Imagine a stock market for all your stuff: a place for buying, selling and figuring the value of your car, cell phone, designer handbag or dusty bottle of wine.

Add an online community, product reviews and ambition and you get Wigix: the WantItGotIt Exchange, a Web marketplace that began public testing last week.

A startup based in Oakland, Calif., Wigix has more than $5 million in venture-capital funding and about 40 employees and contractors, many of them in China.

Wigix has an ambitious goal: taking on the world of online buying and selling ruled by eBay and other Internet giants.

"The online auction industry is still firmly stuck in the 1990s," said Wigix CEO and co-founder James Chong, who was the architect of Charles Schwab's early Web trading platforms and sold a business software company to IBM in 2004.

Chong and the team behind Wigix are betting that buyers and sellers tired of eBay's auction system will be drawn to a marketplace that uses a model based on stock trading. They sense an opening as eBay's growth has slowed amid competition from Amazon.com and its rivals.

EBay users interviewed by Wigix to find out "what really bugs them" say their gripes include the auction experience and complicated seller fees, Chong said.

Wigix uses a "bid-ask" system. Shoppers can place "open buy orders" for an item at a set price, whether or not an item is for sale. Sellers offer items with their own open orders. When the prices meet, a deal may be done.

The "market value" of a listed Wigix item fluctuates, determined initially by how much owners say they paid for it and later by actual buying and selling.

Searches, instead of returning long lists of items for sale with varied descriptions, are meant to be more focused. For example, the Nintendo Wii game console would have a single Wigix page describing its features, current value and a listing of who wants to buy or sell.

A few days after the test, the the Wii and Apple iPhone and other popular items had multiple listings submitted by users, a problem the company said it is fixing.

Wigix appears best suited for "in-demand items of the moment" rather than the unique and quirky things often found on eBay, said Scott Kessler, a Standard & Poor's equity analyst in New York.

Addressing complaints about eBay fees and using the slogan "Keeping Fees at Bay," Wigix charges no commissions for transactions under $25 and no listing fees. Above that, buyers and seller pay $1.50 for items that sell for up to $100. Sellers pay a small percentage for pricier sales.

Wigix has seeded its site with listings for about half a million items and plans to add more, but the goal is to have the user community build an "all-encompassing catalog" of everything, Chong said.

To grow the catalog, users are encouraged to list their possessions so they can track their value or share the information with friends. Customers who add new items become "homesteaders," and receive 5 percent of the revenue generated by a particular item from sale fees and advertising on its page.

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