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.

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

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 a clear 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/weights for postage.

The fanciest carboot sale in the world.

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.

Let's also take the friction out of online buying.

It's not just about selling stuff though; we are also evolving the process of buying online:

• 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 sub-sites serve as dedicated online concession stalls for shops & brands.

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, yet 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.

Win-win-win-win

1. Selling Convenience

   Aims to make listing online completely frictionless

2. Buying Joy

   Browsing in a highly personalised, much more efficient way

3. Environment

   More reuse = less virgin manufacture

4. Redefining Competitiveness

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