This week Eye on E-Commerce looks at website and mobile app Tradesy, a peer-to-peer marketplace where women buy and sell new and gently used clothing and accessories. Listing an item is free and takes 60 seconds or less. To aid in the selling process, a pricing recommendation engine, providing information as to what’s selling, trending and brand insights, is offered. Founder and CEO Tracy DiNunzio launched the largest wedding marketplace, Recycled Bride, now Tradesy Weddings, in 2009. In between making fashion more accessible, affordable and sustainable, DiNunzio sat down with FASHIONOTES for an interview.
Describe the 60-second listing process.
It’s so simple! You just use the Tradesy app to shoot a few photos of the item you want to sell. The pics don’t have to look perfect, because Tradesy will clean up the images for you and make them look pretty afterwards. Then you enter a bit of information about the item, such as its brand, size, and approximate retail price. At that point, we’ll recommend a Tradesy selling price that you can either accept, or set your own price, and then you’re done! That item is listed for sale on Tradesy instantly.
Unique to Tradesy is the pricing recommendation engine. Explain why this feature is an asset to sellers.
We’re taking data from our site and sites across the web to recommend the price that’s likely to get your item sold fast. The pricing recommendations are now so accurate that items that sell with the recommended price get purchased in an average of 8 days, compared with items that don’t take our recommendation, which take an average of 26 days to sell.
How did establishing Recycled Bride prepare you for Tradesy?
In every way! I got to learn so much about the dynamics of a marketplace, how women prefer to interact and transact with each other online, and how to market a site like this to a large audience. Recycled Bride was like my MBA — a great training ground that prepared me to tackle a huge opportunity with Tradesy.
Social media is greatly influencing the fashion world. How has social media benefited your business? Any tips or strategies you would like to share?
So much of our company’s early growth happened through social media, but the social web landscape in fashion has gotten very noisy over the last few years, and therefore it’s much harder to stand out on social media than it used to be. The most impactful thing I did with social media, which I think anybody can do, was to use Twitter to identify influencers and people in the media and form relationships with them. Every time I read an article about something related to tech or fashion, I’d Google the reporter to find their Twitter handle and start interacting with them. That ultimately led to most of our early media exposure, which was a big part of helping us grow our user base at no cost.
Any upcoming features you can share with FASHIONOTES readers?
Right now, we’re very focused on perfecting the curation and personalization features on Tradesy. With more than 600,000 items for sale, there’s literally something for everybody on the site now, but we have to make sure that our members can find things they’ll love quickly and easily. We recently launched our StyleFeed, which is a constantly-updating stream of newly-listed items, personalized for every member’s size and style preferences, and over the next few months we’ll be improving and refining that feed so that every Tradesy member feels like a personal stylist is shopping the site for them!
What are some future plans for Tradesy?
Tradesy is on a mission to turn every woman’s closet into a personal boutique, where we don’t just buy but also sell. If we can help women to look and feel great without breaking the bank, that’s pretty much a dream come true.
With shoppers selling clothing to bankroll new purchases which will eventually be resold, Tradesy is at the forefront of cyclical commerce. We look forward to seeing what happens next for the company.
Images Courtesy of Tradesy
Avelinda Garcia is a fashion industry professional and principal at Superstylin*™. Her background is in business, design, marketing and editorial, and she specializes in fashion consultation, creative project management and content curation. http://superstylin.me
