Gazelle.com is an American company based in Boston and founded in 2006 that helps buy and sell used gadgets, with a special focus on the second-hand market for Apple devices. The company has obtained financing of 46.4 million dollars, continues to expand its activities globally and will double its sales this year, reaching 100 million dollars.
Its main competitors are obviously eBay, Amazon and uSell, but Gazelle has been able to polish the buying and selling experience of this type of gadget much better than eBay and make this process easier for the user, also offering the most competitive prices. The user only has to enter the web to obtain a price for his device, pack it and send it to Gazelle.
At the moment, Gazelle is showing resounding growth, supporting its business model on three keys that are not so easy to imitate: the availability of cash to buy used devices, a polished device valuation algorithm and the logistics necessary to manage thousands of daily shipments. They will soon reach one million shipments and more than half to emerging markets, half to distributors located in Hong Kong.
With a continuously growing market for electronic devices, Gazelle will not lack arguments to continue growing. Without a doubtsome buying and selling will continue to be a niche to continue exploiting on the Internet. In the US there is currently a true boom in marketplaces in a multitude of verticals: clothing, sports, household chores, etc. There is still room for a lot of innovation in this sense, especially in the generation of much more specialized buying and selling experiences, which make it possible to greatly simplify the process. On the other hand, the new startups that are launched in this field will have to be able to compete with giants like eBay and its enormous network effects, and be able to capture critical masses of users that allow their business models to be valid. In this sense, Gazelle simplifies this intermediation by taking a more active role in buying and selling than eBay and, thus, has been able to reduce the strong barrier to entry that the critical mass of users means.