Alibaba-owned second-hand C2C online marketplace Idle Fish (Xianyu in Chinese) has launched a post-and-sell service giving users a guarantee to sell their premium products through its platform, 36Kr reported on Wednesday.
Currently, the service is available only for iPhone owners, who can list their smartphones on Idle Fish and wait for interested buyers to bid and buy. The service will be expanded to luxury products such as bags and other electronic products.
Alibaba has not responded to KrASIA‘s request for a comment.
Before making phones open for bidding, Idle Fish will evaluate the handsets for quality check. It promises to sell them within 48 hours after getting listed on the platform. It claims to sell these devices at 30% premium price compared to its resell value in the market.
It said if the final prices are lower than market prices on other recycling platforms, Idle Fish, which sets a base price to guarantee the final sale, will compensate sellers with double the price gap.
Jiang Fan, president of Taobao and Tmall, during the 2019 Investor Day said Idle Fish has 20 million daily active users in September. He said Idel Fish’s Gross Merchandise Volume (GMV) has reached RMB 100 billion (USD 14 billion) in the fiscal year 2019 ended March 31, with a total of 60 million sellers on the platform during the same period.
The post-and-sell service can further attract new users and boost transactions on Idle Fish, placing huge pressure on startups that focus on second-hand luxury e-commerce platforms such as Plum.
Founded in 2017, Plum connects individual owners of luxury goods with potential customers wanting to buy these products at a relatively lower price. In August 2019, without revealing any numbers, the company told 36Kr that its GMV and number of users in the past six months grew five-fold.
To fund its expansion, Plum raised USD 20 million in its Series B+ round led by Japanese internet company Recruit, with participation from existing investors such as Matrix Partners China, Qiming Ventures, and Unity Ventures.
36Kr is KrASIA’s parent company.