I think that without a local presence where items are screened, fraud/product misrepresentation/stolen items will be a significant issue - perhaps enough to sink them. They are essentially saying "hey, use our eBay account to sell stuff and we'll send you money". They have serious logistical issues to deal with, but I wish them luck because they are solving a real problem with potentially massive rewards if they can get it right.
It is absolutely real for me. I've got like two closets full of older but perfectly fine stuff (like the laptop I replaced with the laptop I bought this year) that I would feel bad throwing away but I don't want to bother selling through normal means (and none of my immediate friends is interested in having).
I would absolutely use this service to get rid of the stuff even if the offered price were marginal. In my case, I'd even be fine shipping the stuff out for free if the box shipping were pre-paid (but I may be an extreme case).
Having too much stuff is a first world problem, for sure, but sign me up.
When I had more time and less money I would buy camera equipment from people on CL, and resell it for huge mark ups. Most people just wanted it gone and were willing to get a little cash.
I bet they do a lot more volume than people are giving them credit for. I also think a smart phone app that allows you to take a photo and immediately send it to the company would increase their potential merchandise.
The non-profit will be very thankful and you won't have to keep wondering what to do with those closets.
Now the other aspect of the service, which is where they will post the item for you and set up the description, price etc and handle dealing with the customer, that's where the value seems to be. Most people don't sell items online because they have to set up an account, figure out pricing, make sure they have good ratings so people will still buy for them and deal with chargebacks.
Going to the Post Office is a huge hassle. Even when I don't have to go to them, but say, FedEx Kinkos, I have to deal with them instead (I literally had a FedEx Kinkos employee punch the top of my box repeatedly to prove that it wasn't taped up well enough for their transportation, to which one can only think "It's not my bloody fault that you don't treat packages with any respect.")
I think a great deal of the anxiety in selling is not collecting money (eBay and Amazon both make this trivial) but the worry about holding up your end of the deal, and whether the lost opportunity cost of the hassle outweighs the value of doing the deal.
I know I just put everything in a giant box to Amazon's trade-in system because I only have to worry about shipping once, even though I'd probably get far more if I sold it all piecemeal.
(broken right brifter, badly bent rear triangle / rear dropouts, etc)
Simple solution: use flat rate USPS priority boxes. Order a few of each size for free and stick them in your closet with a roll of packing tape.
You know exactly what it will cost, you can get a free next-day pickup from your house, and you can use newspaper for packing material.
Only works if you ship small-ish stuff, but it's brilliantly easy if you sink 10-15 minutes into the prep.
On Craigslist, buyers tend to be extremely flaky. Every time I've sold something there, I've wasted substantial time with people who arrange meeting times and don't show up. This happens many times per item. It's also overrun with scammers, although those are easy to spot if you know the signs. (Bad grammar, being unrealistically enthusiastic to the point of offering more than the asking price, mentions of out-of-state or overseas transactions, etc..)
On eBay, you have the ever-present risk of fraud. A typical scam goes something like this: Someone buys your item, you ship it, the buyer files a dispute, and eBay/PayPal take back the money. The scammer was planning to file a dispute all along, even if you did everything right. There's very little you can do to combat this, in part because eBay tends to favor buyers over sellers.
If Sold takes on all the hassle and risk of consumer-to-consumer selling, then I'll definitely consider using it.
If the buyer tries to scam them by saying the item was not as described, the escrow service (presumably insured some way) would deal with them and you're out of the picture.
It would add a few days of delay to purchases, but for casual items already being sent UPS or Fedex Ground that aren't time critical it seems like it could add considerable piece of mind to small time sellers and buyers.
(disclosure: i'm the lead mobile dev at Bondsy)
Ebay has done so much to build ill-will with sellers over the years, and with the recent fee increases it was almost too much for me to continue. I decide to hold my nose and list a couple of items anyway this past week, but the listing page is now broken in both Firefox and Chrome on linux!
Enough is enough.
It is a shame, though. The users generally seem to be pretty good, and I almost always enjoy dealing with them.
[1] I think I'd rather have my fingers run over by the car than make a trip to the US Post Office. Right up there with the DMV.
https://store.usps.com/store/browse/subcategory.jsp?category...
I'm curious if they provide packing material too - that was the other big issue for me. I typically used newspaper or peanuts from a box I had sitting around, but I still ran into trouble a fair amount of the time.
Look at Yardsale–they're a YC company and doing essentiall the same as Sold. I haven't seen much press about growth or follow-on funding.
Poshmark, on the other hand, is niche-focused (women's fashion) and seems to be growing well. Raised $15.5M. [2]
[1] http://cdixon.org/2010/08/21/the-bowling-pin-strategy/
[2] http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/04/poshmark-nabs-12m-series-b-...
Reading this stuff requires two passes for me.
Anyway, neat company. Unfortunately I don't think I have anything they would be willing to sell. This is something I would be interested in trying if I did.
Please bring this to Europe, we need it too.
Was the only way I was buying/selling PS3 games for quite some time.
Also reminds me of https://www.getyardsale.com/
Yeah, if something so trivial like find the right box stop you from make money, Bryan, selling is really not something for you.
They're definitely in the right path, but I think like any startup, they have some wrinkles to iron out. Luckily they have an amazing team and I think they'll do just fine in time.
I'm interested in seeing how Sold progresses. For the niche, pricier items that Sold is focusing on right now, I'd be more willing to invest the time to handle the sale myself since the payoff is presumably higher.
If they can just solve that for some fee I'd be pretty happy already. Buyout from Ebay/Amazon is likely if this works.
Basically I'd like my workflow to be: Put stuff on Amazon/Ebay...when it's bought the postman will come the next day and pick it up and deliver it for me. Kind of like a reverse Amazon-Prime.
Don't mean to take anything away from sold (amazing product) but we are starting a company that takes care of the shipping, for anything. Check it out if interested http://shyp.co
So I give you the stuff. You figure out if it can sell. You take a good percentage cut. You deposit the money for me. Just make the process transparent in case I cared about the details.
Which gets me to thinking, do services like Gazzelle make money?
For example, the auto-marketing of the product:
> With Sold’s app, you take a picture of the thing you want to sell and write a description. The company uses a mix of algorithmic and human judgment to figure out how much you can probably get for the item and sends you the proposed price. If you accept, Sold posts your product on whatever online marketplace the company determine is best—eBay, Amazon or smaller niche sites, depending on what you’re selling.
OK, let's assume Sold's price assessment goes without a hitch (and that's a big, big if)...there are a few things that it seems users will always want control of. If Sold decides my product would work best on eBay, then is there the appropriate configuration options so that I can define minimum bid and user reputation?
And if so, how much convenience does Sold's wrapper over this process give me over just directly using the service itself? And is it worth the fee that Sold charges (I'm assuming that it charges some kind of overhead)?
Now if I were selling lots of things in a fairly regular interval...how does Sold scale? If I were a craft maker/vintage seller, why would I pick Sold over Etsy, for instance?
I don't know if this is the case, but I'd hope they would completely abstract away the particulars of eBay vs Craigslist vs anything else. I.e. you wouldn't have to know or care about minimum bids or buyer reputation. Sold just tells you the price, you accept it, and they pay you. Problems with the eBay buyer? Sold absorbs that time and money cost. At least that's how I would want it to work.
> And if so, how much convenience does Sold's wrapper over this process give me over just directly using the service itself?
If all the effort and risk of selling an item is abstracted away as I suggested above, then that would be a great deal of value added, at least for me.
> Now if I were selling lots of things in a fairly regular interval...how does Sold scale?
I don't know the numbers yet, but I'd have to guess you'd be better off managing your own sales and shipping at that point. You could still use a marketplace site like Etsy or eBay. But I don't think you'd want a second layer of middlemen, which Sold is. It sounds like Sold is for one-off, consumer-to-consumer transactions.
If this works as described I see it as a simple way of getting some money for things you no longer need. You know that you could probably get more cash if you did all of the legwork yourself, but if you just want something gone in exchange for a few bucks then this seems like a fairly painless way to accomplish that.
This is drastically more convenient than dealing with EBay, answering emails, making calls, screening real buyers from non-buyers, or going to Starbucks to make a Craigslist deal.
The separation from competition that I would see as valuable are the two other aspects of the service: algorithmic sales and logistical support.
Great ideas from these guys, but in terms of the resources to work with, all things considered I'd rather be in the position of the incumbents than the scrappy startup.
This takes it a step further, and deals with all of the headaches associated with selling. You just take a picture, place it in a box, and you're done. I can definitely see a market for this.
Assuming the price I get is over half of what I'd expect to be able to get for it myself if I put in a lot of time, effort, and luck.
The whole point of this is to generate enough press to sell to ebay or amazon right?
Anything else is going to be too complicated for him.
