
An online flea market that pays people instantly for their used goods - pratap103
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-03/now-you-can-get-paid-instantly-for-your-old-rolex-with-an-app
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tmikaeld
Don'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)?

If that'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.

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jstanley
> such a system would depend on people being honest

People always said eBay would never work because people aren't honest, but it
turns out most people _are_ honest.

~~~
bryanlarsen
Most people are honest, but it only takes a couple of bad apples to spoil the
entire barrel. eBay 15 years ago was so much more awesome than the eBay of
today.

~~~
jstanley
> eBay 15 years ago was so much more awesome than the eBay of today.

That's simply not true.

There is so much more available on eBay now. I do almost all of my shopping on
eBay because it presents a consistent user interface, with a quick checkout
flow, and good competition between vendors to keep the prices down.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
...and I have abandoned eBay entirely, due to my perception that's its a hive
of villainy. Folks listing computer equipment for sale above the regular
price. Auctions that routinely go for more than you can easily buy elsewhere.
Insincere bidders that try to con sellers into cancelling a bid (thus ensuring
their confederate will now win, with a bid well below the value of the item).
And so on.

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Mutjake
In many jurisdictions there'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's a 23% added cost. And if you take
commission, you'll need to pay the tax for that as well.

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Wohlf
The laws vary hugely based on city/county/state/country and purpose of sale,
but in my experience in the US you are almost always required to report income
made from personal sales and pay income tax on it, and the person who bought
it from you is supposed to pay sales tax. Sometimes there is a quantity
exception, fewer than x sales and/or lower than y total value. With trades it
is much murkier but in my experience not required.

Not to say I do or that the tax man will ever come for me, but the laws are
there.

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JoeAltmaier
Surely its 'report profit from personal sales'? And flea-market sales of used
items will rarely qualify.

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bertjk
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.

At best, maybe it could be a loss-leading gimmicky feature to drive traffic to
less easily gamed traditional ecommerce aspects.

~~~
jpalomaki
You might be able work around this by striking a deal with the company
handling the transit. If there's a pick up service, the guy doing the pickup
could make a quick check on the goods and release the payment. This of course
does not help for issues like selling pirated goods, which can't be detected
on quick inspection.

My gut feeling is that large part of business comes from regular customers. I
guess the probability to cheat goes significantly down on each subsequent
trade.

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wheresvic1
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.

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ZeroGravitas
Canada is more diverse than the USA, so every time (and it happens a lot for
some reason) someone says "That couldn't happen in the USA because it's not
homogenous" I always compare it to Canada, which generally seems to be the
country that actually is what the USA advertises itself to be.

~~~
adventured
Canada is nowhere near as diverse as the US.

Canada is 1.x% hispanic, 2.x% black, 78% white.

The US is 20% hispanic, 13% black, 60% white.

Canada is a homogeneous nation.

Latin America's population is ~650 million. Canada intentionally designed its
immigration system to be exclusionary to immigration by poorer people. Which
is why, during the time in which the US massively boomed with Latin American
immigration (1970s forward), Canada did not.

How can there be 650 million people in Latin American, nearly 70 million
hispanics in the US, and only ~450,000 hispanics in Canada? A skill &
education restricted immigration system that doesn't allow in typically
poorer, lower skill, lower education hispanics coming from Latin America. It's
extremely anti-diversity.

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ZeroGravitas
People of Chinese, East Indian, First Nations, Ukrainian, Dutch, Polish &
Filipino ancestry all make up a bigger proportion of Canada's population than
hispanic or black people. Your own numbers only add up to 81% for Canada but
93% for the USA. That's people from as propontionally large a group as
African-Americans in the USA that you've skipped over.

Possibly there's two layers of miscommunication about "diverse". One, people
could consider Scots, Irish, English, French, German, Italian, Polish,
Portuguese, Russian, Welsh, Norweigan people to be non-diverse if they fit
some social category of whiteness. Even if one of the groups still speaks it's
own language and has a seperatist movement.

Second, having big chunks of certain demographics could be considered less
diversity than having lots of little chunks from different places.

~~~
adventured
Facts are facts. Canada's immigration system is absurdly anti-diversity, which
is why Canada has so few hispanic and black people, and why it's nearly 80%
white.

Within about 20 years, the US won't even be a majority white nation.
Pretending Canada is more diverse than that, is ridiculous. That Canada is
somehow a super diverse nation, is a pretend claim that is unsupported by the
actual demographic facts.

Why don't more poor black people immigrate into Canada from cities like
Detroit, Chicago or New York? Surely their lives would be considerably
improved given Canada's superior safety net, healthcare system, etc. - and
Canada has good wages and a healthy unemployment rate. It's simple, they're
not allowed to. Canada's immigration system excludes the possibility that most
people with lower skill & education backgrounds can ever get in.

If Canada were actually pro-diversity, they'd liberalize their immigration
policies and let in a large amount of immigration from Latin America (after
all, the vast majority of the Americas is hispanic), such that Canada's
hispanic percentage closes the gap with the US over the next 20-30 years.
They're never going to allow it.

~~~
BenchRouter
> which is why Canada has so few hispanic and black people, and why it's
> nearly 80% white.

Er, or it's not bordered by Mexico and doesn't have nearly the extensive
history with African slavery that the US does?

> Why don't more poor black people immigrate into Canada from cities like
> Detroit, Chicago or New York?

I'm not trying to argue one way or another for Canada's immigration system (I
know very little about it), but this is a very simplistic argument.

Why don't all the ex-coal miners in WV simply move to where the jobs are?

Picking up and relocating your life is way, way more involved than you're
making it sound.

> It's simple, they're not allowed to.

This is _also_ the case in the US, hence the widespread fears about illegal
immigrants.

If life was significantly better in Canada, one would expect far more illegal
immigration.

~~~
adventured
> but this is a very simplistic argument.

It's not a simplistic argument. It's a facts based argument and I'm the only
one in this discussion so far that is actually using facts.

> Er, or it's not bordered by Mexico

Canada also isn't bordered by Asia. It allows in plenty of skilled Asian
immigrants. What does bordering have to do with Canada's regressive
immigration policies that prevent low skilled, low education persons from
immigrating into the country?

The US isn't bordered by Pakistan, India, Vietnam, China, Philippines, or El
Salvador. Six of the top 10 immigration countries for the US.

Borders don't mean much if you're not allowed to immigrate regardless.

The US is also not bordered by Colombia, Hondurus, Ecuador, Bolivia, Costa
Rica, Panama, Peru, Brazil, etc.

> Why don't all the ex-coal miners in WV simply move to where the jobs are?

Well that's exactly how the US has worked in fact. People - over time -
migrate toward opportunity state to state. That's why West Virginia's
population hasn't grown in 80 years (!).

See: population growth over time in Nevada, Arizona, California, Florida,
Texas, etc. Silicon Valley exists precisely because the US works that way.

~~~
BenchRouter
> It's a facts based argument and I'm the only one in this discussion so far
> that is actually using facts.

Your facts-based argument is that people in Detroit would move to Canada if
the immigration policy was relaxed? I see no facts at all around that
assertion, which is the one I was calling simplistic.

> What does bordering have to do with Canada's regressive immigration policies
> that prevent low skilled, low education persons from immigrating into the
> country?

You said (paraphrasing):

>> Why are there no hispanic people in Canada, relative to the US

I said:

>> Because it's not bordered by Mexico

(And, by the way, Mexico is the #1 source of immigrants for the US).

> The US isn't bordered by Pakistan, India, Vietnam, China, Philippines, or El
> Salvador. Six of the top 10 immigration countries for the US.

Out of those 6 countries, one would qualify as contributing to the Hispanic or
Black population in the US (the groups we were discussing).

Out of the top 10, none are from countries in Africa or the Caribbean (which
we might also consider to be a "black" population).

So we can agree then, that the US's diversity w.r.t. black people has nothing
to do with immigration?

> See: population growth over time in Nevada, Arizona, California, Florida,
> Texas, etc. Silicon Valley exists precisely because the US works that way.

Those are also states that have heavy immigrant populations because they're
attractive for skilled workers or close to natural entry points. You'll have
to cite a source stating that the growth in those populations is from internal
movement.

The US as a whole is fairly close to replacement rate births, so we would
actually expect populations to remain stable.

~~~
adventured
> Your facts-based argument is that people in Detroit would move to Canada if
> the immigration policy was relaxed?

My facts based argument goes back to the original parent discussion that you
joined, which is: the US is considerably more diverse than Canada and that
that is due to very different immigration policies over time. I've
overwhelmingly backed that up.

Would poor people have immigrated out of Detroit and into Canada as Detroit
collapsed, seeking a drastically superior social safety net, free universal
healthcare, etc.? Hell yes they obviously would have.

> You'll have to cite a source stating that the growth in those populations is
> from internal movement.

You can't actually believe the US has historically lacked for internal
movement (in fact it's only very recently that that has been the case).

California's population in 1960 was 16 million. The US total hispanic
population in 1960 was 6.x million. As recently as 1970, California's white
population was nearly 80%. In 1970, 16 million of California's 20 million
people were white - how did they get there? Millions of people moved to
California from other states, _famously_ , in the post WW2 era.

Las Vegas, which makes up a quarter of Nevada's population, is 44% white, 11%
black and 7% asian today. How do you think those people all got there? The Las
Vegas population figure was 8,422 in 1940.

I'm certain I don't need to cover Arizona (boomed internally similarly to
Nevada), Texas and Florida. Florida has very famously seen vast internal US
migration as older people flooded the state over decades.

~~~
pierrebai
Actually, you've moved the goal post.

Your actual claim was that Canada immigration policy is _anti-diversity_. The
only correct claim you've backed up is that the Canadian immigration policy is
greatly favoring rich and educated immigration.

It's no wonder people feel offended. Saying Canada is anti-diversity is a
close proxy to say it's systematically racist.

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anc84
Just another VC-money shower.

So the company buys used goods, but I see no mention of them selling it
profitably?

~~~
unwind
It is mentioned, but there's not a lot of detail. This seems to be the
juiciest paragraph concerning the actual business:

 _All told, less than 1 in 10 second-hand-goods sellers didn’t deliver as
promised. That was good enough for Mitsumoto, who relaunched the service,
called Cash, in August as a new way to gather inventory for an online flea
market. Total daily purchases are capped at 10 million yen, and are limited to
smartphones, luxury handbags, watches, clothing and other specific items from
a list of several thousand. Customers take a photo and are given a non-
negotiable offer. Prices are set automatically based on data gleaned from
other second-hand marketplaces and Cash makes money by reselling the goods._

Granted, it is a bit vague about the reselling.

~~~
anc84
Yeah, "Cash makes money by reselling the goods" is quite vague...

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SQL2219
I wonder how many of those "luxury hand bags" he buys are knock-offs?

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otterpro
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's location first. I don't know how many times I went to the seller'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.

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lowglow
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.

