Brendan Candon explains why SidelineSwap keeps transactions on its platform. The sporting goods market requires nationwide search, shipping costs are low enough to discourage off-platform deals, and the platform uses buyer guarantees, paid shipping labels, and automated warnings to enforce on-platform transactions.
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Robin had a question in the chat, which was on disintermediation and, you know, asking, is disintermediation a problem? And, you know, if so, how is it something that you've kind of overcome?
So disintermediation has not been a huge challenge for us, luckily. There's no geographic concentration in our marketplace. So we don't, we don't even enable local pickup. So, and the reason for that is we think in sports, It's actually like, I think all categories are more technical than you think on the surface, right? People aren't just shopping for a baseball bat. You're shopping for a BBCOR Drop 3, you know, composite Rawlings Quatro Pro bat. And like, that's specifically what you're looking for. If you try to drill one, you can't drill into that on Facebook Marketplace. There's this criteria doesn't exist. And 2, if you found— if you did just do that search, you're going to get zero results within a 25-mile radius. In most cases, so we think like eBay is better than Craigslist in the sporting goods category because it's technical. You need to be able to search across all geographies in order to find the specific product that you want, and that the shipping cost isn't prohibiting from facilitate from doing that. So you know that's all to say that like geography geography is important. I think on disintermediation, and in our case, we've been able to facilitate most transactions across. The country, you know, and from anywhere to anywhere. And so that means you're very rarely buying from the same person twice. There's like some customer, like buyer-seller loyalty, but that's pretty rare. So you're typically starting with a product search, that product's typically not in your area. So you need, your selection is more important to you than like speed or somebody down the block and shipping's not prohibitive. And so, We, and then you're not buying from the same person over and over. For all those reasons, like we just haven't had to deal with disintermediation quite as much. And, you know, lucky, you know, I think I'm thankful for that 'cause that, that's a hard problem to solve. But I think like we try, you know, we may enable local pickup at some point and, you know, we try to make it really easy for sellers. Like I think more better your platform is that you save them time. These, save them headaches, the more likely they are to just keep it on the platform. Obviously they can connect and go create a shipping label outside, but buyers and sellers have incentives to keep their transactions on Sideline because of the buyer guarantee, because the shipping labels are paid for by the buyer. You know, all these things make it so that way you have less of a reason to go off platform. Feedback creates another loop that keeps you on. So I think there's all these pieces you can put in place. And then we do some like stuff within the chat interface where people are trying to exchange phone numbers or emails. They'll get a friendly, sometimes not so friendly prompt from Sidebot saying like, hey, like there's risks with going off platform. You should, you know, here's why you should keep your transactions here. And I think those things have been really effective. So, you know, it's not like nobody's trying to. I think we've intentionally put a bunch of pieces in place to make strong incentives for buyers and sellers. We have these like natural reasons in our market where they don't go off platform and then we provide gentle reminders and we'll kick people off platform where they don't listen, where you get restricted and banned. There's like all these levels to it to make sure we preserve the integrity of the marketplace.
