New feature - we're valuing your items, track how much you're saving

We've started placing approximate valuations on thingloop items so that you can:

• See the value of your sharing network, i.e. all the stuff people are sharing with you
  
• Track how much you're saving by borrowing
  
• Track how much people are saving by borrowing from you
  

The new statistics can be viewed by looking at your profile and groups.

Caveats

There are a couple of things that should be noted:

1. The valuations are estimates (see the next section for more info).
   
2. We are not currently able to value manually entered items, only auto-searched items from the web.
   

How are we doing this?

This is the boring bit, so skip it if you're not interested!

Basically, we search for pricing information during web searches, and choose the current lowest price for the item. This means that the estimates will be on the low side, e.g. the average DVD will be valued at maybe around £3 or £4 pounds, unless it's a new release.

Consequently, most of the values provided are on the conservative side, and may undervalue some of your items. We apologise for this, but feel it is better to underestimate than to provide wildly inflated valuations. The figures still provide a good valuation of the activity within your sharing network.

We are hoping to enable valuations of manually entered items in the near future as well. Watch this space.