Nick
September 16th, 2008 at 9:00 pm
I agree with everyone that Chegg.com is a disaster. They shipped out books to my brother and I. My brothers book came in the mail and they told me my book could not be shipped because there is no such address, Lets be serious….They just shipped a book to my brother at the same address! Then I called, the issued me a refund. The only thing is that they didn’t issue me a refund. Called them 3 days in a row and could not contact them. I contacted the Better Business Bureau and finally the answered, it only took four weeks to get a refund and two weeks for them to ship a book that never reached my house. Their company is absolutely without a doubt HORRIBLE. Stay away.
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