The Exchanges

Q Tell me more about Priceyak. On the website, you say, automating dropship arbitrage for eBay sellers, repricing, will fill your dropship orders automatically. What's that mean?

A Yeah. So if you're familiar with dropship arbitrage, it's basically this mechanism of being a marketplace seller without actually having the inventory that you're selling. You just kind of know where to get it. And so our software automates that whole process. We help you list items from other marketplaces. So one common example is Amazon to eBay. eBay has 1,000,010 of millions of products. Amazon has hundreds of millions of products. Some of those are mispriced. And so you can take advantage of that price arbitrage by using our software to list something from Amazon on eBay without actually owning it. And we do the full stack of all the stuff that could be automated, which is cross listing stuff, uh, repricing it when it changes price on Amazon. We change the price on eBay and actually fulfilling the order. That's kind of the coolest part is, is the automatic order. And we place like 20 to 25,000 orders a day on Amazon.

AI assessment note: “our software automates that whole process. We help you list items from other marketplaces.”

Q A thousand customers is obviously, you know, difficult to get all those folks signed up. I assume you're doing some interesting things around customer acquisition. What's a growth channel you're using that might not be typical?

A Yeah. So a surprising one here is that, um, I mean, we, we've kind of exhausted this one a little bit, but to get contact info, we can basically identify anybody who's dropshipping on eBay, um, through certain mechanisms that we have. The hardest part is getting the actual contact info for them. So for a while you're actually just buying stuff from eBay from almost every seller. And we would, you know, our office was basically filled with junk. We threw a couple office parties where we just gave away lots of stuff and it would be like the cheapest thing from that seller. Um, but that way we get their contact info. We could call them up and say, Hey, we know you're drop shipping. Uh, you know, you should use our software. So it's kind of an interesting tactic. Another one is that we, um, my co-founder like four years ago posted an answer to a stack overflow question about like, how can I automatically order from Amazon? And we have, you know, the top rated answer there is like, you can't do it. And then he commented on, it's like, actually you can with our software and we get a ton of inbound from that. It's like pretty surprising.

AI assessment note: “for a while you're actually just buying stuff from eBay from almost every seller”

Q So Max, let me ask you like, I, this was like an obvious question to me, but maybe I'm stupid and there's an obvious answer. Why, why, why do you need these people? Why not just do the arbitrage yourself across hundreds of millions of goods?

A Yeah. So my co-founder was actually one of the biggest arbitrage sellers, um, when he was in high school and that's kind of where part of the origins of zinc came from. Uh, so that's a good question. We get that a lot. The main reason is that there's a lot of actual bottlenecks. Um, obviously if we did it ourselves and there was no impediments, we could take over the market. But the problem is it's not an eBay's advantage. It's not an Amazon advantage to have all their sellers and all their buyers be one person, right? As a marketplace, they're incentivized to diversify. So we kind of give them this idea of diversification and allow them to, um, you know, have tons of sellers who do some do retail arbitrage, some do a dropship arbitrage, some, some have a mix of normal sales and dropship. Um, and so we were able to avoid a lot of those bottlenecks. Another really important reason is that Our sellers are kind of the growth engine of our, of our products. They always discover these new niches. They're going to be the first ones to look at products coming from China, um, and like new stores, you know, unique inventory. And so we can't do all that product discovery ourselves. And so we just do the stuff that's really scalable, which is the software.

AI assessment note: “The main reason is that there's a lot of actual bottlenecks.”

Q Do you do that via like a professional services kind of model?

A Uh, exactly. Yeah. So we have a thing called zinc works and we basically will do a little contracting here and there. If the customer, like our requirement for that is obviously if the money's, uh, you know, in the right range, or if the customer is somebody who we can see a lot of expansion revenue into, we'll, we'll do it. Um, and so lately we've gotten a lot more credibility and we've gotten a lot of relationships in the upmarket space where we can, uh, you know, we know we can build something that they want. It's just a matter of like adding this little layer on top of the infrastructure that we already have. Um, we are probably like the number one or number Two scraper of Amazon and all these other sites. And so we're confident that we can kind of do any sort of repricing, competitive intelligence, information gathering, uh, any sort of things like that better than they can with their in-house teams.

AI assessment note: “Uh, exactly. Yeah. So we have a thing called zinc works”

Q How do you stay ahead of Amazon terms and eBay term changes? I had friends that were in this business for many years, made a lot of money, and then Amazon changed something about timing related to returns that just screwed up their whole business.

A A hundred percent. Yeah. This is, this is kind of our biggest day to day and, and it's hard. It's not easy. Um, there's definitely like constantly changes that we need to be abreast of. That's why we have account managers who are responsible for talking to customers every day. And the customers are the ones who kind of hear about it first. They, Talk to each other. They hear premonitions. Uh, we adapt really quickly. We've had a bunch of instances where, you know, eBay would say this and Amazon would say that, and then our customers would freak out. And then it was our job to like assuage them. And people have been kind of thinking that the business is going to die for the dropship business is going away. And it's like, it's not going anywhere. I mean, you're familiar with probably other companies like wish and all these other like great successes that are doing very similar stuff. So I think it's as e-commerce grows, um, you know, Amazon is never going to represent in the market, especially internationally. And so just more and more of these opportunities.

AI assessment note: “we have account managers who are responsible for talking to customers every day”

Q Interesting. If you, um, if you don't add any new customers over the next year, what, what are you fairly certain your revenue will grow by just from expansion on your current base?

A Hmm, that's a, it's a tough rejection, so we don't generally do Do that kind of project, but just cause it's very, um, and kind of volatile, like you said, the ecosystem as a whole. Um, I think the biggest customers could def like the biggest customers are the ones that I keep closest tabs on and they're growing like 10, 20% year over year. Um, but I, I mean, honestly, I'm most excited about kind of using the technology that we've built for these SAS, uh, sellers and these market areas, these marketplace sellers, and actually leveraging that to build some solutions for bigger retailers and bigger brands. Um, obviously they're, you know, a lot more cash rich and they also have a lot of these needs that we've Already solved. It's just that we haven't productized it in a way we haven't had this 10% layer on top of what we have currently in order to, you know, make it something that they can use. So that's kind of what, where I think a lot of our growth as a company will come from.

AI assessment note: “we don't generally do Do that kind of project”