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SuperPawn Spots Millions for the Asking

By Shari L. Gould

June 15, 2004 — One of eBay Inc.'s customers, preowned merchandise reseller SuperPawn Inc., was an early adopter of eBay's Web services in November 2002, and has become eBay.com's fifth-largest seller with its ztradingpost.com Web site.

Steve Mack, CEO ofztradingpost.com, said the company slashed the price of selling merchandise online from US$22 per item to 25 cents per item in the first three months.

Mack also said ztradingpost.com became a $3.5 million business via eBay.com without hiring any new employees.

With eBay's Web services, SuperPawn created ztradingpost.com, and uses a platform called zDrop as a backbone for companies that want to create a franchise or chain store for dropping off merchandise being sold at auction on eBay.com. More than 300 locations of companies such as Mailboxes Etc. currently are being licensed to use zDrop for back-end processing. These companies stand to earn a 28 percent margin when sellers use these drop-off facilities to auction and distribute to eBay.com purchasers.

Reducing the cost of sales was accomplished by using Web services to drive the sales process of displaying product information for sellers, including digital photographs; monitoring the activity between the purchaser and credit-card processing companies; and handling the logistics for distributing the products.

The company uses no central distribution facility, so it relies on what Mack called "seamless integration of information back to the store."

SuperPawn developed an application called AuctionMonitor, linking SuperPawn's point-of-sale system called PRIMA-Pre-Owned Retail Internet Management Analysis-to eBay.com. This application that was developed through the eBay Developers Program streamlines merchandise listing, categorizing and fulfillment.

Here's how it works: AuctionMonitor interfaces to eBay's API, enabling SuperPawn to sell used merchandise efficiently at auction via ztradingpost.com. The interface connects PRIMA with eBay and the SuperPawn Web fulfillment engine. AuctionMonitor gathers information about the items that SuperPawn customers want to auction on eBay.com, items being physically delivered to SuperPawn's satellite locations running PRIMA. Auctions are posted to eBay.com applying specific business rules. With transactions being completed online, auctions are fulfilled directly from satellite locations. AuctionMonitor quickly redirects products through

PRIMA to the appropriate eBay category using its dynamic system of category management. eBay.com customers are kept in the loop on the status of their auction throughout the process.

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