Offer Up Rolls Out Shipping Option

Enabling its sellers to reach buyers beyond their neighborhoods, mobile marketplace offer up is now allowing sellers to offer items to people throughout the U.S. The expansion could allow sellers to have a bigger audience, TechCrunch reported.

Offer Up is a mobile-focused platform that allows both buyers and sellers to create user profiles, which can be tracked and rated to help build trust, as well as enable direct buying and selling of goods. It allows people to buy and sell locally by sharing a photo from their phones.

Through a new “shipping” tab, buyers will be able to peruse items outside of their neighborhoods on the offer up app. To have their items listed on the tab, sellers can select the “sell & ship” setting. After enabling this feature, sellers can ship their items by USPS. Buyers are kept in the loop about the status of their items through the app, too.

Though sellers can list shipping items for free, offer up deducts a 7.9 percent fee from the sale price of items that ship.

Still, that fee is under eBay’s typical 10-percent fee, TechCrunch reported. For offer up, the fee is a new source of revenue. The app had made paid promotional tools available to sellers, but it had not charged a transaction fee to sellers.

Unlike its main competitor, Craigslist, OfferUp requires sellers to create user profiles so buyers can better sense from whom they’re potentially making a purchase. The site also allows users, in some markets, to make in-app payments and securely pay sellers with a debit or credit card, though offer up strongly recommends that users meet face-to-face to inspect all goods and services before rendering payments.

It is a concept where offer up has to face the rigors of competition, though not just from the web’s favorite late-’90s design scheme purveyors at Craigslist. Facebook’s Marketplace is shaping up as a robust competitor in the field as well.