Startup of the Month: Wongo

Serial entrepreneur and secondhand marketplace expert Miquel Mascort identified a business opportunity a few years ago while trying to figure out what to do with used but still valuable clothes and accessories in his closet. The result is Wongo Uploader, an app that connects buyers with sellers on all the used goods marketplaces in Spain—Wallapop, Facebook Marketplace and more—with just one click.

Wongo is not itself a commercial platform, rather it is an easy-to-use app that maximizes potential for both buyers and sellers by synthesizing the secondhand market, advising sellers on the best prices, providing business intelligence and accelerating the sales cycle.

The online selling process seems straightforward, right? Take flattering pictures of your unwanted items, upload them to the internet and wait for faceless buyers to bid on and take your unwanted items off your hands. Wrong! In fact, 63% of all used goods marketed online are never sold. Mascort explains the key reasons why: user ignorance (sellers offer their goods on one or two platforms while buyers compare prices on all available platforms); email overload and time consumed on irrelevant messages (non-competitive bids and buyer questions); and ineffective pricing strategies due to inaccurate or incomplete market knowledge.

On average, buyers send 12 emails per item per platform and scan six different platforms, which amounts to more than 70 messages to reach a single deal. Since sellers often attempt to sell multiple items, responding to potential buyers quickly grows exponentially cumbersome and time-consuming. Wongo adds significant value by curating emails, so that only the most relevant messages are given the highest priority.

In 2017, Europeans sold over 20 billion euros in secondhand goods, according to Kantar TNS and Expansion, and EuroPages points out that over 64 million Europeans sold almost 10 billion euros worth of their used stuff online. Locally, those figures amount to 15 million Spaniards and 2.3 billion euros in secondhand goods—with three million cyber-sellers using a Spain based virtual marketplace to trade 550 million euros worth of used goods.

Twelve months ago, Wallapop led the pack of Spain’s leading secondhand platforms with over 80% market share. But according to Mascort, the recent mobile addition of Ebay, Facebook and Vibbo (formerly Segundamano) has completely upended the sector, fragmenting the industry and dramatically diminishing Wallapop’s previous dominance. (Other key players include Amazon and Milanuncios.) In 2016, Wallapop and key rival Letgo merged to raise another $100 million USD (at a valuation exceeding $1 billion USD) to compete with American giant Craigslist.

You can learn more about Wongo at wongowin.com