An online flea market that pays people instantly for their used goods

Don&#x27;t know why i found it hard to grasp the ghist of this but.. he buys second hand items (paying before receiving) and then sell them at higher price on his own (in-app) store (if they arrive)?<p>If that&#x27;s the case, such a system would depend on people being honest. In Japan, this provenly work, maybe even in Sweden - but in less honest countries, i really doubt it.

In many jurisdictions there&#x27;s a major problem with taxation: if you sell something from a person to another, you can usually do it tax free, at least on a small scale. If you create a company to facilitate this process, and the company acts as a middle man by buying the things from one person and selling them to another, the company probably needs to pay value added tax from the sale. In Finland, for example, that&#x27;s a 23% added cost. And if you take commission, you&#x27;ll need to pay the tax for that as well.

Considering the wave of scammer responses every time I try to sell even the most trivial thing on craigslist nowadays, I highly doubt such a pay-first scheme will survive very long if someone were to try it in the US.<p>At best, maybe it could be a loss-leading gimmicky feature to drive traffic to less easily gamed traditional ecommerce aspects.

I think this works well in a relatively homogenous society like Japan. Do you think this would take off in the USA? Maybe if you restricted selling to the local neighbourhood store.

Just another VC-money shower.<p>So the company buys used goods, but I see no mention of them selling it profitably?

I wonder how many of those &quot;luxury hand bags&quot; he buys are knock-offs?

Is this like a Craigslist, with option to pre-pay? If so, it would be a convenient way to reserve something instead of racing out to the actual seller&#x27;s location first. I don&#x27;t know how many times I went to the seller&#x27;s house only to find out that it was sold earlier that day. I once drove almost 2 hours to buy a used car, which I confirmed it was available before I left the house, only to find that it was sold by the time I got there.

Interesting, Yardsale founders created another app that IIRC basically did this. It never took off for some reason but I thought it was great to get an instant buy and pickup for electronics.