How The Right Software Helps Resale Businesses

Karri: how do you see the role of of software and how how do you actually see like the whole operation going and ideally like what is the software helping helping them to do? And I guess it's kind of starts from receiving the item and starting to grade and and kind of already having that information put into and how that information kind of travels with the product all the way to to maybe selling it reselling it or or maybe reselling it multiple times.

Tuomo: Yeah I think it trying to again simplify I think it's like uh we can start with the assumption that I have a empty inventory and empty warehouse now. So if I have a digital software that table is empty. I have nothing there. I have zero items in my inventory. Now I go to the world and I say that hey I'm in the market of getting stuff back uh or or buying them out from you. Now people engage with your offer uh and then they say that I have some stuff that I'm willing to send you. Now the question is that how good are we at digitizing that item kind of coming up with like the declaration of what it is what's the condition and maybe a guess of what might be its aftermarket value. Five years ago that's essentially someone filling out a form trying to maybe you have some catalog and trying to map it and against it and so on. Uh and then you getting it and then looking at that form uh submission and then looking at the item and then having a person that is professional at doing that and seeing whether that matches correcting the stuff and then some computer maybe calculating a better aftermarket value for it based on scraping websites of the world of what's the value of this. Nowadays this is where I feel that AI is is a hugely hugely beneficial thing. Anyone can try this at home just open up Chat GPT uh or whatever your uh language model is open up give it a a photo of a product at your home and ask it what is it and can you grade it and uh uh give a price estimate for it. It does an extremely good job and it will do an increasingly better and better and better better job going forward. So the declaration of what things are is becoming easier. Uh and it becomes even easier if if if if it's somehow supported by the retailer by with some catalog data or similar for the language model. So instead of having to fill a form and doing that it's we're going to world where it's as easy as snapping a photo or taking a video of bunch of items. And that's the way of kind of digitizing the rows to your inventory that hey this might be coming in. So so I think that's a big part of the software like AI and and and computer vision and all of that can do a huge amount of heavy lifting there. Uh and then you have let's say 80% correct or in some cases 100% if it's a IKEA lack table there it's probably easier to spot. Uh yeah but after that then the software's actually kind of main job is to support that whatever your process is depending on your business case how granular you have to be is to be the place where you record the information. So every item needs to have a kind of a ledger of what has happened was there a cost attached to that and and the time that it took because then it it kind of at scale you can start looking at your operation via that ledger. But that that's what I would say is is the main part and then then you can imagine that that originally empty inventory table is starting to fill with rows which is comparable to the complexity of your inventory. You start to have a value in your inventory. Uh that value is connected from the idea that hey we've identified this item to be this. From that point of on there's plethora of stuff that software can do. But uh maybe one thing might be that just follow the aftermarket for trends and saying that all right hey for whatever reason this item is speaking. Uh so so then it becomes this kind of a again something that I think has been done in the market before but now it it's maybe coming from a bit different perspective and and so on.

Karri: All right and after you have inventory full of full of uh unique items um for example in Twice Commerce like what what what happens then when you have these individual items and now you have to kind of start selling them like do you just post all of them like if you have 100 phones that are are very similar. I think you already mentioned about some SKU grouping some kind of logic like how how does that actually actually work with these individual items? I I guess for consumers it's not maybe nice to look at 100 uh similar looking like in the same grade and try to find some errors or or difference in the photos but how do you actually package those and make them.

Tuomo: Depends on the consumer. I think for average consumer no but maybe maybe I know you you might enjoy actually going going through that table. But uh yeah so uh yeah I think that then it becomes the art of how do you sell. So it's a different thing what something actually is and then what you sell. And that's the art of your brand and knowing your customers that what kind of service what kind of information they enjoy. Is it more important who was the previous owner than or is it more important of like which chip model something has or what the does it have scratches on it or not. So it is extremely dependent on your brand and and how what do you represent to your customers. But it it becomes the job of building a catalog. So it's just like what are the what is the offering that you can get from me and then you can say that hey I might have a catalog item called uh bikes in excellent condition. Then I might go to a level that uh here are slightly used canyon bikes. Uh and so on and each one of for each one of these I define in order to fulfill this promise what do I need from my inventory. And that can be as simple as saying that anything that has a skew code of something or you can go extremely granular saying that anything where the resale value is between this uh where the color is either A B or C uh where the model is X Y or Z. So I think that's at least that's what we are now in the in the new version that we're launching. That's the that's the main main kind of idea that the flexibility of of that. So it it is it becomes the job. I have my inventory then the job is the art of selling of like what is your offering and how do you package your catalog and if you're yeah it depends really on your customer base. I I've seen like if in in some markets if you if your customer base are like semi professional hobbyist they might want extremely granular information because that's like that's why they shop from you. If you're selling to uh less let's say deep end customer in a niche then you might generalize and there's benefits to both the the hobbyist might be willing to pay actually more in order to know extremely detailed information. In the same way the general consumer might be actually willing to pay more just for the fact that they're not willing to spend the time to do their due diligence. So they're willing to accept more vagueness in the in the value promise.

Karri: That's very very interesting and and the it sounds like the flexibility is is very important there so that like if if you are already forced into when when you are doing the grading when you are actually receiving it if you are just saying like this is A2 and after that if you want to kind of change it or you want to maybe offer that more granular view into that it might be actually difficult if you don't have like all the data available and then the flexibility to kind of re catalog or create those products or or.

Tuomo: Change becomes harder because then you're you don't know like over time you don't know what you aggregated under a single entity. So I think this is like and the why things are like this is understandable because many of the ways of doing commerce has been established before digitalization and and all of that. Now in a world where AI might be facilitating a lot of things is capable of going through uh mass amounts of individualized data and to make recommendations even to sell it to consumers in a concierge way making great deals. The granularity and understandability of your data uh becomes even more important. So the more the let's say an AI agent for example can try to find edge for you in saying that okay I'll be out of those 1 million different items we have sitting in the warehouse. Now that I'm talking with Karri it can kind of continuously go through all of those and figure out that that's the perfect fit for you in terms of what we are looking for as a seller and what you're looking for as a buyer. And then they can reserve some of the other items for other people. So it is this kind of I think a world where at least I believe that we can go is that everything is a lot more individualized a lot more specialized since the facilitation of sales might happen via AI agent that doesn't have a problem of actually like personally knowing a a inventory full of tens of millions of items and helping you find the exactly best for you.