I had the opportunity to speak both with Jeff Scanlon and Gary Lagestee about the Rummage Monkey marketplace.

So where did Rummage Monkey begin? What really set this in motion?

Jeff: We’re Foreign Exchange Sales Brokers working with many middle and small business owners and so while we — like others — saw a need for an affordable marketplace, we figured we’d also do better than the tech guys who started one because we had the business contacts.

I gotta ask it: How is Rummage Monkey different than eBay?

Gary: It’s not an auction site. Sellers ask a fair price, have the option to use the negotiation tool to accept offers, and no one has to wait for the auction to end to make the deal they want.

Jeff: And we offer options in buying, purchasing options, like escrow accounts, Google Check Out, PayPal, and standard merchant accounts — eventually sellers will be able to access and process their credit card transactions via Authorize.net. We’re still tweaking it all, but with our secure messaging sellers and buyers will be able to securely finalize their payment via messages.

Gary: And our fee structure is low. There are no listing fees, low fees for extra features like additional pictures, featured items etc., and fair final value fees.

Can you create your listing with images and photos you host yourself? You know, the old html insert…

Gary: Yes. But for those who need us to host those extra images we have the option, with a small fee of course.

Your fees are low… Many marketplace sites fail because they don’t plan long term with their fees, their server costs aren’t covered and they go belly up. Which leads to two questions: Are these fees you can live with, so the site is viable? Or are these temporary starter fees to get the site started and then they’ll be raised?

Jeff: We’ve planned our fee structure so that we can afford to run the site. For example, you’ll notice that on items $12 or less, we take a flat fee of 35 cents. This is because with what the merchant account fees are, we needed to be certain to cover that amount. These aren’t starter fees, in fact we just lowered them.

So the fees won’t be raised — I don’t mean ‘ever,’ but for the foreseeable future anyway…

Jeff: We’ve planned and calculated, the low fees shown are our fees — our goal with Rummage Monkey is to be affordable.

One of the major complaints about new marketplace sites is that they don’t have any real money put into marketing and promoting the site. No one shows up…

Gary: We’ve purchased and produced a commercial for XM satelite radio, have a strong Adwords campaign, and have banner ad campains at many high-traffic sites like MySpace.

Jeff: Also at Photo Bucket and power sellers groups.

I should make it clear here that Rummage Monkey is still in what you’d call ‘Beta,’ right? I mean you haven’t fully launched yet.

Gary: Correct. We’re still adding features, updating and building the site. Jeff is living and breathing this thing — we have to force him to step away now and then.

Jeff: And most of our advertising, including the radio commercial, won’t happen until we have more sellers — why pay to heavily promote the site, bring customers in, just to have them find there isn’t much for sale there yet? ‘Yet’ is the key part; we are working to get sellers and store owners now.

I’ve read that your planning to officially open & do the major promotion, at the end of March… Is that true?

Gary: We hope to launch the ad campaign at the end of March, or at least within 2 months.

Knock wood?

Gary: Yes, hopefully!

Jeff: Again, this is largely based on the number of sellers and items… Are you going to try it?

*This is when I went to the site and more seriously looked at the fee structures etc. The stores made sense to me — low monthly fees range from $5 (for 500 items) to $20 (for 1,000,000 items) with a middle package of $15 (for 10,000 items). More affordable than I would have guessed.

Can you have more than one store? So that each store has a theme? I believe in niche marketing…

Jeff: Sure. You’ll need a unique ID for each store, but email me and we’ll set it up right for you.

Wow, that’s service you don’t get at eBay. In fact, I’m just thrilled to see contact information on the site. Right there, on the site, there is contact information — physical address, a working email address, and oh-can-it-be-true? Yes! A valid phone number. That alone makes Rummage Monkey worthy of seller attention.

Jeff: Once more sellers come, the ads will run, the buyers will come — & they’ll find lots of goods to buy. Everybody wins.

***

At the FutureShop companion website, AuctionCulture.com, it reads, “Organizations that understand the new dynamics between the secondary and primary markets will strengthen their products inherently, and in so doing increase customer loyalty.”

So far, Rummage Monkey seems to be on it’s way to doing just that.

Jeff Scanlon read ’somewhere’ that the average American household has $2,500 of unused items, and it piqued his interest. This figure was in contrast to the current online marketplace movement which was/is heading more & more towards selling new product, but the figures stuck in his head.

The ’somewhere’ he read those figures was likely a news story regarding the 2004 A.C. Nielsen survey which stated that the average American has $2,200 worth of unused goods lying around. The $2,200 price tag was the purchase price, so the secondhand value is likely less than half of that — but that was 2004, and this survey didn’t include all the used but saleable items, the vintage and antique collectibles either. So we can forgive Jeff (or the report he read) for the $300 bump rounding the number. There’s a lot of stuff in our American homes.

And now more than ever we’re willing to sell, swap, barter and buy it.

In fact, the author of FutureShop, Dan Nissanoff, says, “Society is moving from an accumulation nation into an auction culture. It’s a philosophy that recognises temporary ownership as a more effective way to own things.”

Ebay is the world’s biggest online auction site with 180 million registered traders and a turnover of $44 billion, so obviously the big piles of stuff we Americans have are big money. No wonder Jeff was interested. But the question was, “Did the world really need another online marketplace?”

Gripes from buyers and sellers alike about eBay, it’s fees, policies, and monolithic stance that they were the only option, are bountiful on the Internet and in the press. And while there’s no denying eBay’s huge, estimates place eBay’s figures as representing only 5% of the available auction market. So no matter how you look at it, yes, there’s room. Jeff must have done his research and decided that there was Opportunity O Plenty. Rummage Monkey was born and I got an email about it.

Being a naturally curious and talkative girl, I contacted Jeff.

Jeff and I talked at great length about eBay’s history, including how the giant built itself on the backbone of collectors, dealers and the collectibles market itself but has certainly moved away from these ‘notions’ (which is a euphemism for members). ‘Abandoned’ was my word. Jeff agreed but was kinder in his word choice — however, he still laughed loudly when I referred to eBay as “the Wal-Mart of medium navy blue sweaters.”

Of the many things eBay has done to abandon or disenfranchise collectors at eBay, the most noticeable to all was the recent ‘It’ campaign. According to CNET, this campaign is “a play on the cultural zeitgeist created by the annual mad dash by consumers to get the newest, hippest products, like Furby, for example.” (Notice the link to You Can Get ‘It’ On Ebay; it’s no longer a website — can’t eBay afford $5 for a domain name & the extra shekels for hosting?)

Where once eBay was The place to go for the rare, the unique, the hard to find, now they steer members towards the latest trends that, in my opinion, you can find in your local mall or nearly any online store. Things as common as medium sized navy blue sweaters, even if they have the hot ‘n trendy designer labels.

Was Rummage Monkey going to focus on the new, the like new, and eschew the charm of collectibles?

Jeff not only said he’s in favor of supporting the collectibles market, but he completely understood that a seller of collectibles has more work involved than that DVD guy who uploads one listing with 35 copies. “You have a lot more work put into each listing for these rare one-of-a-kind items,” Jeff said. Ah, Jeff gets it, gets us. And at that moment I knew there was something special about Jeff the businessman. I hoped it would mean that Rummage Monkey would be different too. Could Rummage Monkey, still in Beta, become a haven for buyers and sellers of collectibles?

Stay tuned and see. The full interview with Jeff and his Rummage Monkey partner Gary Lagastee will be published on Monday, February 26, 2007. Come back and get the inside scoop as the site’s being built.