One of the biggest small businesses out there is the resale shop. Whether you sell things on consignment or buy them directly from online auctions or various television shows, you’ll need plenty of used material . But the problem with selling used stuff is you generally don’t know how much to charge for it or how much to pay for it. Thanks to Priceonomics, you can figure out exactly how to buy low and sell high.
What Priceonomics, the recent startup from TechCrunch’s Y Combinator series, sets out to do is provide values for used goods. Computers, bicycles, televisions, a whole variety of goods are available for comparison. Once you decide just what it is you want to search for, you input it into the Priceonomics program, and Priceonomics returns a range of values that have already been found online thanks to a series of webcrawlings that reveal the goods. Searching for a MacBook Air from Apple, for example, shows that you’d pay as little as $327, or up to $843.
And what this does is allow you to address one of the key points of the marketing mix, and give yourself a serious edge in terms of competing with the various other stores out there: price. You’ll be able to know just how much you should pay for a used item, and in turn, how much you can safely charge. This kind of knowledge could give a store getting started a whole lot of room to run; knowing if someone’s overcharging you, or if you’re undercharging for the product you just put on your shelves, will likely lead to a huge help with your bottom line.
And at the end of the day, that’s a huge help. Of course, it’s not yet universal–I went checking on used copies of The Devil’s Double on Blu-ray, but Priceonomics looked at me like I was some kind of loon and had a fat lot of nothing–but they’re steadily expanding their offerings. You can even sort by city or further by a price range you’d like to check for.
It’s not a hundred percent just yet, but if you deal in used goods, Priceonomics is going to give you a whole lot of support in one of the key elements of your marketing mix. And once you’ve backed that up with plenty of customer support functions like digital fax receiving and cloud-based telephony, then you’ve got just about everything you need in one handy package.
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