Why does something like this work vs eBay?
Sorry if this was addressed in the article, but there was a paywall to read.
Sorry if this was addressed in the article, but there was a paywall to read.
* Counterfeit expertise. Counterfeits are common with high-end sneakers.
* Presentation focused on shoes and not goods. Why is this shoe important amongst the many shoes available?
* Superior search and discovery.
Tracking sneaker values has long been Mr. Luber’s obsession. In the late 2000s, he was a strategy analyst at IBM in New York who spent his nights trawling eBay for data on how much sought-after shoes were selling for on the secondary market. He compiled those figures into Campless, a sort of Kelly Blue Book for sneaker-resale value. But Mr. Luber wasn’t satisfied with eBay. His beefs weren’t limited to the bad photos that sellers posted or their habit of selling fakes. What really bugged him was the absence of price standardization. One dealer might peddle a pair of Nike Dunks for $100 and another might list the same shoes for $300. Mr. Luber envisioned a more orderly market, with a New York Stock Exchange-style ticker, that would make the value of a pair of sneakers transparent, in real time. When those Dunks sold for $100, everyone on the market would know about it, thus forcing other sellers to knock their prices down to the going rate.
Around that same time, Dan Gilbert, the founder of mortgage lending company Quicken Loans, noticed that his teenage son was flipping sneakers on eBay for profit. Intrigued, Mr. Gilbert founded a research team on sneaker reselling who discovered what Mr. Luber was working on. Mr. Gilbert bought Campless in 2015 and the pair joined forces (along with COO Greg Schwartz), launching StockX, “the stock market of things,” based in Mr. Gilbert’s hometown of Detroit in February 2016.
Further mitigating risk for the buyer, StockX acts as a middleman for payment and does not release proceeds of the sale to the seller until the shoes have been verified. Carlos Chavez, 34, an engineer and part-time sneaker seller in Los Angeles, prefers using StockX (or GOAT, a newer rival app) to eBay, after he experienced a “chargeback,” in which PayPalfroze his proceeds of a sale for two weeks because the buyer used a counterfeit payment.
“I’ve sold on both eBay and Grailed but the big reason I prefer StockX for shoes is to not be scammed,” said Mr. Chavez, who in September used his funds from flipping sneakers to finance a vacation to Oaxaca with his wife. In a statement, an eBay spokesperson noted that it offers a money-back guarantee if a buyer identifies a counterfeit and that since 1998 it has had the Verified Rights Owner Program (VeRO), which allows brands themselves to more easily report fake items on eBay. Further, in October 2017 eBay launched “eBay Authenticate” which inspects and validates luxury items such as Prada handbags and Rolex watches.
Authentication and price sales transparency.