Watchy – A New Tool To Buy And Sell Your Watches
There’s a new mobile app on the market that helps you to buy and sell your watches: Watchy. We all know apps like Chrono24, WatchPatrol and WatchRecon, and even some retailers have their own app where you can buy their watches or do a trade-in, like WatchBox.
All these apps mentioned have their own way of dealing with offering watches, searching watches, commissions etc. Chrono24 is probably the biggest player on the market, but charges a fair amount of money when a deal is made. However, you do get a lot of reach for that. WatchRecon and WatchPatrol scrape listings from all sorts of forums and other sources, where you (mainly) buy from private sellers who want to offer their watch or do a trade.
So how does Watchy differ from these existing apps? Why do you want another app on your smartphone? Watchy was released not even a month ago, and wants to become the go-to place for people who are looking for that specific pre-owned watch and do not want to worry about the reliability of dealers and their watches. The Watchy app also offers the possibility to put your own watch for sale on there. You can also ‘follow’ your favorite sellers to see what they have in store for you, in an Instagram type of structure. A well-designed app, that has already grown in size since the first day of the launch: improved performance and more dealers who signed up with Watchy.
Time to ask some questions to the founder & owner of Watchy.
Q&A With Watchy Founder Rene Wijnen
We already have apps like Chrono24, WatchBox, WatchPatrol, WatchRecon and so on. Why should people install the Watchy app?
Today, people use their smartphones to take care of all sorts of things. Whether these are finance tasks or on-line shopping, everyone is using their smartphone. Watchy offers a fully functioning mobile app to shop and sell watches, no website needed. You can even do the payment inside the app. It is a one-stop shop. In top of that, our unique selling point with Watchy is the resell functionality (more later).
We also noticed that some of the dealers are being confronted with high costs of existing platforms like Chrono24, but had no real alternatives. Watchy wants to jump in this gap and enable a seller to show their stock to a large audience as well. We are now in the start-up phase, but the numbers look more than promising. During the development of Watchy, we learned from using the Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp apps and wanted to embed some of their functionality as well. Look at Watchy, and you will see that the ‘feed’ of your watch dealers and your own overview, correspond with the screens you know from Instagram and Facebook. The chat function with dealers is based on the features of WhatsApp. We made sure to collect the best features from the best apps out there, and embed them into Watchy.
In Watchy, you can directly negotiate with the seller. How do you make sure that transactions that are being done in Watchy are secure?
Security and safety are important to us. We work with a trusted and well-known party (Mollie) who takes care of these transactions. But let me be clear that you don’t have to perform the transaction in Watchy, you can also do this directly with the other party, without using our service. With the negotiate function inside Watchy you can decide, with the other party, how you want to do the transaction. The main feature of Watchy is to showcase watches world wide, offering them for sale, and if you want to, you can in the end also do the transaction inside the app.
When a user chooses to do a transaction within the app, he wires the money to Watchy. We then operate as an escrow service, to give the buyer some guarantees. The money will only be released to the seller if the process went smoothly. When the money is received, the seller will ship the watch to the buyer using a shipping company like DHL. The seller enters the track & trace code in the app so the buyer can follow his package. When the package arrives, this will be visible to both parties. From that moment on, there’s a period of 10 days in which the buyer can undo the deal (for whatever reason). If there’s no buyer’s remorse or whatsoever in this period, Watchy will transfer the amount to the seller of the watch.
I tried your app, but for the selling functionality I have to enter all sorts of payment details (like bankaccount). How do you safeguard this data?
Our data will never be given or sold to third parties! The reasons why you have to enter this information is, a) to pay you a commission when there was a resell (more later), b) to be used by the developers to get a good understanding of the transactions and usability of the app.
You just started with the Watchy app and it looks quite promising. Where are you heading with the project? Do you want to have as much dealers as possible on board or do you want to have a restricted number of trusted sellers that only offer the best quality?
It is important for us to be able to offer the complete package to end-users. We want to deliver a platform where buyers and sellers of luxury watches can do their business in a safe and secure manner, and with a good reach. We strive to have a lot of dealers (and buyers) on board, but never at the cost of reliability and quality. For this reason, we did a lot of research during the development of Watchy on how to implement the highest standards.
Do you have tips for users of Watchy how to make sure they will receive an authentic watch (and not a frankenwatch for example)?
Of course, we created a feedback function inside the app. Like you have on eBay, where you can rate a seller after dealing with him or her. With dealers, you can always check their references on forums, Facebook and Instagram for example. The difficulty is with private sellers. How to be sure you are dealing with someone honest? We took a couple of measurements to make it very difficult for frauds to take part in Watchy. If you offer a watch, you need to really have the watch in your possession as we ask people to set the watch at a specific time (at random) when taking pictures for your offer. This, to prevent frauds from using other people’s pictures of a watch they don’t really have.
Besides that, all (!) sellers are being checked manually by our team. Professional sellers are being checked with our team anyway, before they can put any of their watches for sale using our app. Only when a dealer is verified (you can recognize them by this yellow ‘Verified’-icon), the watch will become visible to users of Watchy.
From what I understand, by sharing an offer from Watchy on his own timeline, I can actually earn commission when it is really being sold (through my share). How does this work?
This is our resell feature. This works as follows:
When a seller (either dealer or private) offers a watch in Watchy, he or she has the possibility to activate the resell feature. This means that he can decide if there’s a commission to be paid to someone who helps him selling the watch, and how much exactly (in %). When this feature is activated, all users of Watchy can share this watch on their timeline. This should work like an oil stain, and create a lot of exposure for this particular offer, as others can also share this offer again on their timeline. So in the end, when a watch gets sold via a share using the resell feature, a reseller will earn a commission. We can exactly see through which reseller (persons who shared it) the watch is being sold in the end. The commission is based on the amount that is being paid for the watch, of course. Using the resell feature, the seller is able to get a lot of reach for his watches. However, this feature only works when the transaction is being performed within Watchy!
The activities of the app are being monitored on a daily basis, so we will have all the insights on the negotiations that take place and which transactions are being done. This way, we can ensure that a reseller will always get his entitled commission.
Of course, you can also share the watch on one of your social media channels (Facebook, Instagram), to give it exposure, but the resell feature (and commission earning) only works when sharing the watch on the timeline within Watchy.
Thank you for your time and explanation of Watchy!
In the end, it is up to you if you want to use another app to look for a new or other watch. The cool thing about Watchy is that you can also use it to offer watches from your own collection, free of charge. At least for now. The resell feature makes it interesting and perhaps persuades you to become more active within the app to share some cool watches. As soon as there will be more dealers (professional and private) on Watchy, and more traffic from end-users, it can become a mighty powerful tool to easily buy, sell and trade watches. All within one environment.
Does it add something new to the table compared to the existing watch market apps? Sure, the resell feature is new and it is interesting to have your own ‘Instagram’-type of environment where you can share your collection, show the watches you want to sell and show the watches you’d like to ‘resell’. An extra app on your smartphone will not hurt you, and I find myself using all the different apps (Chrono24, eBay, WatchRecon, WatchPatrol, WatchBox) anyway, so I added Watchy to the list as well. Give it a try.
Go here if you have an Apple device
Go here if you have an Android device
