[Angostura]

If I'm buying a game, do I really care whether they are in London or Essex? No, I don't - the game is going in the post anyway.

The UK list is a bit grim at the moment, mainly because you are mixing cities and counties into the same list. That comes across as strange, almost as if you are making a category error. Have you though of sticking to counties, or using sythentic regions (The South East, The Northwest, the Midlands etc).

[soc]

True for things like games you may not care, but for furniture, cars, and personals you probably do care. I think we will probably just show a map in the future and you can pick which region/town you in from there.

[Angostura]

If I were you I might think instead about asking the user for his/her postcode. Then the user can decide to rank hits by proximity if they want, or by other criteria.

I want the closest piano stool. I live in East London; some parts of Essex are closer to me than some parts of London.

[soc]

yea, good idea. We were planning on including the postal code in the post flow so once we have that people could browse based on proximity.

[Angostura]

I don't want to push the point in an irritating way, but I think you should think about amending the post flow....

Currently you have people selecting a region and THEN selecting what they want. It would be better to have people select what they want and THEN select how important the proximity is.

That solves (i) The arbitrary city/region issue and (ii) Lets you advertise on the home page the scope of what people can shop for, rather than advertising all the cities in a country.