UPS Helps Gone! Online Marketplace Go National

Gone!, a six-month-old platform for selling used goods, has cut a deal with UPS that has let it expand nationally, TechCrunch reported on Tuesday (March 24).

The company originally launched in Austin and then expanded to San Francisco with an on-demand business model: Customers would download the Gone! iOS app, snap a picture of items they wanted to sell and send those to the company, which would price and list them on online marketplaces. Once items sold, the company would send an on-demand worker to handle packing and shipping.

That’s still available, and Gone! will soon offer it in New York City and Seattle under the name Gone! On-Demand. But anywhere else, customers can use Gone! Lite, in which they get a prepaid shipping box, schedule a pickup with UPS or drop the item off at a UPS location — in effect, using UPS to circumvent the on-demand part of the service. Without the need to manage that local workforce, Gone! can now offer its services nationwide.

The company has also added a feature for would-be customers who can’t figure out which of their belongings to sell. The new version of the Gone! app lets them link an email address; the app will then scan email folders to capture receipts, shipping confirmations and other eCommerce information, creating an inventory of potentially sellable items — and a database of specific descriptions of items, so a seller doesn’t have describe them all over again at selling time.

Gone! announced Tuesday that it has signed with big-data vendor Slice to do the back-end work of capturing and tracking that data.

The company also has added Amazon online gift cards as an option for sellers to be paid by Gone! once the buyer has completed the transaction. That makes it possible for sellers to get access to the money for their used goods (and, presumably, to spend it immediately on more future resale items). The other alternative for getting paid: Gone! mails the seller a check.

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