Idea Overview

Since there currently is no centralized hub that offers a flexible range of everyday products such as clothes, furniture and household items, we chose to create an online marketplace that will provide the initial platform for goods exchange within the Penn community. Penn Marketplace will serve as an intermediary that will connect buyers and sellers. Sellers will gain the advantage of greater visibility for their goods through search tags and photos. Buyers do not need to post a request for a certain item that a seller has already advertised for in the past. Gone are the days of endless Facebook and listserv requests and offers that will eventually get buried underneath other threads and emails. During our first meeting as a group, some teammates arrived with a number of ideas for our venture. While most of the ideas were simple and feasible, we decided against product-oriented ideas because we were unsure about the production process. Since we would need to get the product out in a very short amount of time with only $40 as capital, this type of venture did not seem feasible. We also didn’t want to hold any inventory as this will further complicate logistics. We ruled out heavily service-oriented ideas since we were certain we could not commit huge chunks of our time to services such as grocery and coffee delivery. Therefore, we discussed other ideas that wouldn’t require too much of our time but could still generate profits. Someone in the group brought up the need for a centralized database where students and employees at Penn can easily find things they need from other people within Penn. To eliminate the need to deliver these goods on our own, we came up with a website that would provide interested buyers with sellers’ contact information so that the two parties themselves will be the ones to fulfill the transaction. While discussing how the website should operate, we focused on devising an incentive system to ensure that buyers and sellers did not just communicate directly and take away from Penn Marketplace's profits. We realized the need for this type of incentive to ensure that we can still secure profits of 15% on top of the sellers’ prices by making buyers and sellers go through us before the physical exchange of goods. To do this, we will ensure that sellers’ contact information will not be released until Penn Marketplace receives payment from buyers through Venmo. Moreover, to ensure that sellers push through with the transaction, we plan to hold any money we receive from the buyers until we receive official confirmation from buyers that the transaction was fulfilled. We will explicitly state in our website that it is the seller’s responsibility to make sure that his buyer confirms receipt of the good/s. Since buyers and sellers will be fulfilling the transactions themselves, we decided to target only the Penn community to make it easier for users of the website to meet up and complete transactions in person. Graduating students will be prime users of this website since they will have a lot of items to dispose of. We plan to market this through word-of-mouth, university journals (DP, magazines) and social media (Facebook, Twitter). Collaborations with sites such as Penn Book Bazaar and the Penn Student Agency can also increase our reach. We believe that this venture has a lot of potential for growth as we expand to larger markets, include more features, and become more literate in technology. We look forward to see where this project will take us.