Show HN: Solid side income from market inefficiencies

dinwal 11 years ago |

I happen to be the creator as well, so feel free to ask me any question you may have. Tech, business, traffic or anything.

nstart 11 years ago |

How does this work for people living say in Sri Lanka (me)? What do I do with the shipping costs that would usually be astronomical? Or is this not feasible for someone living here? Or am I just not getting something?

Thanks :). Also, kudos on this. Seems like a pretty sweet idea if it takes off.

dinwal 11 years ago | |

It is only for US residents at the moment. We are working on opening it to people in other countries soon.

dRocking 11 years ago |

I like this a lot. I thought about doing something similar for used cell phones, where you could find price discrepancies between Craigslist, eBay, Amazon, and some others.

dinwal 11 years ago | |

Thank you for kind words.

That is where we are planning to extend this. Also, eBay and Amazon dropshipping are a good target for this.

danieltillett 11 years ago |

What is to stop the this arbitrage being driven down to third world income levels by something like mechanical turk?

dinwal 11 years ago | |

I like how you think :).

You need to get the book shipped to your place first and then you need to ship it to the buying website. You will need to get involved at one point.

If you hire someone from US to do this, they will start flipping books themselves leaving you.

danieltillett 11 years ago | | |

>You need to get the book shipped to your place first and then you need to ship it to the buying website.

Why not just have Site A ship to the end customer directly?

dinwal 11 years ago | | |

You need to swap the labels. The buying site gives you a label to put on the box so that they can keep track of who sent what.

Also, some sites like chegg send Red Bull, Starbucks or even cosmetics in the box that you would want to keep.

gremlinsinc 11 years ago |

why not use book scouter to get the best buyback/sell price, and bigwords.com to get the lowest buy price?

dinwal 11 years ago | |

Are you suggesting that Flippiness should use those services or are you saying that a person can use those services for free without paying?

If latter, yes we could use those but we don't know how frequently they update their prices. If there is a mismatch between their prices and source prices, our data will be inaccurate. We get prices continuously in a cycle for all books that we have (almost a Million). This ensures we remove stale records.

If you meant Former, the issue is a person can't manually check prices for a lot of books every day. Even if they did it will cost them more timewise than our membership dues.

actionbrandon 11 years ago |

why not just do this trade yourself and keep all the money?

dinwal 11 years ago | |

This is a valid point. The reason is that there is a manual process of getting the book shipped and then shipping it. This cannot scale very well. I can may be trade 50 books a day but that is the upper limit. I don't want to invest too much time into something that can't scale. By opening it up to the world with a monthly membership, I can take a vacation and still make money from this.

Does that sound good enough?

FHorse 11 years ago | | |

Who takes the risk of buyers not paying and sellers not delivering? What about the risk of prices changing in the middle of a flip? I'm afraid I know the answer already...

dinwal 11 years ago | | |

Since you are buying and selling from/to businesses instead of people, there is a low chance of things going wrong.

You sell the book first and get a quote. The quote is good for at least a week and in a decent number of cases for 30 days. As long as you can get the book shipped to you within that time period and ship it to the buying website, you should be good.

I understand the skepticism and that is why we have the free plan to test it out at low level.