Gear Offer is an outstanding and unique peer to peer marketplace for those looking to buy or sell cameras and camera equipment. Be it an amateur looking for a good deal on a great camera or an experienced hobbiest looking for a great new lens, Gear Offer stands to be the first stop on any photographers buyer journey with the right marketing in place.
Tell us a little about yourself, what’s your background and how did you wind up starting GearOffer?
My name is Don and I’m a software developer and photographer. Because I buy and sell a lot of used camera gear, I frequented all of the typical marketplaces like eBay, Craig’s List and Facebook. But, I found that none of these platforms is really optimal for buying and selling used camera gear. After some research, I found that there was no dedicated marketplace for photographers. So, my business partner and I spent a year and a half custom building a software platform for our unique marketplace.
The business hasn’t been around for very long and you’ve found almost immediate success. How have you marketed the site and where are your customers originating from?
Our marketing efforts where mainly with Google Adwords and social media. We’ve had a lot of success with our Adwords campaign, with a relatively high conversion rate. It’s a huge category with an incredible amount of long tail keywords that can be targeted by an avid digital advertiser. This type of marketplace also really benefits from content marketing as well. Our customers come primarily from these channels as well as organic search traffic which is our biggest driver.
How many people are involved with the business and how much time are you spending on it each week?
There are 2 of us running the business. Because we custom built the platform, we built it to be as hands-off as possible. I would estimate we spend about 4 hours per week working on it.
This is a young business, why are As this is essentially a peer to peer marketplace, what sort of interaction do you have to handle when it comes to customer service?
Our customer interaction is minimal. We spent countless hours optimizing the user experience to avoid confusion for users. It took a lot of trial and error, but our workflow from signup to payout is very streamlined. We do occasionally deal with a few questions from users, but those inquiries are not frequent.
Can you list a few opportunities for a potential buyer to grow the business?
There are several opportunities to grow this business. One big advantage is that the platform is built around the user experience and all of our optimizations are built right in.Â
With some content marketing and conservative ad spend, Gear Offer could become the Reverb.com of camera gear. It has a lot of potential.
Also, because this is a marketplace platform, the software itself could be used to create multiple marketplaces in other verticals. Or, it could be licensed to other entrepreneurs interested in creating their own marketplace.Â
