One of the main reasons we decided to create Zistle  is the fact that there isn’t a viable online collecting experience that successfully leverages the web. Beckett.com has attenpted to create such a community but their Becket.com is practically broken and the buggiest web app I have used in a long time. Beckett has great presence in the card collecting community and they obviously provide value to card collecting. However, they have been unable to translate their brand and market dominance into a functional online community and after visiting their site, it is obvious why.

Visit #1

On my first visit, the site seemed about one click away from crashing the entire time I used it. The load times were pre-historically slow and several times the site completely froze or timed out. After several unsuccessful attempts to add a card to my collection and several error messages, I decided to come back later because nothing frustrates me more than websites that aren’t working. Strike one Beckett.

Visit #2

This time, the site was actually working so I was encouraged. Maybe they had a rough day when I was visiting the first time. My goal was to add a Joe Mauer card to my organize tab. Thinking this would be fairly straightforward, I searched for Joe Mauer and it successfully loaded 2,422 results. I clicked the add icon on the first card to add it to “my organize”. But rather than adding just the individual card, it added all 2,422  Mauer cards from the search query. Nice! Now, in order to change this error, I would have to go back to the organize and delete every single card that I didn’t want in my collection. This is officially strike two.

Visit#3

A new day and a new set of bugs. This time, I tried to add a Johan Santana card to my collection but when I tried it told me I was not logged in even though I was (see pic below). So, I logged out (although it took me a while to even figure out how to do that since the logout button is a cleverly disguised key icon) and tried again. Again, it didn’t work so it wasn’t just a fluke. I also tried out their pricing tool to see how much my collection is worth. This is where Beckett has a huge advantage and an amazing feature to offer. So how much is every Joe Mauer card and one Johan Santana autographed rookie worth? $0.00. Nice work guys, seriously.

Now, I have not completed a full test of all of the site’s features but after three separate visits, every single action I attempted utterly failed. Being in beta does not excuse you from having a decent product. If it isn’t working, you shouldn’t deploy it, period. I mean at a certain point, aren’t you worried about negatively affecting the Beckett brand? I would think that anyone who tried to use this site would walk away with a more negative view of Beckett and their services. I guess they pretty much have a monopoly but still…

I think they have missed an amazing opportunity to create a compelling online community for card collectors and we know that Zistle will be better. Zistle is an easy way to build a collection online that automatically organizes your collection and makes it easy to complete your sets. Oh yeah, and our site will actually work.