How many of you are familiar with equivont.com for shopping, marketing your animals, and just trying to be your “one-stop equestrian stop” of sorts? I’d love to hear your opinions!
Thank you ~
Just googled, never heard of it.
A bunch of things just seem totally fake. Too similar, horses don’t always match descriptions, not enough info.
I have no idea what the end game would ld be, whether it’s fake it till you make it or a phishing scam.
I look at a lot of horse and tack sales sites. This one is freakishly sparse in details
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I appreciate your opinion, many thanks!
Did you have an interaction with them?
Also all the second hand saddles look brand new.
It seems all the saddle ads just link back to official saddle reps. It’s likely that the BNT trainers and the saddle sales were just scraped off online ads.
The horse ads are all over the place. No pedigree info. And in a few you can see the photo has been snapped from an online video. Here is my favorite.
No interaction at this point. I’m trying to see if the site is used much and what people’s opinion is of them.
It really looks to me like all the ads are put together by the same person. The saddle ads and trainer ads just link to pro businesses already online. The horse ads are wierd. Some of the photos are just photographed computer screens. All the photos are very generic.
It’s also interesting that they have a huge info page about scams with a huge list of known scammer emails. I’ve never seen that before on a horse sales site. Honestly I would not click through any links on this site.
Hi Scribbler! Thanks for checking out Equivont. This is Jessica DiCostanzo, Co-Founder of Equivont.com. I can assure you this is not a scam. Equivont was created out of selfish need- I was trying to find a facility and trainer for my horse when I was moving across the country. As no one in my network had any recommendations, I went online to begin researching. After finding many outdated sites, I got frustrated because I couldn’t trust the information.
I partnered with my riding buddy in 2018 to help solve the problem of connecting equestrians to reputable businesses digitally. We are still a young company, we are working everyday to grow our presence and usefulness.
I have personally called and signed up every business that is advertising on the site. Often times professionals and businesses have a lot going on, so as a complimentary service, we create listings on their behalf and send them for approval. We understand that there are lots of scams in the universe these days and want all users to do their own vetting to ensure personal protection.
As far as photos go, we are using photos provided by the businesses. Not all businesses have the appropriate formatted photos for our software so yes, we do take screenshots of these photos. Our goal is to empower small businesses and help them be found by the equestrians who are looking for them.
I would be happy to discuss this further with you over the phone 714-200-3133 or email at jessica@equivont.com. We always welcome feedback as we are a small business working hard to bring our equestrian community together.
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Thank you so much for your response!
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Thank you for your response! Glad to know it’s just a startup.
As a piece of feedback, you might want to look at a site like Warmbloods for Sale for the amount of background details people tend to want up front before they make an inquiry about a quality horse. Stood up conformation shots, video of all three gaits and whatever the horse specializes in, breeding, etc.
When a sales listing only has the bare minimum info, any buyer has to request all these details from the seller, and that’s really annoying for the seller if it happens over and over.
You can look on COTH for all the grumbling about trying to shop for horses when there isn’t good online information to make a basic selection!
I would also suggest putting the state or province in the address on the sales item because most of these are located in tiny towns and no one from another place would have any idea where they are.
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Hi Scribbler,
Thanks so much for the feedback! We aim to make Equivont.com as user friendly as possible- these are great tips.
I consistently use Equivont myself to shop for products and horses for sale.
Best,
Jessica
