Show HN: I'm renting a truck to make buying and selling furniture easier
thedealtruck.com
thedealtruck.com
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.
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. 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.
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.
I've not had a single problem using it.
>No way to tell people stuff already sold or to automatically repost.
You can delete a post to tell people it's already sold, and reposting at the end of the time period isn't really too hard.
>People can't move big stuff.
How big? I don't own any piece of furniture I couldn't move with a normal truck.
Make a profit first. Once there's profit, a whole lot of problems become much easier to solve.
OP if you want to get this going in manhattan get in touch.
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.
That said, I wish you luck this weekend.
Edit: General Clean-Up
[0]: http://www.angieslist.com/files/packed-moving-truck.jpg
isn't a truck a FILO storage for a FIFO process?
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].
[1] http://www.flickr.com/photos/49959666@N04/7993410449 http://www.flickr.com/photos/49959666@N04/11521462835
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.
Not in any way claiming they are, this just makes sense as a policy to build trust with sellers.
int getBids(){
//return bids;
return 0;
}I didn't want to comment on the service itself until I had something important to say about it.
Details matter and you either get this, or you don't.
.btn:hover {
margin-top: 1px;
border-bottom-width: 3px;
position: relative;
top: 1px;
margin-bottom: 1px;
}
.btn:active {
top: 2px;
border-bottom-width: 2px;
-webkit-box-shadow: none;
box-shadow: none;
margin-bottom: 2px;
position: relative;
}For what it's worth, 90 minutes is a very short for an auction, and only getting 50% is daylight robbery
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).
If you have something of value, chances are you're not going to be using the above.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Amazingly, I got rid of a pile of gravel in my driveway via Craigs List, in a matter of hours.
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.
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.
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.
This system makes that "Get it gone now!" constraint real.
That will encourage people to pick a price others might jump at. Some fine-tuning would of course be required.
When I used to live in San Jose, it was common knowledge to not buy any furniture from the downtown area since it almost always brought in bed bugs.
- Make the list of items available online without signup
- At the minimum, don't require a phone#, ask for email instead if you don't want list to be public for some reason
No way giving away my phone# even if you promise no spams.
You put a incredible amount of liability on yourself with this idea.
sellforme explicitly lists furniture as something they do not sell. Or any other item over 25 pounds...