However, when handling the operations of these events, Choy and her friends quickly realised how tiresome the process was: “It wasn’t straightforward at all, a lot of manual work had to be done.”
She gave the example of reselling an old book. Before listing the item, the team needs to identify the publisher and genre, determine its retail price, assess its condition, look for defects, estimate a reselling price, and write a description of the book.
“It was too much work to handle,” Choy said. “Even though the demand and supply for secondhand items were there, there was a huge operational and logistical gap in between.”
Lim compared the secondhand market’s potential to large e-commerce platforms like the now-defunct Book Depository, which offered both competitive prices and convenient home deliveries. While secondhand items often come with attractive prices, the buying and selling experience often lacks convenience.
“It’s quite leceh (troublesome) to individually list down or photograph the stuff you own but wanna give away, and this doesn’t count the hassle of negotiating or the need to travel somewhere inconvenient,” said Lim. “So people just keep their stuff and let it gather dust at home.”
MAKING THE SECONDHAND MARKET MORE ACCESSIBLE
Their experiences gave Lim an idea: “What if we could make the secondhand market more convenient and efficient, such that owners can easily give away their stuff at a value, and people looking for stuff can find them easily, too?”
That’s when Lim, who majored in mathematical, computational and statistical sciences, was moved to build a tool to solve that.
