Travellers marketplace - or My Boat is a Chandlery

I believe there exists a need for yet another online platform for buying, selling, renting, lending, borrowing and giving away items. People should even be able to make a profit by turning their boat into a floating chandlery, deliberately buying items they will never need with the intention to sell it to other cruisers, and using the online platform for making the goods easy to find and search through by neighbour boats.

The short-term goal with this project is to make a platform dedicated for sailors, allowing them to make inventories of stuff they have on board, allowing them to sell, give away, let out or lend out stuff from the inventory to neighbours, and also allow them to make requests for things they are missing.

The long-term goal is to make a more generic platform that can be used for anyone and not only sailors. The site should all the time be developed in such a manner that it can be used by anyone, either it's a "cruiser", a boat owner, a land lubber travelling with a recreational vehicle, or someone living in a fixed location and never leaving home - but features that are needed by "cruisers" should be prioritized, boat owners in various forums should be invited in first, the aim should be to make it the natural place for cruisers to search for things they need - as well as post information about things they don't need.

The key selling points as compared to existing services:

• The service should most of all be location-oriented, with locations that may change over time. It's not about creating a new global marketplace, it's about connecting people and stuff locally. Shipping can be a hassle when one doesn't have a fixed delivery address!
• Most existing services are about "ads" - a thing that the seller want to get rid of as soon as possible. This service should be about "inventory", a thing that is stoved away, but you don't need it that much and may consider selling it.
• Most existing services are about buying/selling stuff - this one is as much about borrowing/lending.

Background

I've been thinking about this occasionally over the last decades or so, but what fired me up a bit was a "mini-argument" going on a relatively small telegram group for people sailing in the Med. One person ("Seller") posted something for sale in the telegram group, another person ("Admin") deleted the post and responded "we have a dedicated group for buying/selling, why don't you use that nstead", Seller pointed out "Not everyone is in that specific group and may miss out". That's quite right, I'm not in said group, I don't want to be spammed down with arbitrary items for sale from arbitrary boaters in the Med. However, I would be interessted in knowing if my neighbours have things on board that they don't need. I would even be interessted in knowing if they have tools that I may need to borrow while doing maintenance on my boat.

I have a boat - a relatively big boat indeed - and I have lots and lots of stash on board, like:

• Tools and spare parts for doing maintenance and repairs on the boat - including things like different kind of glass fibre and carbon fibre, various different types of epoxy, a little bit of diving equipment, pumps, tubes of various lengths, diameters and qualities, etc, etc.
• Toys and recreational tools - like a SUP, beach toys for the children, various board games, +++
• Transportation devices. I have roller skates, bikes, a SUP, a small dhingy with ores ... but I'm currently missing a fast dhingy.

Most of the things on board is used infrequently. Quite a lot of the stuff on board is kept with an expectation that "maybe I'll never need this thing ... but perhaps, one day, it will come useful". For sure my neighbours also have lots of such things on board. For sure, sooner or later I will need something that I don't have onboard my ship, but that some neighbour has onboard his ship.

I'd happily rent out a bike to a neighbour, or borrow it away for free if the neighbour "bribes" me with a dinner with wine. Small stuff I'd happily borrow away or give for free, with the expectation that I will be treated equally nice on the receiver side of things at some point in the future. I'd also happily rent a fast dhingy sometimes. However, it's currently hard to communicate this and spread the news.

Idea

• A database of items, people/boats/RVs and locations.
• It should be possible (and useful) to use the database just for categorizing the stuff one has onboard, even without intent to buy/sell/lend something.
• There should be a website, but cruisers are frequently offline, so it's also needed with some user-side application that can do local caching.
• AI can help a lot, sorting and tagging photograps, help with human-language searches into the database, etc

Existing platforms and standards

TODO: find if there are any standards or de-facto standards for categorizing "chandler items" as well as storage-locations (like "in the blue box, all the way behind and in the bottom of the storage under the starboard upper bench").

TODO: make a list of platforms that exists out there in the wild.

Lots of platforms exists, but as far as I know they all have limitations:

• Many marketplaces assumes postage is easy and cheap - as a cruiser it may be very hard just finding a reliable delivery address
• I'm not aware of any sites offering people to add tools etc that may be lended to a neighbour. Most platforms are focused on sales only - with "ads" that may or may not be paid for and having an expiry time.
• Some sites allows people to enter a pick-up address, but assumes the address is fixed and permanent. I'm not aware of any site allowing people to enter "it's possible to meet up on any of those places next week" or "now I'm here, next week I'll be there, and the week after I'll probably be over there"
• It must be super-easy to photograph something and just add it without any description to the database, but at the same time possible to add tags, long descriptions, category information, etc.
• The database should allow people to add both items and "collection of items". While it is a lot more useful with a full database with a list of every single tool in the boat, it takes a lot of time to add and categorize. Some photos of all the tools in the toolbox with the description "various tools" is not much easy to search through, but still better than nothing (and with AI becoming increasingly better and cheaper, it's possible to get much of the lifting done without hours of manual labour).
• It should be possible to add things to the database without declaring that the item is for sale.
• Even for items that are not for sale, it should be possible to flag that it's possible for other users to search for it.
• Privacy is important, particularly to counter the increased burglar risk that follows when potential burglars can check inventories of a boat. So even for items that are considered to be sold, it should be possible to set access levels. Possible levels:
  • Private information, unaccessible for others.
  • Partially hidden information, where anyone with the right URL can view the item, but it's not available in search results.
  • Information available only for "verified members" of the site or something like that.
  • Information available in such a way that search results only will yield that the items are "locally available", but where one has to communicate through the site to learn who has the item and appoint where and how to meet.

Risks

On the user side, the platform may make robbery easier if the robber knows where to find valuable things. That's something to be aware of. The risk is somehow mitigated by allowing the owner of things to specify different sharing modes of the data, and by having audit trails on who is looking up information, by giving anonymous search results (and inaccurate locations) and requiring seller to identify himself through anonymous chat, or by encouraging people to create ads for the things they need rather than the things they want to sell.

On the development/investment side, I think the biggest risks of them all is to put a lot of time and effort into it, just to see that nobody is using the platform (or perhaps starting to using some competing platform).

Business model

As long as the service remains open and free (free as in "freedom", not only "gratis"), I'm willing to put some efforts into this (including hosting) for free on a hobby basis, at the other hand my hands are quite tied up in other projects and problems at the time being. With financial incentives it's possible to free up some of my time and possibly hire developers, do marketing, etc.

There are profit possibilities here, for instance:

• Donations
• New features and integrations built for payment
• "premium membership", where premium members gets some benefits as compared to non-premium members.
• "retailer membership" from people wanting to make a profit by running a "floating chandlery"
• partnership with chandleries or other
• allowing people selling high-valued items to make "ads" reaching a bigger geographical range than for the free users
• selling data to third parties (should not be done without consent and opt-opt possibilities)
• a cut from using an auction platform (but I don't think this idea is much compatible with an auction platform - this is more about connecting neighbours than selling stuff for a good price)
• commercials
• Paid ID verification

The problem with most business models is that it may turn users away. Some businesses operates on a "loss leader" concept, investors throwing in massive amounts of money building a free and nice service and launching marketing campaigns - and then seeking to maximize profits once enough people are using the platform. For me to "approve" such a site (so that I can recommend it to my peers, work on building/improving it, etc), I would insist on some safeguards to ensure that we won't "betray" users that are "investing" into the product by pushing data into it. I value transparency and user rights. Over time the platform should survive by being the best, not by locking in users and winning over competitors through the network effect. Like Wikipedia. Arguably, it's quite a lot about the network effect - but anyone may copy both the database and the software and launch their own Wikipedia - it's just that it makes more sense improving Wikipedia than trying to beat it.