This below information is about the listing for Gizcan on Flippa.
Tell us a little about yourself, how did you start Gizcan and what does your business do?
I’m a serial entrepreneur. I currently run an online electronics parts business full time (completely different from Gizcan).
Gizcan is a side project that I worked on for some time, but never actually put much of my effort towards growing as I’ve always been far too busy with my full time business. I’d love to have had the time to focus on it more, but when I had been, I realized it was derailing me from my priorities. For that reason, I thought it would be best to sell the company to someone who had a bit more time to spend on the operations and marketing.
Gizcan is a re-commerce (intentional) website. By “re-commerce”, I mean that it allows consumers to instantly get quotes for their used devices and then print shipping labels to send them in. We make a profit by reselling the devices ourselves to people who are looking to purchase a used device. I’ve put in a lot of work towards building the website (the design is completely custom) and I recommend everyone check it out to see the functionality and interface for themselves.
Can you tell us a bit about the bump in sales from September to November? Is that normal during that part of the year?
There’s usually a bigger traffic flow any time a new iPhone or Samsung device comes out. The new iPhone comes out around fall and that’s when a large amount of people rush to sell their old devices. So yes, it tends to be cyclical in nature and we’ll see a spike in sales during that period each year.
What sort of marketing have you done for the business? SEO, Social Ads, Google Ads, Billboards and park benches? What has worked? What hasn’t?
Basic SEO (Meta Titles, Descriptions) has been the best marketing tool for us thus far.
At one point I was running a Google Ads campaign that works with CPA around $10. It was helping to generate 1 order every 2 days, but I have not tested that in a while. It would be a great opportunity for a new owner to take a look at.
How much time each week to does it take to run Gizcan and what, if anything is automated?
The only thing that takes time to run Gizcan in its current state is updating prices for each of the devices. I have an instruction sheet ready for how to do that and it takes around 3 hours every time you update prices. I update the prices once per month. Apart from this, it takes 15 minutes per order to create shipping labels for the customer, but this can probably be automated if you connect with the Carrier’s API.
You mention that you sell the used phones on other marketplaces. Is there any integration between Gizcan and these other websites or is it more of a manual process of buying and selling?
There is no integration. It’s a manual process. An example would be listing the device on eBay or Craigslist by creating a listing. It’s a fairly easy process, especially once you’ve done it a couple of times and use the same template for each sale.
What does someone need to know in order to continue operating the business in its current form?
You don’t need to know anything about cell phones or tablets to operate a business like this. It’s actually quite simple and I have already created instructions on how to change pricing and issue shipping labels which is the only work that’s required.
If someone has good knowledge of Google/Facebook Ads, I’m sure they can take Gizcan to the next level.
