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?
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.
Also you're assuming the receipt from one transaction follows the item. That's not necessary. Every transaction gets a new receipt. But you would want a history of receipts for a Rolex or car.
Picture this, I submit the item to Craigslist with my receipt. It's not posted, but Craigslist verifies it and puts a check mark on the post.
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.
It wouldn't be linked to me as I envision it.
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.
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
I noticed there was this one spot that always had something there.
After living there for about 2 years I knew it was THE SPOT.
So when it was my turn to move out, I had to get rid of all my furniture and thought I'd give it a go: over the course of a day I got rid of two 3x3 ikea kallax, a 2m cupboard and a tv amongst other stuff. An old woman even tried to tell me off for illegal flytipping but the ONLY time anything lasted more than 30 mins was when a guy found the 2m cupboard and was organising a car to come pick it up for him. And he stood there protecting his quarry for about 1 hr (I could watch the spot from my balcony)
My fav was actually helping to carry one of the kallax shelves about 400m to the other guy's house with him.
The life of selling stuff via listing pages
"first come, first served", then walk away. Like one time I put the furniture and other stuff at the end of the driveway and then took a shower, and when I went back to look maybe 30 min later it was gone. deleted the posts and got on with life.
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 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
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.
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 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.
If it’s valuable, you could pawn it.
Most people just drop it on GoodWill.
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.
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.
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.
It could work if the item was originally bought on Amazon and one could just point to the original listing, though.
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.
Or did I misunderstand
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.
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!
Service area is just SF Bay and Phoenix so far.
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
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.
If it is low value, how do you know someone would want it anyway?
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.
