Exp Pro Reseller Buyer Candid Review
I have 25+ years experience reselling and buying resale. Since the late 90s, I have used / tried every resale platform developed. I have only written one other review where I have urged legitimate buyers & sellers to stay away. That review was over 15 years ago. That company is no longer in business.
To OfferUp Reviewer: Your customer service & support is useless. Don’t bother recommending to me to contact. None of my cases have ever been settled or responded to for that matter. I also know it is most likely a bot auto generated response thus I will ignore it.
To Buyers & Sellers: If you receive a response here don’t waste your time contacting service support it will only further frustrate you. My recommendation is write your review out of public consideration and give up and cut your losses. There are plenty of other platforms where you will have a good experience without all the frustration.
I am like many of the original account users that started using OfferUp in 2012. It was my favorite platform for buying and selling locally and as a professional reseller, I was overall successful. Post acquisition of Letgo in 2020 I was excited to see changes on the horizon that would be developed to compete with the bigger platforms. I know change doesn’t happen over night and I have been loyally hobbling along side the company waiting for the pivot to take place and gain momentum. A person can only take so much before all hope is lost.
My overall recommendation:
A complete overhaul of the C-Suite leadership to hire tenuous driven leaders that will put a strategic plan in place quickly. Alternatively, I recommend that OfferUp ‘GiveUp’ and close the doors.
There doesn’t appear to be any solid vision being deployed other then to throw darts and see what sticks. If your intentions are ever to go public, you are really running in the wrong direction. Shareholders respond to profits. It’s as if OfferUp has a neon sign screaming please don’t buy me!
There are really only 3 basic KPI categories that are important to a buyer and a seller and OfferUp is failing laughably at all of them:
In Order of Importance:
End User Experience: I have buyers asking me how to purchase an item at-least a half dozen times per month. If a buyer can not figure out how to purchase from your platform, you are not an online selling space. It’s simple math: sellers sell to buyers, buyers buy from sellers OfferUp profits off the exchange of sales. The end user experience in the platform in/on App and Desktop drives profits. This is not only basic development it’s basic business 101. OfferUp continues to auto default categories for my listings and forces me to use a top level category for listing an item that absolutely doesn’t belong there. I am no longer assuming this is a design flaw. I now believe it’s intentional to forcibly make a seller pay for a listing when the so called “reached limit for the category for the month” has been met. Yes I have had the unfortunate experience of contacting support to report and request support for the top level category issue to which I have never received a response that brings me to…
2. Customer Service:
Post 2020, any inquiry I made or required support with including getting paid for for my sales has never been answered. What is sad is that since opening my account with OfferUp, I only had 5 support related matters which were all matters of cyber security threats from impostor sellers phishing. All of which where answered immediately. So I had no overall issues until 2020 and suddenly I wasn’t getting paid for my sales and I had to open up numerous support cases. None were ever answered and my funds suddenly appeared in my account nearly 4 months later. Now listings are being removed stating that they are in violation of guidelines for which I looked over repeated with a fine tooth comb and under no circumstances do my listings fall into any violations. Worst then anything is receiving messages from buyers asking me if I am on other platforms because they don’t trust making a purchase on OfferUp because they did not receive the item they purchased from another seller and can’t get their money back. BUT EVEN WORSE then that asking me if I can help them get support from OfferUp and it is staggering the amount of messages I get with people asking me to help them as if I am your customer support person and some how know better.
3. Provide Value:
Value equals profits. This should be the 1st and most important KPI but since OfferUp has failed so so so so so miserably at the very smallest basics of reselling online - Did I mention miserably? I made it number 3. Before spamming to death your end users with OUTRAGEOUS promo costs (quadruple any other platform) and RIDICULOUS shipping costs. You have to go back to KPI #1 and fix your end user experience. You can not assume magically over night people will naively just start giving you money to sell on a site that doesn’t even have the basics of using a reselling site developed in place. For all buyers, the premium premier early access subscription fee is a rip off!! DO NOT BUY IT! There is absolutely nothing special you are getting out of this service. I promise you. For Sellers the promos by listing fee is a JOKE! Rarely will you find your ads on search engines external to OfferUp and when you do, you will find them with incorrect descriptions to the listings, incorrect/ changed brand names and your photos will either be something else or it will not be fully legible. When you are offering an item for sale for $20 why on earth would you spend $4.99 promoting it?
OfferUp if you do not know how promotions work go figure it out, do market research, comps, get and use end user feedback, have pilots on releases and test test test! Then launch- duh. Remove all the pop up spam ads buyers are not there to click on Amazon and Walmart click bait and we certainly do not enjoy being kicked off the app because we didn’t click on the Casino phishing ad campaign that’s you keep supporting! Your tragic idea to sell ad space to big boxes and fraudulent websites is embarrassing.
The 4th KPI is be innovative but I stopped with 3 KPIs because I know this one is way to advanced for OfferUp. Innovation is not dart throwing. I haven’t even gotten started on the job board feature. What in the world!? Just so you are aware, I did explore it. My resume doesn’t fit any of the human trafficking and international Vishing Scams listed on there. The majority of which your platform is promoting by the way. OfferUp: Before trying to be Amazon try to learn how to swim in 2 ft deep water with a life vest on because you are so far away from floating on a pond and drowning it’s impossible for you to sit bayside on a pier near the Ocean.
Closing Comments:
To all my buyers and the sellers that I have purchased from: Thank you for your value sellers, support and patronage from my wonderful buyers. I did enjoy the community with you when it was good. I wish you all the best of and God speed. I pray that it will be another 15 years before I find myself writing another forlorn dumpster review about another tragic failure. I will be officially closing my account and am moving on. Peace.
Special thanks to eBay who called me to thank me for my many years of loyalty.