Classifieds have been around forever, and the process of customers selling 2nd hand goods to each other was one of the first customer journeys to be ‘disrupted’ by the internet.
Sites like Ebay, Gumtree and Dubizzle have been responsible for decimating classified advertising for print publications by removing the limitation of column inches and allowing buyers to search more efficiently.
But the Peer to Peer (P2P) supply chain and customer journey can not be taken completely online and that presents friction and an imperfect process. The transaction still needs to take place in the real-world. Sellers need to expose their home address and invite strangers to inspect and pick up goods. Once the transaction has been completed, there is very little recourse that the buyer has, despite social reputation tools.
So what if you could innovate the P2P experience even further and remove these barriers to people buying and selling? What if you could create a marketplace with ‘no meetup’ element?
Melltoo is a startup co-founded by Morrad Irsane and Sharene Lee that asks the question – what if you didn’t have to meet up to complete the transaction? What if a courier came and picked up the item from the seller and delivered it to the buyer while the money is held in escrow?
The marketplace, which is available as an app for iPhone and Android, doesn’t just take an old offline idea and replicate part of it online, Melltoo is an example of what happens when you say “this could be better”.
While newspapers and print magazines are still struggling with understanding that customers have gone digital, that there is no future for classified in print. Even the likes of Dubizzle can’t afford to stand still.
Putting the customer at the center of the customer journey and removing all the traditional friction points should lead to success.
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