Why Watch Collecting Online Has Been Difficult : Until Recently
If you go online today, look up Luxury Watches on eCommerce Platforms like eBay, you may find the prices being higher than if you were to buy them from brick & mortar. Which is quite strange, as it is usually the opposite when it comes to shopping online in 2024.
New watches having a 10-20% margin on Large Marketplaces like eBay is unsustainable. They have to set their prices way above market value to make a profit with 15% fees and keep a substantial margin for themselves. Online Marketplaces are actually less desirable than traditional brick and mortar stores or to have the businesses build, operate, and maintain their own websites and online customer funneling and logistics themselves.
This is why buying watches online is just not going to be very valuable for those seeking to buy it, as they see prices way above market value, so the sellers working off of these tight margins, either due to brand restrictions, high wholesale costs, or the just the cost of high end watches in general making profit margins tighter. So having the stress from a 15% service fee like eBay or Amazon does not make sense, and on top of that, being at risk for losing that item and the prevalence of fraud on platforms like eBay makes using these platforms just not feasible.
If a platform like Telaport, who’s trading fee is only $2 as of this writing, can lower the service fee to as close to base transaction fee for cash payments as possible, that would be an immense relief on the business and more importantly the customers wanting better priced inventory. Not only that, having the option of using Telaport’s middle-man service on high-end luxury goods in an E-Commerce Marketplace is unheard of before, and adds another layer of confidence with sellers in a Marketplace like Telaport.
Currently Stripe Fees are 2.9%, and if Telaport charges only 4% for cash transactions, that would be the best value that has ever been offered by any eCommerce Marketplace if you consider all factors such as Price, Marketplace, P2P Service, Middle-Man Service, and more included in that, which the other platforms don’t even offer as an option with their high 15% service fees.
- Antonio LaPlaca
The Importance of eCommerce Eco-Systems
If you look at what drives the sales of goods and services for non-essentials online or daily use items online, collectables, the root of this is community.
In Community you can see that groups form, ideas, standards, collectors, communities, promoting what’s popular, what to buy, what not buy. These groups and communities have grown exponentially more powerful as the online world evolved. Starting from Forums then to Social Media Platforms like Facebook, Reddit, and Discord, these communities and groups are almost entirely what drive the market today.
If we look at another major factor which drives these markets, it’s the marketplace. The online Bazaar of sorts, those platforms like eBay, Mercari, and now Telaport. Online Marketplaces give communities, buyers, collectors, business, one giant virtual store to all sell together on. This gives everyone cohesive and up to date sales data, high likelihood access to exactly what they’re looking for, a place to research value before selling, and a place to set up your entire store, which would once be in the middle of nowhere, with no customer traffic, to having the entire nation, the entire world, able to view and purchase your products from you.
This is fantastic in the sense that it opened up those possibilities, and have made so many loyal customers and businesses who rely on these platforms as the whole arbiter of their sales force. However with this power, businesses have now had to rely on these large tech corporations, and with that came sloth and abuse of power from these now giants of the eCommerce Marketplace industry. They use their power and standing to force high prices and cuts on the everyday businesses. Taking anywhere from 15-20 percent of every sale. However as time went on, their services did not improve, they declined, and have in recent times spiraled out of control, to the point where using them is dangerous for your business and personal items.
Coming out of the Corona Virus era of government stimulus, poor government decisions, and now the recession/depression we are in, businesses are struggling. During the Corona Virus, when people received extra stimulus, they spent it on things that they wanted, and during that time, businesses that sold low-mid range priced non-necessity items flourished. Showing that people do in fact want these items, if they have the means to purchase them. However today, these same low to middle class people are struggling to afford to eat, find jobs, and have to focus on pure survival from starvation and total loss of their livelihoods. The same goes for these businesses who relied so heavily on eCommerce Marketplaces to support them. However, if you don’t serve high end items to high end clients, in 2024 and beyond, you will not be able to make ends meet.
These platforms such as eBay and Mercari have been building a horrible reputation among small businesses who rely on honest and consistent business. With eBay promoting buyer fraud, giving zero rights to sellers, and putting them at risk of double negative loss (loss of product + loss of cash) they are in a position to find someone who cares. Mercari has hurt their businesses as well by implementing surprise fees presented to a buyer at checkout, making businesses sales drop off to near zero on that platform. So that’s where somebody, who really isn’t in this space, is winning with their massive marketing campaign, putting hundreds of millions of dollars into marketing, Shopify.
The internet started out as place where everyone had their own site, sold things on their own platform, however just like in the real world, this was siloed in it’s own sense without it’s own proper marketing budgets and advertising online to get customers to find out they exist. That’s where platforms and marketplaces like eBay came in to save the day and provide this Marketplace where everyone can find their products through simple queries, and it didn’t matter about where the store or business came from. However Shopify is having an extreme amount of success with local and small businesses, as they are the only option. eBay’s high fees mixed with almost non-existent seller protection have pushed people to regress backwards in time, and go back to building their own websites, handling their own shipping logistics, listings, advertisements, and customer funnels themselves. This is all because of the high fees, 15-20 percent, and dangers of using eBay and Mercari. It’s just not worth it, and nobody has stepped up to the plate to fix or solve the problem. That is until today.
This is where Telaport comes in, the eCommerce Marketplace that gives people the option of complete and total safety through a middle-man logistics network, user-verification, and no percentage based fees, as well as the option of being able to exchange goods for goods, B2B, B2C, C2C, etc… and up to 40lbs of anything, so long as it’s legal and not against Telaport’s ToS. Telaport wants to provide people with not only the eCommerce Marketplace like eBay, but also a Logistics Network like Amazon, and a Community with groups, comments, and communication like Facebook.
With this, Telaport becomes an all-in-one ecosystem for eCommerce where we solve all of the customer and business needs, and more importantly, don’t abuse our position, and provide this service at the lowest cost possible. Currently the fee ranges from $1-$3 max per trade, regardless of the size. When selling on Telaport, who utilizes Stripe, they will get cost to as close to the Stripe fee as possible to make sure that we encourage commerce, business, trade, buying & selling, so that when you meet someone, talk to a group, you can buy, sell, trade and exchange on the platform, and have the whole process door-door finished through Telaport.
This total eco-system is what Telaport wants to provide, it’s to focus on community, and the growth of businesses and enabling collectors from every background, with any kind of budget, from zero to hundreds of thousands of dollars, young and old, to have the widest array of possible ways to participate in commerce, and have all of those tools to do it safely, and handle the whole process on a single platform, reducing the risk to almost nothing, completely unheard of in other platforms that currently exist. eCommerce Eco-Systems are the future of eCommerce and Marketplaces online, and one which directly tackle the current financial situation of individuals and businesses across the country and world today, to have a more interconnected and active world of commerce once again.
- Antonio LaPlaca
Quantum Computing Pioneers
Today we are on the verge, of a dawn, to a new era. Today we are at the point which we stood with classical computers in the 1950's. We have working examples of the technology, we are able to perform some of it's most basic functions, however we have yet to fully realize it's capabilities in application in a field outside of academic research.
It was only this February that Intel released their first Quantum SDK to the public. This SDK is interfacable with C, C++, and Python. It is still low level down to hardware, and mostly directed toward research purposes, as we can tell for Intel's new chip they are going to release, targeted at academia and research facilities.
Clearly we are quite a ways away, I would like to make an estimate of 5-10 years, before we start seeing Quantum Technology being focused in the industry. With business' everywhere now focused on AI we can expect much more public resources dedicated to that field rather than Quantum Computing. However, this gives us time, like the pioneers of computers, to set up the foundations of Quantum Computing and build standards and practices just as our Classic Computing forefathers have done before us. Minor innovations right now, will have major impacts on the field, and will set your name in the history books of Quantum Computing and what will eventually be the focus of our future endeavours.
Just as everything else in the past, this technology will move faster than the majority of the populace expect it will. Google has just achieved a major milestone in Quantum Computing finally achieving the first actual display of Quantum Supremacy and performing a computation in 6.18 seconds that would have taken the world's best super computer 47.2 years to compute. Those outside of the loop, just like all other tech booms, will be in for a shock when Quantum Computing matures and begins to apply to real-world solutions just as Machine Learning and "AI" has in the past 5 years.
- Antonio LaPlaca
Chat-GPT and Successful Business'
Bill Gate's recently mentioned that the first company or start-up to successfully implement the all-in-one virtual assistant will be the winner of the next era of technology. The field is so fresh with relatively low barriers to entry, Gates gave it a 50-50 chance on whether it will be a corporation or a start-up who will do it.
However, this has not stopped Microsoft from making the push themselves. Recently they announced Co-Pilot, an assistant powered by the same model as Chat-GPT to allow users to ask for help, but this time it is integrated within Microsoft applications such as Excel, Word, Outlook, Bing, etc..., where the assistant can not only give you answers, but use your files and information and write all the formulas and outputs you need by simple text prompts.
Microsoft's stocks have shot the company to a record evaluation of 2.6 Trillion dollars. However Microsoft isn't the only company who will benefit from the boost in it's early stages. All companies who adopt rather than reject Chat-GPT and it's similar kin, will be far ahead of their competitors. Think about the Software Engineer who is trying to troubleshoot a problem that can take anywhere from one day to a whole week, delaying projects and timelines. Now imagine, each of your SE's are equipped with a tool such as Chat-GPT, they are able to take those problems unique to your business, and utulize Microsoft's massive ML model trained on their datasets of coding problems, to come up with a reasonable solution, or at the very least get your SE's in the right direction to resolving problems and reducing troubleshooting times, and over-all pushing major complicated projects out the door faster than all of their competitors who are uneccesarily not using such powerful tools.
In-Fact, Chat-GPT just showed me a simple mistake I was making when formatting this blog. Pointing out that instead of using a break, mb-auto should have been set to a number such as mb-4. Saving me 10-20 minutes of searching the web myself and looking at others peoples conversations to extract what's useful to me. In-fact, it noticed that my already implemented code could've been improved, rather than just giving me a general solution. Let that sink-in, and you tell me who's company is going to be better off in the next 5 years. Those who utulize the latest productivity tools, or those who don't?
- Antonio LaPlaca