About Rummij

Market stalls for the re-use economy.

Rummij is a marketplace that uses AI to bring the joy of shopping at real life market stalls or rummaging through antique shops to your phone screen.

Our stall-based approach means you can list hundreds of items for sale in seconds, or quickly browse thousands of bargains in the time it would normally take to search individual items.

"Browsing online is like IRL shopping through a keyhole"

Taking the friction out of online selling.

AI can clearly handle so much of what makes selling online punishingly onerous:

• Identify, price, and list 10s or even 100s of items for sale at once - no need to individually upload or list.
• No fees for selling, low fees for buying

The fanciest carboot sale in the world.

• Scrolling curated stalls means you can cover so much more ground, taking in ~10x more items than a traditional listing site
• Stall-based shopping provides a psychological experience more akin IRL shopping
• Shop-based areas serve as online concession stalls for shops & brands to show off their products, something like browsing an old-school paper catalog

Our Story

Rarely do we want to sell individual items... it’s “I must sell some clothes“ or “I’m going to slim down my collection” - yet historically online selling has focused on laborious item-by-item listing. It's such an unappealing admin job that most of the time we do not bother, leaving unwanted items languishing in garages, lofts and cupboards.

Our own inherent laziness started us thinking about Rummij long before AI came along, but it was the accelerating progress in machine vision that revealed AI as the clear the route for taking the pain out of selling stuff online, tackling the onerous task of individually listing items and painstakingly filling out descriptions, prices and measurements for postage.

So we thought, let's build an AI-first marketplace that does just that - automatically identifying, pricing and listing whole stacks of items at once, in seconds.

More than just identification AI

But this goes beyond computer vision - what if the whole experience for buyer and seller could be almost completely frictionless?

Stalls vs Search First

That thought inspired our second Eureka moment - why do we love shopping in physical stores, yet have a horrible time on Ebay?

• Problem 1: you have to _know_ what you want before visiting Ebay / Amazon because they are search first marketplaces
• Problem 2: it is much easier to take in a breadth of products and ranges IRL

Browsing online is like shopping through a keyhole... or visiting a dept store at night and hunting out products with only a flashlight.

Rummij displays approximately 100 items per page-fold vs. ~10 on Vinted and ~8 on eBay - this makes shopping more like scanning market stalls or shop shelves in a physical environment. You can "write-off" more choices instantly, but serendipity is also more prevalent.

The stall-based approach encourages browsing, and in doing so reveals other items in the same shop window. We like to think of it as not dissimilar to browsing a paper catalog - occassionally you go to the index to find a specific thing, but more often the joy of simply browsing is pleasure in itself.

Couple that with the same kind of personalisation AI that drives engagement with Instagram and you have a new and wholly more compelling experience.

Doing our (little) bit for the planet

Environmentally it also bothers us that so much stuff lies dormant in people's houses, lofts and sheds; we thought - if we can somehow create a way that makes it easy to list these unwanted trinkets then just maybe we can help to prevent the manufacture of some unnecessary goods.

Try the AI or buy stuff

Win-win-win-win

1. Convenience

   Aims to make buying and selling completely frictionless, compelling even

2. Environment

   More reuse = less virgin manufacture

3. Hard Cash

   More money in your pocket and space in your life

4. Redefining Competitiveness

   Considerably cheaper (free in fact, for sellers) than today's online marketplaces due to our modern architecture and micro overheads

Think of it like this

• A newer eBay
• A cheaper Shopify
• A faster Vinted
• The future is AI. The future for marketplaces is Rummij AI