Hey guys, I built this with the team at Fobo.net. It’s just a quick experiment I put together during the week.
The idea is to rent a truck and drive around the city picking up anything you want to sell. Furniture, appliances, etc. – anything of value that fits on a moving truck, as long as it isn't broken, in poor condition, or something you'd typically donate.
At pickup, we photograph your items, put them on the truck, ask for minimum selling prices, and notify SF folks of the deal. Highest bidder after 90 mins gets the item delivered. We have 100’s of interested buyers in SF so far.
Would love feedback. To cover the cost of delivery and movers I ask that you split the final price 50/50 on large items. Happy to wave the cost on more high-end items for now, just ask.
Hi Ed, former moving professional here. I love the idea, but I think you have a lot of logistical obstacles to overcome. I thought I'd throw some questions at you to think about (and maybe you have already).
1. What will you do if something breaks? (As the saying goes, if a mover tells you he's never broken anything, he's either lying to you or it's his first day).
2. What will you do to protect yourself against mistaken/fraudulent damage claims? (i.e. Buyer/Seller claims you scratched the DR table, but you didn't).
3. How will you load your truck to maximize space efficiency? The more things you can store on the truck, the more things you can put up for auction. As a mover, the first thing I put into the truck is the last thing I take off [0]. But you can't do this as to the dynamic nature of your business. You always need access to everything on the truck...which is surprisingly harder than it seems.
4. What will you do with breakables (i.e. china, glasses, lamps etc)? Different animal than furniture.
5. If I'm selling a large ticket item, why would I use your service? For example, let's say I bought a couch for $2000 last year and now I want to sell it. I should be able to fetch $1000 for it. If I'm patient, I could probably get as much as $1700. You're taking half. $500-$850 is extremely expensive to list an item on the internet and move it across town.
Not sure if the website has been changed since you made this comment, but at the moment the "How it works" section contains everything that was in that comment.
This is the fashion. Startup websites aren't supposed to repel you with technical details on the home page. "Furniture, truck, phone, whitespace" is enough. What more do you need to know? Just click the button.
It's not technical details - It's that I literally didn't know what they were advertising. It wasn't until I read the comment that I understood the pickup would be from me, and that 50% for them(written under delivery for some bizarre reason) meant that they would be keeping 50% of the price. It wasn't clear enough.
I like this idea quite a bit. Both selling and buying furniture on CL is a nightmare. I moved to the city 3 years ago from across the country and was forced to sell furnishings for a 3 bedroom house. I don't expect you will have much trouble on the supply side because CL sucks:
1. CL interface is abysmal. No way to tell people stuff already sold or to automatically repost.
2. Dealing with humans was trouble. From time to time, someone would show up and offer a fraction of the asking price.
3. People can't move big stuff.
4. We were particularly time sensitive. We like sleeping on a bed, but we also don't want to be stuck with one.
5. People come by at random times, or don't show at all, or schedule a pickup a 10 days in advance. It would have been great to just load everything at once and be done with it.
I understand you don't want to rent a warehouse, but a 90 minute auction is too short.
On another note, this business model reminds me of modcloth. When they first started, I think they used to travel around and buy up vintage clothes to sell on ebay. Much later, demand outstripped supply so they started contracting out to small shops to make replicas.
> 1. CL interface is abysmal. No way to tell people stuff already sold or to automatically repost.
While I agree that the CL interface is bad, it's quite easy to delete your post after the item has sold. Reposting is also quite simple, though like you said, it's not automated.
I consider manual intervention to repost a good thing. Since so many people don't even delete their postings, I can only imagine how bad it would be if re-posting were automated.
Love this idea! I signed up and am looking forward to seeing what kind of items are available in the coming weeks.
One little thing confused me about the dashboard: I can see that I have "free item alerts" on, but I can't find a way to see if I have alerts on for normal auction items.
In any case, great idea and I'm excited to use it.
+1 to NYC. I tend to avoid selling stuff on CL because I don't want to directly deal with the potentially creepy person that actually wants my stuff. I guess what I want is a minimal middleman that brings an extra degree of safety and convenience to the exchange.
It is a cool idea but seems to have serious scalability concerns. One truck can only hold so many items, you'll need drivers with CDL endorsements, insurance, fuel, etc. for every truck you add.
you don't need a CDL to drive a zipvan and they have a decent amount of space. They also include insurance and fuel although I haven't reread the TOS with this plan in mind, I think it might be acceptable.
OP if you want to get this going in manhattan get in touch.
Building an email list for this type of service couldn't be that hard. It's not like the users have to actively go to his site to shop (thus have the chicken and egg problem), he just has to build a list of people willing to get an email to try a new service. SF is full of people who like trying new services I'd expect.
A number of random thoughts come to mind. Apologies if this comes across as negative. I like the idea because it makes selling a hassle-free experience, but the way I am imagining it feels inefficient to me. "Free delivery" == $150 for a $300 couch? Or am I missing something? Does your truck sit for 90 mins during the auction? or are you making more pickups? If multitasking, isn't a truck a FILO storage for a FIFO process? Couldn't I sell on CL, get a bigger audience and hire a delivery/mover service if the buyer doesn't have a friend with a pickup truck? If a mover service is more expensive than you, then why? A quick search looks like I can hire a two man moving crew for $75 an hour.
The mean number of items in the van depends on the speed of pick up and drop off vs. the auction time.
If the pick up/drop off team is supposed to dismantle your bed/manhandle your new couch up six flights of stairs/plumb in your new washing machine, they could end up spending 30 to 45 minutes per job, so they'd only have two or three items on the truck at a time. So there could be plenty of free space if they pack it right. Then just staff the truck with two really strong people, who can lift a washing machine over a couch or whatever, and you've got almost-random-access storage :)
Assuming they're handling items in the $100-$500 range, i.e. their cut is $50 to $250, you could afford two guys even if they took 45 minutes per delivery - assuming you had enough demand to keep them working constantly. If they spend half their time on standby because of demand fluctuations, the economics would get more dicey on the lower margin items :)
If they get big enough, you can get vans with multiple side doors which would be more flexible about access [1].
It's an interesting point - cheaper items are not worth the time to the company to drive to pick up and subsequently to deliver, and more expensive items are not worth the cut for the seller, who can get cheaper pickup elsewhere.
Wait, I thought he was advocating that for more expensive items, its more expensive to find a someone to deliver/come pickup? In which, OP's idea works better only for expensive items.
I love this idea, but I'd love it even more if you donated stuff if it didn't sell so I didn't have to. Having access to a truck is hard when you live in a city and mostly don't use cars.
And you might want to flesh out a bit more on being a mobile consignment shop. I mean - the problem you're really solving is "I want to buy something on Craigslist, but neither the buyer nor seller have time to move it". No reason that should come with the restrictions of 90 minutes for moving.
I don't think my comment was in the nature of, say, a grammatical correction. If this were my website and someone found a button's hover state off-putting, whether they were right or not I'd want to know about it.
I didn't want to comment on the service itself until I had something important to say about it.
It's an incredibly important point for the firm, considering that design decision flies in the face of good design, presumably has been viewed/interacted with by multiple people at the firm, and is somehow still in place in the live site.
Details matter and you either get this, or you don't.
while I agree that details matter in design, a. it's not a big deal and b. mentioning it doesn't really add to the conversation at hand. I thought HN was all about trying to ensure that comments were useful to the topic?
If they do a lot of business, and buy more trucks and get more employees - and if not them, the competition after people discover that this is a viable business model - the 50% might lower with economies of scale giving them more room to take a reasonable profit.
Depends on how fast they can keep those trucks moving. I'd start investing in some math and software implementing that math in order to optimize those routes. You could tie it right into the auction website and give all the drivers webapps feeding them their next pickup/dropoff points. You would be able to charge based on distance/size calculated on the fly. I see room for making this really cheap. If you wrote good software for it, you could license the platform and not even actually do the business - this is a natural franchise.
Sorry, just rambling. I think this idea is great if done well.
Presumably people can or will be able to set up an RSS feed for items they're looking for (like a couch, bed, TV, etc.), and the truck company will standardize on terms to make it easy to see.
50% isn't that bad (or a whole lot) when a lot of the items won't be going for much anyway.
I'd see an upsell existing where you could pay $5 or $10 (or $1/lb) to extend the auction by, say, 24hrs.
The biggest problem I see is with a lot of leases ending at the change of the calendar month, there will be a surplus of items at the end of the month (as people have to leave), and a lot of demand at the beginning of the month (as people move in).
Furniture is very illiquid because of the transportation hassles. I bought three desks that had retailed for $500 each, for $33 each. That person would have been happy to get 50%.
In general, it seems as if there might be a market for people who want to get rid of stuff but want to expend near-zero effort doing so even if it means significantly sub-optimizing the revenue received (I raise hand for most any item under $100 or that is a pain to ship/offload.)
I'm fine with getting 50% for stuff that would otherwise sit in my attic or garage. That said, I suspect that this is a tough business. From what I can gather, most of the eBay-based versions of this have pretty much died out.
Edit: And I should add that, for anything that's bulky or a pain to deal with, I want it gone. I guess I'd be OK with smaller consignment items being returned but not furniture.
I like the idea that the truck is the warehouse. Of course it's an issue to get an item out if it's buried, but that's just a limitation on how tight you can pack the truck.
Putting things on pallets might let you slide them around and manage the space better. Also, I don't know the weather in SF, but I'd never trust the floor of a box truck to stay dry in the Midwest, and pallets keep things off the floor.
A make-or-break will be how much unsold stuff you end up driving around. I wonder if there's some way you can discourage stratospheric speculative pricing, by offering a better commission if the seller lets you set the starting price.
Regarding buried goods - it depends on the truck. I don't know about the US, but in the UK curtain-sided lorries aren't uncommon, making it relatively easy to access pretty much ever part of the trailer.
I'm really scratching my head. Does it mean load the item to the truck, find a buyer, then delivery to him without dropping it in a warehouse?
I don't think this is going to work. What makes you think there will be an eager buyer? Used furniture is not a very liquid market. Sellers typically ask for more than buyers is willing to pay. It takes time to find a match. Some items will not find a buyer after a long time or never. That's why we need a warehouse.
If I am a seller, what is my motivation to use your product? I could easily post my things on CL, tell the buyers to come pick up, and I get full price for my stuff. Where do you add value to the seller where CL doesn't?
Selling on CL is a huge annoyance. I've tried to sell a number of things there, and mostly get flaky "buyers" who never respond back after their initial "I'm interested" message. Then you have the problem of giving your home address to a stranger. I'd be open to trying this service if they ever expand out to the East Bay. I've got a bunch of stuff in my garage I'd love to sell, but the existing channels (CL, eBay, etc.) are total pains in the ass.
And from the other point of view, I've sent reasonable offers (based on local market rates) to sellers that "Had to have it gone by the end of the month!", gotten a "No way, I paid $X for this new just 12 months ago!" only to see it relisted the next month.
This system makes that "Get it gone now!" constraint real.
> I could easily post my things on CL, tell the buyers to come pick up, and I get full price for my stuff. Where do you add value to the seller where CL doesn't?
What fantasy land do you live in where this happens? I have never had a time it didn't take me at least 2-3 times to sell something, the buyer is a hassle to deal with if the item is large and needs a suitable vehicle for transport, and they want to haggle once they're on site.
I've had both experiences. If you are looking to get full possible value on something, expect to ride it out. If you just want to get rid of something and don't mind taking a little less than full value, I've had things get snapped up.
Most people don't have trucks and you don't have to deal with CL- reposting every 12 hours, dealing with people who want to pay half the agreed upon price at the door, telling people where you live, etc etc.
Yes it does eliminate people showing up to your house and giving your address out to God-Knows-Who. But this service certainly doesn't eliminate the reposting problem. You can only sell your stuff in a 90 minute window. In fact, using this service more cumbersome because you have to physically be where the merchandise is for the pickup. CL you can do at work and deal with the masses on your schedule. Plus, the truck problem isn't the sellers. Sure, YOU might not have a truck, but SOMEONE does.
My concern is, this product seems to be more valuable to the buyers than the sellers. Yet the buyers don't pay anything for the service.
"Yet the buyers don't pay anything for the service."
Well, it is a bidding process. So if buyers believe there is enough added value in this service, they will overbid the 'CL price'. So if a couch would sell for $300 on craigslist, presumably it could sell for that plus whatever the value of having the item delivered, let's say $400.
I think the bigger issue with this service, is that the cost of delivery of a large piece of furniture is relatively constant regardless of the value. So if I want to sell a $1000+ dollar couch, I have no incentive to use this service, it would make much more sense to sell it on craigslist and offer to cover the costs of a professional moving service instead ($500 vs $100-200). It seems to me that this service is most valuable for lower priced items. So if I can sell my crappy $100 couch hassle free, but only get $50 back, I would be pretty happy with that. However I doubt that would be profitable for the company.
I think you may run into issues of too many items not selling if you allow the owners to set the minimum. Perhaps you could offer a lower percentage cut if the owner agrees to a no minimum auction.
I wish you luck, but I don't see how this is sustainably profitable. People think their junk is worth way more than it is, and "minimum price" will wreck this.
Not sure if anyone's tried this (probably tons have), but what would be even better for sellers, would be some kind of a mobile pawn shop, that shows up at your door, cleans out your garage of all the crap you'd otherwise toss away or donate, but would rather have a few bucks for, and then re-sells it all on their own time. I'd choose that any day over holding a "traditional" garage sale.
This is actually a nice idea. Lots of potential. Congrats on building a MVP! Few things that come to my mind
- 50/50 split seems pricey!
- How about you do it differently ? pick up only those that have guaranteed buyer and you take a commision from both seller and buyer
I can see it working maybe, but still, it seems like you could just put something up on CL just as easy, and nobody is going to pick up your stuff and return it, they will just pick it up when they buy it.
Having recently sold some furniture on CL, the number one problem buyers said was "I want this but can you deliver?" Nobody has transportation for big furniture. It's a source of friction between buyers and sellers for sure.
Fix the hover effect on the buttons. The click too. Don't remove the border, make it white. Or if you remove it, put a margin that is the same height as the border was.
They don't accept Mattresses or Appliances which is probably a big market by itself. Half of the CL ads (in my area) in furniture are beds and mattresses.
The thing that really stands out is comprehensive and liability insurance? What happens if someone is injured moving a someone's stuff, or if the truck has an accident and its content are damaged, or even stolen?
You put a incredible amount of liability on yourself with this idea.
The idea is to rent a truck and drive around the city picking up anything you want to sell. Furniture, appliances, etc. – anything of value that fits on a moving truck, as long as it isn't broken, in poor condition, or something you'd typically donate.
At pickup, we photograph your items, put them on the truck, ask for minimum selling prices, and notify SF folks of the deal. Highest bidder after 90 mins gets the item delivered. We have 100’s of interested buyers in SF so far.
Would love feedback. To cover the cost of delivery and movers I ask that you split the final price 50/50 on large items. Happy to wave the cost on more high-end items for now, just ask.