Book Barter
By: Jessica Kim, Shreya Goyal, Rayan Melwani, David Du, Max Saintfort
Market/Business Definition
A social marketplace, allowing buyers and sellers of books to connect and interact with each other.
Size
Start from UChicago campus and expand to other campuses
How do we make profit?
- Premium viewing at textbooks
- Membership status, rewards program
- Transaction fee
- Ads for other ILC groups
Industry Context
Facebook’s marketplace is used in 70 countries by an astounding 800 million people. There is a huge demand for online platforms in which people can buy and sell items due to ease of access and cheaper prices.
Competitor Analysis
Facebook marketplace, as mentioned already, has a relatively large claim on the informal marketplace industry. However, we believe that because of inefficiencies pertaining to already sold items and the lack of books, Facebook would be a potential competitor. For example, Facebook marketplace posts often are not updated. For its group members, there is no reminder for books posted for sale a couple days ago, neither for books that are wanted for weeks. Many possible transactions just won’t happen if no third party exists that manages the posts.
We would argue that we would not be competing with the likes of Amazon, Ebay, etc… as we are not actually moderating, executing or overseeing the transactions between our customers. We strive to connect the right buyer to the right seller, to ensure that our customers are able to efficiently secure the books that they need at cheaper prices.
We would also be competing with the bookstores in the Hyde Park Area, as they sell both used and new books to our target market, however the prices of these books are often relatively inflated and unjust.
Startup Analysis
Book Barter provides potential buyers and sellers with latest updates about second hand books in exchange — whether it’s someone wanting to sell their old calculus book or someone wanting to buy a used physics lab manual.
A possible weakness is collusion by buyers and sellers who are initially connected through our website. We could address this problem in the following way: we allow unregistered users to put only anonymous posts. We will manage the post through a matching system based on parameters like book name, expected price, and distance. Then if there’s a match between two people wanting to buy and sell the same book, we as a third party can facilitate the transaction ourselves. Due to the cost of transporting, we will start our business running only on UChicago’s campus. In this mode, we profit through transaction fees.
If users want to search for contacts themselves, they need to become registered users. We will charge them a higher monthly membership fee. This helps avoid the problem of collusion.
And we can further divide the membership based on the number of contacts users search for.
The posting and searching process allows us to collect customer data.
Product Positioning
