SidelineSwap is a sports gear marketplace that charges sellers 12-15% and launched a trade-in platform with Dick's Sporting Goods. Customers trade in used equipment at pop-up events for gift cards, and the inventory feeds back onto the marketplace. About 20-30% of buyers become sellers, creating a cycle that drives growth.
Chapters
Could you kind of give us a brief overview maybe of Sideline Swap as a marketplace today before we dive into things more? Absolutely. So we are, have started as a pure play market vertical marketplace where we connect buyers and sellers. We take 12 to 15% fee from the seller on the transaction and we make it easy to, you know, list your gear in seconds through our app or our website. And then we offer a buyer guarantee and facilitate seamless transactions. That includes, you can purchase at a buy now, you can make an offer and negotiate, you can chat with the seller throughout the negotiation, and then buyers pay for prepaid or pay for shipping. So the seller receives a prepaid shipping label when the item sells. The— yeah, and that was basically our marketplace, or the bones of it, at least from 2015 to about last year. We've always felt that in our— in sporting goods, that there's a Poshmark customer and a ThredUp customer is the way I think about it. So the— we were started as Poshmark for sports, where we connect buyers and sellers, and we just take a cut on the transaction. But there's definite friction around shipping specifically on bigger items like hockey sticks, golf clubs, baseball bats. And so we always felt like there's a lot more opportunity on the supply side that's locked in people's homes and their garages that's not currently making its way onto a marketplace. And that's the biggest opportunity to us. It's not how do we get inventory from eBay to Sideline? It's more How do we unlock supply that's, that's not making its way online up to this point? So last year we launched a new part of our business called our trade-in platform, where we partner with retailers like Dick's Sporting Goods to turn their customers' used gear into gift cards. So this year we ran 500 trade-in pop-up trade-in events where you could go to a Dick's store and trade in your used That gear, we evaluate it on the spot based on some custom tech that we've built. It's based on our marketplace pricing data, and then we'll pay pay the customer and issue them a Dick's gift card, and then that inventory makes its way back onto sideline to be resold on the platform. In some of those cases, we hold the inventory first party. In other cases, sellers run the events. But for us, it's been a really successful way to continue to unlock more inventory and grow the platform. So. You know, we've, we've added a bunch of high-quality supply. We've grown a bunch of brand exposure through these retail partnerships. We work with several retailers and brands. And then, you know, that just then feeds the marketplace because buyers come on, find better selection. 20, about 30% of buyers convert to sellers. And so kind of continues to accelerate the flywheel. And we've seen that part of the business grow really quickly, but also feed, like accelerate growth on the marketplace side. So we think they work together really well.
