Startup Idea: Reverse Amazon | Hacker News Reader

Startup Idea: Reverse Amazon

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46 pointsantonpirker67 comments

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.

It's the merchant's signature. The buyer's info isn't part of the receipt as I envision it. It's necessary for some of the functionality I mentioned but not all.

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.

That doesn’t prove anything. It just means you had access to a receipt at some point. This is a human problem that can’t really be solved with technology.

What is the "killer app" for something that would take this enormous level of effort?

I just listed several as far as I'm concerned. I don't see it happening as a Y Combinator Silicon Valley ad supported startup. The best I can imagine right now is to pitch the vision and have standards bodies and industry groups collaborate on the standard and then maybe find some place where the government can dictate "if you do business with us, you have to use this tech". For instance using the receipts for tax deductions. Give a preferential rate for digitally signed receipts to pass back the cost savings of not dealing with paper. And then hopefully it grows from there.

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.

Who keeps receipts? That's the point, you would if it was easy. It's automatic like keeping a email. I have all my credit card transactions going back years. It would be the same.

It wouldn't be linked to me as I envision it.

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

If you live in a semi-dense population, put it on the curb then post about it on your local facebook group and it will disappear in minutes.

Funny story - I used to live somewhere very central in London.

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

That's heavily locale dependent advice. This is not something you can do without it getting reported and treated as trash everywhere, and in many places you'll just anger your neighbours and inconvenience the municipal trash department.

Since it's free, people probably don't think they are missing out as they can get that "free" at some point later on. You take things more seriously when you pay for them.

this is the way. put it on Craigslist "Free" and FB Marketplace, drop specific coordinates / locations / picture.

"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.

We got this in Sweden. Sellpy: https://www.sellpy.se

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.

Right, the missing niche is the fast piecemeal service AFAICT. Not "look through all my stuff and try to sell it" but "take maybe as little as one item I want to sell, today, seamlessly, and appraise and sell it"

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.

Look up a consignment shop in your area, take your stuff to them, they'll handle it and give you like 30-50% of what they sell it for, done.

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?

Local agents is cool. I remember seeing a store in Berlin a decade ago where you could rent some display space and sell your stuff there

I'm positive there's a business case, need here somewhere. The only problem is working out how to do it efficiently. I also saw a warehouse operation near me some years back which offered an eBay re-sale service. It went out of business after a year or so. Maybe the margins or product values are too low? Hence the need for massive scale?

The Buy Nothing movement is essentially the same as this concept.

Giving something away on "Buy Nothing" seems like the same amount of work as selling the thing to me (except with no money exchange).

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.

They are (or were) called consignment stores and most of them would be knowledgeable in their area to give you quick cash.

If it’s valuable, you could pawn it.

Most people just drop it on GoodWill.

Pawn shops exist and will give you about that percentage for your stuff.

For that small subset of "stuff" which is likely to sell quickly at a suitable profit in the local market as understood by the pawnbroker.

That is exactly the economic reason this idea doesn't work. Pawnbrokers know the value of things and how much effort they can invest in any one item. Selling anything they won't take yourself usually means that you'll have to invest a fair bit of your time to sell it. Anyone doing this commercially can't afford that labour unless the item is worth at least something like €100!

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.

[1] https://www.damninteresting.com/temp/curbdiver.jpg

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.

What prevents Ebay from being abused like this?

But the user doesn’t pick the buyer the “reverse Amazon” does

Or did I misunderstand

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.

Thanks for all the comments! Really cool!

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!

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.

I want a reverse amazon where I specify the problems I have or products I want, and it gives me the best product/supplier.

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.

Service area is just SF Bay and Phoenix so far.

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.

It must be challenging to live in a cave isolated from the world ^^

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.

Facebook Marketplace

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

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.

I mean it is a market, the market is THE mechanism to match and allocate.

If it is low value, how do you know someone would want it anyway?

There's plenty of open databases to look up tons of things about you.

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.

This is just ebay/facebook marketplace with extra steps and having to trust some company even more that they won't screw you over.

IIRC Vinted is somewhat like that, they sort out shipping but you need to haggle yourself.

What's the point - this has been done dozens of times in various industries?

Isn't this E-Bay.?

Yes. Or to go even older, this is a rehash of consignment stores/estate sales/liquidation centers, but with the internet involved.

A consignment shop?

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.

Kleinanzeigen is not a thing in Austria?

Facebook Marketplace exists.

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