Features Archives - Paperclip

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December 17, 2022 - No Comments!

A complete guide to: listings never leave

Good afternoon friends!

Now before we begin, the team at Paperclip would like to wish all our users, followers and blog readers a very happy holidays and a fantastic new year.

2022 has been a busy one at Paperclip HQ. Our team have been hard at work making our platform smarter, more responsive and more user-friendly then ever before. Huge updates to our Trade Centre, search functions and user profiles have totally transformed the Paperclip experience. We’ve seen our trading community continue to grow, with thousands of new users from all over the country adding preloved goodies to our platform. Not only that, but we’ve successfully launched our rental project (more on that in our upcoming ‘Year in Review’ piece) and we’ve been featured on the iOS App Store’s ‘Reduce, reuse and recycle’ list!

Listings never leave

Today we’re taking a deep dive into the popular new feature to be added to the marketplace in the last 18 months: listings never leave.

Here at Paperclip, we envision the future of item ownership as temporary. Let’s face it, times are tight and with space at a premium, we the believe that we’re at the dawn of a real boom in the circular and sharing economies.

So ask yourself this; does it really make sense to pay full price, buying something brand new, if you only need it for a repair, a weekend away or night out?

…and does it make sense to hang on to this item indefinitely? Especially if it's just taking up space and/or depreciating in value.

Well, our team set out adapting our platform to help our users quickly and safely purchase items, then relist them for sale with just a few taps of their smartphone.

So how does it work?

Once you purchase an item on Paperclip, and it is marked as successfully delivered/collected, this item immediately appears in on your profile and is added to your social inventory.

You can choose to relist the item from day one, or you can hide it from view if you think you’ll be holding on to it for awhile.

If you do decide to relist the item, you'll be asked to confirm that the condition of the item is the same and if the photos are still a fair representation of the item. Here can also quickly and easily amend the price and the new location of the item should either have changed.

Selling an item and don’t wish to have your photos re-used? Not a problem. When you first list your item for sale, you can just untick the 'I am comfortable having the photos of my item reused by the buyer' box. You can feel safe in the knowledge these photos will never appear on the profile of anyone else in the community.

Oh…and in case you were wondering, there are no additional fees for relisting your items.

It's that simple. It's all about reducing waste, saving money and making your social inventory work for you.

What’s next for Paperclip?

The next year promises to be an even bigger one for Paperclip and our trading community. Expect more new features, more rewards and more flexibility for buying and selling. How exciting!

We’ll be back early next month with our annual Year in Review piece, but until then, we wish you all the very best for the rest of 2022.

Published by: Laurence in Features

August 30, 2022 - No Comments!

Introducing: Paperclip Rent

Today we're coming to you with an exciting announcement from Paperclip HQ...

We are delighted to announce our new partnership with a one of the UK's leading student accommodation providers, and unveil our new circular economy service: Paperclip Rent!

Working together for students

The team at Paperclip are thrilled to be teaming up with one of the largest purpose-built student accommodation (PBSA) providers in the UK and working on this exciting new project.

We began consulting our student users about improvements they'd like to see to our platform over the coming months. One request we saw time and time again was for a rental service. With the growth of the circular economy and a burning passion for sustainability among the demographic, it was no surprise that over a third of surveyed student users requested a rental service.

We were already working with our PBSA partner and they had been getting the same requests for a rental service from their student tenants. The perfect storm of opportunity, skills, resources and need meant that a partnership was a clear path forward and, well, the rest is history...

Soft launching Paperclip Rentals

During the spring with began discussions about our trial for bike and e-bike rentals one of their on-campus locations. After careful consideration, we agreed on a soft launch at the Oaks in Coventry, which is less than 10 minutes from The University of Warwick.

We worked closely with their on-site team and have set up our first rental station. After a few successful trial runs, a health and safety consultation and a briefing with the accommodation team, we now have five bikes ready to rent ready for new and returning students this September.

The Paperclip Rent website is now live and the bikes are all ready to go!

Our PBSA partner's pre-arrival awareness activity has resulted in significant interest from students before they have even arrived at the Oaks!

Our CCO Keith Parkman writes, "Paperclip Rent takes our buy and sell offering and gives it a whole new dimension, and students are the perfect group to launch our rental service with – their fixed budget, limited storage space and often an intermittent need, all contribute to a cohort who will really appreciate the affordability and flexibility that it offers.

The partnership will enable us to engage with over 25,000 students and quickly ramp up the rental offering across 23 UK cities. This will be the ideal platform to grow Paperclip Rent to all other demographic in these locations."

Here are some pics of the team on site preparing for our promotional photoshoot, setting up our bikes, and generally getting to know the place...

Once the trial has gained the intel on exactly what students want to rent and the service has been thoroughly tested throughout September, the roll out to Birmingham, Sheffield and Bath will take place in October.

Additional items such as VR headsets, games consoles, cameras and 3D printers are all items being considered as additions to the service in the coming months.

We'll keep you updated on the partnership as Paperclip Rent gathers steam; just stay tuned to the Paperclip Blog!

Published by: Laurence in Features, News

March 21, 2022 - No Comments!

Spotlight on: Trade Centre

Over the last few weeks, the team at Paperclip HQ have been working hard to add new features and further improve our user experience...

In response to the feedback we collected from our trading community back in 2021, our Development team set about revamping our Trade Centre. Today, we're taking a look at some of the upcoming changes to the way you buy and sell on Paperclip.

Simplifying Buying and Selling

Right now, trades are separated across several tabs depending on what state they were in. In the 'Selling' section of the Trade Centre, items you have listed are broken down into five separate categories; Items, Offers, Accepted, Declined and Sold.

In the 'Buying' section, all items that you have ever made an offer for would be found in one of four categories. These are currently; Active, Won, Didn't Win and Completed.

Trade Centre, buy, sell — The current 'Buying' section categories on web

In our next update, both 'Buying' and 'Selling' will be simplified for a smoother user journey. Both sections will have just two tabs; Active & History. This will make it easier to find all your 'live' trades in one place.

Filtering your trades

Rather than having a long list of all trades that are yet to be completed, you'll soon be able to filter the trades displayed to further drill down into trades requiring a specific action e.g. locating an item that you've made a previously placed a bid on.

The new options for filtering active items in the 'Buying' section

These changes will be reflected on all platforms. So whether you're using the Paperclip marketplace on iOS, Android or a web browser, you'll soon get access to the new look, easy-to-use Trade Centre.

Oh, and it's not just the Trade Centre we're updating. You can head on over to our previous blog post to learn more about the exciting changes happening to Paperclip Groups!

We've got some huge exciting partnerships and new features in the pipeline for the next few months, so make sure to keep up to date with the latest news from Paperclip HQ. Follow us on Twitter here.

Published by: Laurence in Features, Perspective, Trades

May 22, 2017 - No Comments!

Version 2.0 is here!

After nearly a year of design, development, and testing, our shiny new version 2.0 is finally available on iPhone and Android!

"But what's new - how can you actually improve upon the nouveau-marketplace app status quo?" perhaps some might ask...

Well, let me tell you a story son.

Prior to starting our design phase for v2.0, we spoke to a bunch of our most devoted users, looked at all of our user behaviour data, held focus groups and sent out surveys to our target user groups (Mothers and Students). The result was a decent idea of what was missing with both traditional and upcoming marketplaces - a ton of features and functions that users actually want. So then we got to work, and a year later it's finally live!

So what's new for version 2.0?

NEW INTERFACE & DESIGN: Our resident design surgeon, Dr. Roberts, has completely redesigned the layout of Paperclip to create a refined user experience. The results speak for themselves.

version, buy, sell, swap, app

REMOVED PRICES: Removing prices means you have a better chance of getting more for the items you are selling, it also eliminates annoying seller-inflated prices which put folk off buying an item. Sellers can still set a minimum price, which means they'll only receive offers above the set price - but buyers won't get to see this. A lot of user feedback and data pointed towards this decision.

The ultimate ambition with removing the price is;

To encourage buyers to make offers which they deem are fair, without being influenced by a guide price. You don't see a price tag on your friend's unwanted iPhone do you?

To emphasize the value of everyday items laying unused around your home - many people see a currency symbol and immediately think about making cash offers, neglecting the fact that they're surrounded by unwanted items which are essentially 'cash on the shelf'
To get buyers and sellers to negotiate and engage in real-life negotiation processes

We wrote an article about this here - if you get turned on by stats you're in for a satisfying afternoon.

MAKE YOUR OWN MARKETPLACE WITH PAPERCLIP GROUPS: This one's a bit of a game-changer as far as we're concerned... and something that probably took the longest to get right in terms of development. You can now create a private or public marketplace for your friends, family, university, community - anything you like really. Again, a lot of data pointed towards adding this feature, and the only way to currently do this with existing platforms is via Facebook Groups (did you know that there are 200 million of them!?). Just 9% of those surveyed felt comfortable sharing their secondhand buying and selling habits with friends and family on Facebook. To put it succinctly, we're going to do for those 200 million Facebook Buy/Sell groups what Eventbrite did for Facebook Events - add a transaction process, advanced verification processes, and most importantly... take them off Facebook!

Paperclip Groups are like Facebook Buy/Sell Groups, but on steroids, which is kind of apt because Paperclip is based in Wales, the juice capital of the world.

NEGOTIATE: With Paperclip version 2.0, you are not limited to only being able to accept or decline an offer. You can now negotiate, which means you don’t have to keep declining an offer until you get what you want. You can send a counter-offer to the buyer indicating what you are willing to accept, it is then on them to accept, decline, or negotiate again. This is how we do it in life so why not bring it to the 21st century?

TRADE CENTRE: A dedicated and easy to use transaction section, which automatically filters all your offers, messages, and notifications into buying and selling… you’re welcome.

Our newly introduced Trade Centre section helps you manage all of your offers, messages, notifications and transactions all in one place, handy eh?

RESPONSE RATES & REVIEWS: Unresponsive users and time-wasters are one of the biggest problems with marketplace. We trawled through hundreds of reviews from other marketplace platforms and gained a lot of insight; problems with unresponsive buyers and sellers were among the most common reasons for negative reviews. We have added several new features to prevent this from happening, and to help manage expectations with inactive buyers and sellers. Every Paperclip user now has a response rate, which falls if they fail to respond to other users within an appropriate time. We have also opened up the review process so you can leave a user review at any time, not just after a trade has been completed.

ADVANCED VERIFICATION: Safety has never been more important to us, with more items and users being added to Paperclip each week than ever before. Indeed, one of our co-founders recently wrote an article claiming that 'trust is the new currency in the economy' - he has absolutely no clue what he's talking about of course, but he does have a good point... trust is important. For this reason, we've added some enhanced security and verification settings. In short, you can now verify your account via Facebook, email, and SMS - and you can check the verification status of other buyers and sellers on their profile. I'm not going to lie to your pretty faces and tell you that we spent hours researching trust processes, we basically we took a look at how other sharing economy based startups such as Uber and Airbnb were solving the trust issue... and emulated their verification processes.

So there you go, after nearly a year of design and development we've finally released a product that we're proud of; a purpose-built marketplace based on extensive user feedback, with innovative features that we can proudly say you won't find elsewhere.

Download Paperclip v2.0 today for: Android | iPhone

So what's next?

We'll be starting slow with the ramp-up for this version; we'll take a month's worth of user behaviour and feedback to refine the user experience for a version 2.1 release in June, and then we'll start cracking on with some rather serious new features for 2.2 and beyond, which should put us in a strong position to take over Wales / the UK / Europe / the world within the next decade. Or something like that.

As always, we'd love to hear about how you're finding the version 2.0; whether it's a bug, a new feature, or just something you'd like to rant about, give us a shout at hello@paperclip.co!

Rich

Published by: Rich Woolley in Features, New Feature, News

March 23, 2017 - 1 comment.

Marketplace behavioral insights and how they’ve shaped version 2.0

As part of releasing our new version, we took time to review all of the data that we’d gathered from running a marketplace platform. We looked in depth at everything, and no stone was left unturned.

Other than significant brand, UI and UX overhaul, there are two main outcomes reflected in our v2.0 release. Rather than overload your puny earthling brains with both revelations simultaneously, we’ve focused on sharing the first major change in this article…

Removing the price from Paperclip

We’ve removed the price from our marketplace. This means that you’ll no longer see a ‘guide price’ on items in the app. Of course this could be a ridiculous move, but below is our rationale for such a bold move;

Our proprietary user data, combined with insights collected from user surveys and focus groups all pointed towards removing the price.

We found that;

88% of buyers lowballed the hell out of sellers in their initial offers. Whilst this is, of course, a fundamental to negotiation, we realised that price served as an upper boundary to negotiation
12% of buyers made a cash offer for the actual price; which means that sellers never get more than their list price for the item they’re selling
82% of buyers indicated that a high price was actually putting them off making an offer, while…
60% of buyers admitted to inflating their list prices, knowing that they’d get lowballed
68% of people saw the £ sign and their first thoughts were on a monetary transaction; they forgot all about the massive value that they have just laying about their attic. In other words – people forget all about swapping when they see a price, because money is quite literally on their mind

With the above in mind, it’s clear that having the price on the marketplace was causing bounded rationality in a sense, and so we’ve made a bold decision… and that decision is to remove the price.

Asides from the statistical wet-dream outlined above, what are the benefits of this to the end Paperclip user?

GREATER SATISFACTION, LESS RESENTMENT: It’s psychology, innit. Just bear with me on this while I explain, using a role play scenario;

You’re a buyer that wants to get £50 for a spare bike that you have. Now that your price is hidden from the buyers, you’re likely to receive bids anywhere from £10 to £100 for that bike. Therefore, if Johnny Buyer wants to bid £60 for your bike, and you accept, you’re both going to be happy. Why? Because Johnny Buyer is getting the bike for a price that they are prepared to pay for it, and Sarah Seller is selling her bike for more than she expected to get out of it. So everybody is happy, and it’s all because the price is removed.

LESS TIME TURNING DOWN OFFERS, MORE TIME PLAYING POKEMON

In an effort to prevent these low-ball offers, we’ve also introduced some handy, advanced item features;

Offer preferences: you’ll now be able to state your preference of offers (ie. cash only, swaps, cash plus swaps, etc)

Steve told me to update the wording of this notification message, totally forgot.

Minimum bid price: when selling an item, you can now enter a price that you’re not willing to sell below. This price will be invisible to buyers, and if anyone tries to make an offer below that bid price they’ll be kindly (but firmly) requested to up their offer, saving you the hassle of telling them that yourself

So there you go, a couple of rational reasons for removing the price.

What are your thoughts on this? Feel free to send any feedback to us at hello@paperclip.co or on our Facebook page.

– we welcome your feedback, even if it’s a simple ‘I like banana pancakes’.

Published by: Rich Woolley in Features, New Feature

August 3, 2016 - No Comments!

New feature: ITEM ALERTS

New Feature Alert!

Welcome to Item Alerts. Each month we've been adding a single 'high-impact, low-effort' update to the current version of Paperclip while version 2.0 of Paperclip is in development. We normally do this by fitting in a 3 day development sprint somewhere in to the development schedule for that month. In a perfect world, we would then test it on the Thursday and fix/release it on the Friday. However, in reality we normally spend about a week or so testing and refining it, and then shove it into the app like a tiny duckling with one disproportionate leg three times the size of the other being shoved into a lake for the first time, left to sink or swim. Just kidding, we shove gently and with compassion over here at Paperclip HQ.

This month we had a few options in the features pool, stemming from various discussions over the past few months. We settled on something that we feel adds a lot of value; item alerts

item, buy, swap, sell, marketplace, cardiff, london, app, ios, android

Item alerts will notify you when something you want gets added nearby to you

Following our latest update, users opening Paperclip for the first time since the update will be presented with a pop-up box asking them to choose up to three keywords. Once saved, you'll receive a push notification whenever one of your requested items becomes available near you.

We feel this feature will definitely help our users get the most out of Paperclip, and it's worth noting that we're offering this feature - along with everything else - completely for free (unlike one of our competitors, who shall remain nameless but rhymes with Spock).

Enjoy!

Rich

Published by: Rich Woolley in Features, News

April 29, 2016 - 1 comment.

Juggling work and Paperclip

I heard a quote once that has stuck with me:

“The graveyard is the richest place on earth, because it is here that you will find all the hopes and dreams that were never fulfilled, the books that were never written, the songs that were never sung, the inventions that were never shared, the cures that were never discovered, all because someone was too afraid to take that first step.”

What they don’t tell you though is how hard and long that first step really is. You have some people who can take that step with confidence and determination, like Rich who founded Paperclip. Then you have those who just never follow through on their ideas or dreams, who kick themselves when they see their idea being advertised somewhere. Finally, there is me, who is smack in the middle. It took me 2 years of little painful shuffles to finally take that first step.

When Rich first told me about the idea of Paperclip I was in my second year of my graduate scheme, trying to blag my way through being a management consultant (only skill you need when being a consultant). At this time Rich had built up a team of around 6 people following a successful Google Start up pitch, my only role at this point was a friendly advisory position. Over this advisory time most of my recommendations were to get rid of the others (apart from Ziad who is our other legendary co-founder) in a true consultancy fashion. This resulted in the team being severely depleted so I started to help out on more of the BAU ‘Business as usual’ tasks (can’t shift the consultancy lingo) but unlike Rich I was having to do this whilst also trying to smash my grad scheme.

Sorry for that random spiel, I’m finally getting to the point of this blog which is to talk about how I managed to juggle my day job and Paperclip commitments before I took the big step. The truth is, it wasn’t actually as hard as you might think but that’s because of a few key points which helped massively:

I had a great employer

Most management consultancy are cold, ruthless environments who drain every last bit of energy out of you, resulting in you never having a chance to pursue outside ideas (I have nothing to base this on but sounds good for the story).

This is where I was lucky because although the management consultancy I worked for is one of the biggest companies in the UK (a FTSE 250 company) it prides itself on promoting a strong work life balance. This meant 90% of the time I would be finished work by 6, which gave me time to work in the evening. I’d also sometimes use the train in the morning to do work but in reality id be asleep 5 mins into my journey.

Working in Google Campus after a long day at work

I was also open with my line manager who knew about Paperclip and embraced it provided that it didn’t impact my day job and that I only worked on it in my own time. Interesting point here, if you do any external work on company property, they can claim IP rights over it.

I have great/patient co-founders

Everyone hates that person who doesn’t pull their weight and at times that was me - sometimes my actual job took priority!

Zee and Rich having a wet t-shirt comp at the Xmas party

It must have driven Rich and Zee crazy as they were both full time. However, they were very understanding and accepted that I had a day job as well. It’s always difficult when you have a mix of part time and full time founders but we managed to make it work, which is down to Rich and Zee’s flexibility.

My advice here is to just be honest with your co-founders, it is better to say you have no time to do something then to try and do it half-arsed whilst half asleep.

I bought extra holiday

Another perk of my job was that I could buy up to 15 days a year holiday, which would leave me with 40 days a year, which is basically 3 months. This was needed for those times when after work or weekend work wouldn’t be enough such as the time I was on TV and the radio (yeah I’ve done both... baller!).

I made time for myself

You always read something like this in advice articles and I use to hate it and think ‘what a load of bullsh#t’ but it’s so true!

We have all had those days at work where everything has gone wrong and all you want to do is crawl into bed and die. Now, imagine having to go home after that day to grind out 3-4 hours of work, which you don’t even get paid for! It does take its toll on you and you start to lose motivation, which is when it can all spiral out of control.

Luckily, this rarely happened to me, which I think is due to being a very chilled-out person and because I would always make sure I had time away from Paperclip and work. Throughout the 2 years I made sure that I still played football, went to the gym, played golf, saw friends/family, and had holidays. The last thing I wanted to do was to resent working either on my day job or Paperclip, the distractions helped me re-focus and continue with determination.

Champions

I outsourced work

I read a lot about co-founders wanting to be involved in every aspect of work… seriously? You need to chill out, it’s not healthy!

We all have our roles in the company and if you hire people or companies its because they are good at what they do and you need to trust them. We outsourced all of our development and elements of our marketing and user acquisition campaigns. We had full control of the direction and process but rather than babysitting them through every task we would let them get on with it, which freed up our time to do other things, like my actual day job.

Our Swansea Interns

I’m not saying the all-seeing all-doing founder approach is wrong but you need to find the right balance that fits your circumstance.

Well, there you have it, my first blog and piece of advice I have ever given. The main point which is probably hidden in the waffle of a blog and terrible grammar is that you don’t have to be an all or nothing person to follow through on your ideas.

Thanks for reading.

Alan

Published by: alan in Features, Musings, News, Perspective

January 8, 2016 - No Comments!

Everyone loves a good old map!

What is it about a map that we love so much? When ever we are given an address, location, or postcode we feel we have to google its location to see exactly where it is on the map in relation to where we are. We have this urge to be able to say 'Oh, I know where that is' or 'That's not too far away', it provides us with a level of confidence as we are able to see where something/someone is located, which makes it seem more real.

We are not saying this is a bad thing, we see this as a necessity with most social interactions having an element of location included: 'What club we hitting tonight?', 'Where the f*ck are you, I've been waiting for 30 minutes', 'Where you from?', 'Meet you at the BP on London Road' or 'Rich Woolley has checked into Pure, Cardiff'.

Over the past few months we have been working with our users to find out what functionality they want to see in Paperclip. The number one thing users said they would love to see is a map view of the items, so they are able to browse a map and see items and their exact location. HOWEVER, they also said they wanted to be able to browse items the traditional way, which started to make us wish we never spoke to them or made this app in the first place. Saner heads prevailed and we got down to the design and development and what we have produced we know your are going to love.

As of January 2016 Paperclip's latest update now includes 'Map View'!

Map View Icon

The traditional item browsing functionality is still the default view but all you have to do now is to click the icon on the right whilst you are browsing items and it will take you to our sexy map view of those items.......its that simple!

Map view will enhance your user experience and make trading those unwanted items easier, faster, and more interactive. Below are our 5 top reasons why:

You can now view exactly where items are locally rather than just being told they are within 5 miles of you
Provides you with the confidence that the item is real
Will make the trade even easier as you will know where you need to go to exchange the items or you can select a location which is more convenient for both parties
It will show you if a user has multiple items which you can quickly preview whilst in map view
If you are going to be in a different location on a given day, you can now browse that location to see if there are any items you would like to trade for prior to visiting

These are just some of the improvements map view will make to your Paperclip experience but please do let us know what you think of it and if you have any improvements you would like to see, just email info@paperclip.co

Thanks and lets get trading!

Alan Small

COO, Co-Founder

Published by: alan in Features, News

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