I've thought about something like this. In my mind it all comes down to receipts. We need a system of ubiquitous standardized itemized and cryptographically signed digital receipts. That way everything you buy aggregates into your personal inventory app. Then making a posting is a matter of one click and one photo. The UPC in receipt means a full product listing can be generated automatically. This is crucial since most Craigslist posts don't have sufficient detail about the specific item model and specs. But with a UPC or equivalent that can be pulled in automatically.
Once postings consistently have UPCs attached, you can figure out the market price for everything and push that to people who own the product when the price goes up.
You can also push out product recall and class action lawsuit alerts.
The receipt would really be a proof of purchase, since it's cryptographically signed. So it could be used to make verified third party product reviews without the conflict of interest of the site also selling products.
You could hook your personal inventory database up to your social network to make a lending library with all your friends. Why buy something new when you can search all your friends' stuff and borrow from them?
Why do you need the cryptographic signature? Who needs to know that I was the original owner of a tea kettle 7 years ago that has been sold in a yard sale twice?
Absolutely nobody.
Having an actual UPC (which coincidentally stands for "Universal Product Code") that is globally unique would be extremely useful. Further if all the parts were listed in the UPC (so it could be easily sold for parts, or even if I was looking for part abc123, I could find what products it is in), would be far more useful than caring who owns it.
The market price for two used hypothetical coffee makers¹ (same manufacturer/type/age) is rarely the same. One has scratches, stood in direct sunlight for years, and has a few parts in need of replacing soon, the other was used twice and has sat in a cupboard ever since. Both work.
Besides, who keeps receipts for anything but expensive items that might need warrantee? Most people don't. Sometimes you acquire something through different means: presents, inheriting, thrift shop, etc.
And that's avoiding the huge privacy matter of buying something with a unique tracking number attached and linked to you.
1: I'll take mine without hypothetical sugar please.
Selling is hard, but even giving things away is more difficult than it should be.
When you list something for free you soon find out how bad people are at communicating and how unreliable they are at showing up when they say they will show up.
Giving it away for free is a nightmare because you get time wasters - better to charge even a nominal amount which will weed out people who feign interest because they're FOMO for something that is free.
You can always decide not to charge the person when they turn up
EDIT - to tell a story about time-wasters: I once bought a 2nd hand digital piano on Carousell (like Craigslist/Gumtree). The seller was being super assy to me, essentially actively hostile.
For reasons I decided to persist and it turns out this seller had the only model of this piano in Singapore and so people were using him as a free showroom then ordering it online. He was so fed up of this he was convinced I would also be a time-waster
Works pretty much as you describe. Of course they sell it for cheaper (probably to get inventory out fast) than you might if you do it yourself and keep a part of the revenue as commission. But good if you don't wanna bother with the sales process.
I'm currently trying to help a relative who's a hoarder, and I have to say, reducing the friction of getting rid of things without just mass-dumpstering them would be a godsend
I think this is one of those ideas that needs scale to work well, like craigslist or ebay pretty much got rid of all the friction you can without propping up a fulfillment network and appraisers etc., but if anyone's got a good way to make it participatory/crowdsourced or is willing to hire some workforce to get it started, I'd be happy to help with implementation or strategy. I'm not good at the marketing bit but not unwilling to try
In the UK at least there are house clearance companies who do exactly this, typically after a death. They first look over the entire contents of the house, then buy it from you and either sell it on or dispose of it.
> and I have to say, reducing the friction of getting rid of things without just mass-dumpstering them would be a godsend
Yeah, that's a big problem with modern consumerism: with money to spend, buying stuff is too easy compared to the effort to part with it later.
Although if you 'have' to move fast, there's companies that specialize in house clearing (as another poster noted). Some thrift stores also do this, provided the resale <-> trash ratio is acceptable to them.
As much as I dislike Meta, Facebook Marketplace is basically this. My town also has a “swap shop”, which makes it really easy to give away still-useful things.
Post mentions the downside of this: you have to deal with _people_. I don’t necessarily feel comfortable with strangers coming to my house, and don’t really have time or energy to coordinate meeting people. I see value in this idea over marketplace.
Came to say the same. I often sell things within hours despite living almost in the middle of nowhere. People are glad to drive over an hour for all sorts of things and most are comfortable with digital payments.
I think this is a great idea. eBay did something vaguely similar when it introduced local agents who would sell stuff for a cut of the sell price. I used it and it was really useful for people like me who hate packing boxes working out post etc etc. I have a ton of stuff I'd love to get rid of if it was frictionless.
Maybe the existing delivery gig network could be used? Uber, Deliveroo etc? I like the idea of donation or paying for disposal, because that makes sense.
I guess it could start small if you could find a garage to store it in?
I wish there was something like a second hand store where you can just drop your stuff for 10% of its price on eBay.
I don't want to deal with anything. Not wait for someone to pick it up. Not wrap it in a parcel and bring it to the post office. Not sign up for some service. Nothing. Just drop my stuff, get a little bit of money and am done with it.
I built something similar to this for a client in 2002, I still have the Java source code. It was called CurbDiver [1], and the idea was that a local agent (a "broker") would list the thing for you on eBay (including taking nice photos), and if it sold, they would package/ship it for you and give you a percentage of the selling price (80% if memory serves).
It had some promising early uptake, but it fizzled after a few years. There just wasn't much money to be made, even when being discerning about what items were allowed. It was a weak, inconsistent stream of nickels and dimes, and a lot of work to get it.
One element that we underestimated was the volume of low value/no value stuff people wanted to try to push through. Pretty quickly agents learned when/how to say no, but even saying no consumes some resources.
At its core it's not a bad idea, but such an operation would have to be very optimized to be profitable.
I don't think its a great business plan. Its basically an online pawn shop, but the company has to take your stuff.
Warehouse space costs money unfortunately. Stuff that doesn't get sold, and its probably going >90% of items, has effectively negative value for the company, and then you add on transport fees.
People overestimate how much their stuff is worth. Take furniture. Since it costs > $1000 for decent pieces, people think they can resell it. Except in certain rare circumstances, used furniture is effectively worthless, even negative value when you take into account you have to pay people to haul it away, like I did a few times when I moved. Even though THEY would never buy used furniture, they always think "someone" will. And it goes the same for alot of used electronics. Cars seem to be the exception, but there's already goodish solutiosn for those CarMaxx, etc.
I'd like to use this service, too, if it worked reasonably.
Pre-Internet, there were consignment shops for clothing.
In earlier days of eBay, IIUC, there was a third party business with a chain of physical locations where you could drop off your stuff, and they'd do all the eBay hassle for you.
eBay and Amazon have tried some ways to improve the one-off selling experience for select commodity-like used items (e.g., iPhones). There's also ways to get Amazon to warehouse and list misc. items (but that looked like more headache and risk than it was worth, for one-off).
There's multiple businesses here that you can pay to remove most items, and I assume they cherry-pick some items for resale rather than trash.
Goodwill takes donations, and has staff that intercepts some items to eBay (and perhaps elsewhere), lets professional third-party flippers into centers (e.g., finding designer clothing), and then the rest can go to their retail stores.
That would be very nice. My suspicion is that a certain amount of work from the former owner, or from someone who is very knowledgeable about that type of object, is required to explain the value of the item to a potential buyer. Somehow the objects themselves are not the limiting factor (trash is full of good stuff that mostly stay there, because there is no one to do this work).
It could work if the item was originally bought on Amazon and one could just point to the original listing, though.
Unfortunately the potential for abuse makes this idea hard to implement.
Abusers would use the system to sell their drugs (ie, junk item stuffed with cocaine lists for $9999). Let’s not forget the sale of illegal firearms (aka teddy bear stuffed with handgun with filed off serial number).
Now you need a proper drug detection protocol, X-ray machines to scan all packages, dedicated security personnel.
Then there’s the potential of dealing with disputes buyer claims item was not received. More people to hire, protocols to develop.
Don't all of these problems apply to existing successful platforms like Craigslist or eBay? In fact, it seems like it would be harder to do on 'reverse amazon' than on eBay.
How would reverse amazon know to price your junk item extremely high? Seems like you're just losing a whole bunch of cocaine.
How would reverse amazon know to ship a potential illegal firearm buyer your teddy bear versus one of the others in comparable condition they have in stock? I imagine you could set up some elaborate code to make side arrangements, like someone agrees to wire you money and you communicate to them a very specific pattern of damage to look for in a used item so they know which one to buy, but at that point why not sell direct?
And people claiming not to have received items they purchased is a common problem to all online sales platforms.
Some services mentioned really look promising, yet none offers the convenience that I would love (not thinking about anything) but I guess I will try some of the mentioned services!
Something like https://www.refurbed.de/ or https://www.backmarket.de/. Works great for tech (higher resale value, small weight), but I can imagine it is tricky to set up the same business model for small non-tech items, furniture etc.
Remoovit.com does this exactly. They pick up your stuff, then either sell, donate, or dispose of it. If they sell it, you get 50%, or if they have to pay to dispose, they charge you for it. Works great.
I'm in a local parent group where people share second hand stuff all the time. It felt pretty efficient to me. I don't know, do we really want every interaction a big platform thing?
I had a similar idea and tried building it, but everyone I talked to about it couldn’t differentiate it from Craiglist or (eventually) Facebook Marketplace. User traction is the obstacle here.
That's called a "consignment shop". It's existed forever. Doesn't mean it's a bad idea. Taxis have existed forever and Uber is still a massive success.
Exactly this was made in my country, Lithuania, and did not work. Maybe needed more advertisement, but I dont think that economics work without burning investor money.
That is what charity shops do in the UK. You don't make money as your stuff are donation, but the charity does when then resell. Works surprisingly well.
The problem with Marketplace and Craigslist is the time they take. I can just send the stuff somewhere and wait for someone to buy it. I need to post it, wait, hope that someone wants it at the same time I’m selling, filter out scammers, negotiate the price, arrange a meeting place, and go meet the person and hope they’re normal.
For one relative high value item that’s ok. When someone had a lot of stuff to unload, or lower value items, it’s too much work or not worth the time.
Physical stores to make it easier for people to sell on eBay were a thing for many years. Most people didn't know how to take a decent photo or post a listing or just didn't want to deal with it. Those stores never had enough margin to cover the amount of labor involved.
EricRiese|1 year ago
Once postings consistently have UPCs attached, you can figure out the market price for everything and push that to people who own the product when the price goes up.
You can also push out product recall and class action lawsuit alerts.
The receipt would really be a proof of purchase, since it's cryptographically signed. So it could be used to make verified third party product reviews without the conflict of interest of the site also selling products.
You could hook your personal inventory database up to your social network to make a lending library with all your friends. Why buy something new when you can search all your friends' stuff and borrow from them?
withinboredom|1 year ago
Absolutely nobody.
Having an actual UPC (which coincidentally stands for "Universal Product Code") that is globally unique would be extremely useful. Further if all the parts were listed in the UPC (so it could be easily sold for parts, or even if I was looking for part abc123, I could find what products it is in), would be far more useful than caring who owns it.
adampk|1 year ago
Freak_NL|1 year ago
Besides, who keeps receipts for anything but expensive items that might need warrantee? Most people don't. Sometimes you acquire something through different means: presents, inheriting, thrift shop, etc.
And that's avoiding the huge privacy matter of buying something with a unique tracking number attached and linked to you.
1: I'll take mine without hypothetical sugar please.
criddell|1 year ago
When you list something for free you soon find out how bad people are at communicating and how unreliable they are at showing up when they say they will show up.
djtango|1 year ago
You can always decide not to charge the person when they turn up
EDIT - to tell a story about time-wasters: I once bought a 2nd hand digital piano on Carousell (like Craigslist/Gumtree). The seller was being super assy to me, essentially actively hostile.
For reasons I decided to persist and it turns out this seller had the only model of this piano in Singapore and so people were using him as a free showroom then ordering it online. He was so fed up of this he was convinced I would also be a time-waster
doomroot|1 year ago
victorbjorklund|1 year ago
Works pretty much as you describe. Of course they sell it for cheaper (probably to get inventory out fast) than you might if you do it yourself and keep a part of the revenue as commission. But good if you don't wanna bother with the sales process.
advael|1 year ago
I think this is one of those ideas that needs scale to work well, like craigslist or ebay pretty much got rid of all the friction you can without propping up a fulfillment network and appraisers etc., but if anyone's got a good way to make it participatory/crowdsourced or is willing to hire some workforce to get it started, I'd be happy to help with implementation or strategy. I'm not good at the marketing bit but not unwilling to try
blowski|1 year ago
RetroTechie|1 year ago
Yeah, that's a big problem with modern consumerism: with money to spend, buying stuff is too easy compared to the effort to part with it later.
Although if you 'have' to move fast, there's companies that specialize in house clearing (as another poster noted). Some thrift stores also do this, provided the resale <-> trash ratio is acceptable to them.
avidphantasm|1 year ago
shireboy|1 year ago
subpixel|1 year ago
jaggs|1 year ago
Maybe the existing delivery gig network could be used? Uber, Deliveroo etc? I like the idea of donation or paying for disposal, because that makes sense.
I guess it could start small if you could find a garage to store it in?
christkv|1 year ago
cushychicken|1 year ago
troq13|1 year ago
mg|1 year ago
I don't want to deal with anything. Not wait for someone to pick it up. Not wrap it in a parcel and bring it to the post office. Not sign up for some service. Nothing. Just drop my stuff, get a little bit of money and am done with it.
bombcar|1 year ago
If it’s valuable, you could pawn it.
Most people just drop it on GoodWill.
coev|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
DamnInteresting|1 year ago
It had some promising early uptake, but it fizzled after a few years. There just wasn't much money to be made, even when being discerning about what items were allowed. It was a weak, inconsistent stream of nickels and dimes, and a lot of work to get it.
One element that we underestimated was the volume of low value/no value stuff people wanted to try to push through. Pretty quickly agents learned when/how to say no, but even saying no consumes some resources.
At its core it's not a bad idea, but such an operation would have to be very optimized to be profitable.
[1] https://www.damninteresting.com/temp/curbdiver.jpg
SJC_Hacker|1 year ago
Warehouse space costs money unfortunately. Stuff that doesn't get sold, and its probably going >90% of items, has effectively negative value for the company, and then you add on transport fees.
People overestimate how much their stuff is worth. Take furniture. Since it costs > $1000 for decent pieces, people think they can resell it. Except in certain rare circumstances, used furniture is effectively worthless, even negative value when you take into account you have to pay people to haul it away, like I did a few times when I moved. Even though THEY would never buy used furniture, they always think "someone" will. And it goes the same for alot of used electronics. Cars seem to be the exception, but there's already goodish solutiosn for those CarMaxx, etc.
neilv|1 year ago
Pre-Internet, there were consignment shops for clothing.
In earlier days of eBay, IIUC, there was a third party business with a chain of physical locations where you could drop off your stuff, and they'd do all the eBay hassle for you.
eBay and Amazon have tried some ways to improve the one-off selling experience for select commodity-like used items (e.g., iPhones). There's also ways to get Amazon to warehouse and list misc. items (but that looked like more headache and risk than it was worth, for one-off).
There's multiple businesses here that you can pay to remove most items, and I assume they cherry-pick some items for resale rather than trash.
Goodwill takes donations, and has staff that intercepts some items to eBay (and perhaps elsewhere), lets professional third-party flippers into centers (e.g., finding designer clothing), and then the rest can go to their retail stores.
troq13|1 year ago
It could work if the item was originally bought on Amazon and one could just point to the original listing, though.
xyst|1 year ago
Abusers would use the system to sell their drugs (ie, junk item stuffed with cocaine lists for $9999). Let’s not forget the sale of illegal firearms (aka teddy bear stuffed with handgun with filed off serial number).
Now you need a proper drug detection protocol, X-ray machines to scan all packages, dedicated security personnel.
Then there’s the potential of dealing with disputes buyer claims item was not received. More people to hire, protocols to develop.
consumer451|1 year ago
acc_297|1 year ago
Or did I misunderstand
jovial_cavalier|1 year ago
jjk166|1 year ago
How would reverse amazon know to ship a potential illegal firearm buyer your teddy bear versus one of the others in comparable condition they have in stock? I imagine you could set up some elaborate code to make side arrangements, like someone agrees to wire you money and you communicate to them a very specific pattern of damage to look for in a used item so they know which one to buy, but at that point why not sell direct?
And people claiming not to have received items they purchased is a common problem to all online sales platforms.
antonpirker|1 year ago
I also got links to https://www.stuffle.com and https://www.circle-hand.com/ via the blog.
Some services mentioned really look promising, yet none offers the convenience that I would love (not thinking about anything) but I guess I will try some of the mentioned services!
maklu|1 year ago
jacknews|1 year ago
picklebarrel|1 year ago
Service area is just SF Bay and Phoenix so far.
a_c|1 year ago
moribvndvs|1 year ago
tootie|1 year ago
lnxg33k1|1 year ago
Euphorbium|1 year ago
jgrizou|1 year ago
karmasimida|1 year ago
To avoid scammers are hard though, so usually people meet in public place for transaction
Imagine you post a picture then exposing your home address that is scary
al_borland|1 year ago
For one relative high value item that’s ok. When someone had a lot of stuff to unload, or lower value items, it’s too much work or not worth the time.
dzhiurgis|1 year ago
In NZ only reason people don't give out their home address is when they are selling something defective so you wouldn't hassle them over it.
NietTim|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
dzhiurgis|1 year ago
marban|1 year ago
FrustratedMonky|1 year ago
coev|1 year ago
Thews|1 year ago
mmcconnell1618|1 year ago
rglullis|1 year ago
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jak2k|1 year ago
aaron695|1 year ago
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