With a new service from Ztail, retailers are able to offer consumers guaranteed resale values of the brand new items they are purchasing. Ztail's guarantee applies to new products purchased on its site from one of its authorized retail partners. Ztail locks in the resale value at time of purchase for 1 year. When the consumer is ready to sell the item, they go back to Ztail, which creates an eBay auction listing for them. "When your product sells, if you don't get the guaranteed resale price, we PayPal you the difference," the site explains.
Ztail cofounder Bill Hudak said the company is accepting new merchants and is working on a product to integrate on merchant's sites. "The fee structure is essentially the same as their normal affiliate fees, so around 5%. We will work with an existing affiliate program as long as they can provide a data feed, or we will take a datafeed directly." If Ztail has to pay out on transactions where the price is not met, it pays the difference, not the merchant.
Hudak also said the company is building a feature that suggests new products from the same merchant when the user chooses to sell. "This will drive upgrades and loyalty for the merchant," he said.
Current Ztail Authorized Partners include 3Balls Golf, Cambridge Soundworks, Comp USA, Giggle, J&R Music World, Mister Watch Online and Tactics.
Consumers who make a purchase through the program are eligible for up to $2,000 in total Ztail Guarantee value in a calendar year. The Ztail Guarantee is only valid in the United States. Users who wish to participate outside of the United States may do so as long as the retailer is willing to ship products to the user's country, and the user is willing and able to list their product on eBay's U.S. website. (Complete terms and conditions are found on the Ztail website.)
Ztail was co-founded by Bill Hudak, Jordan Kobert and Dave Keefer and originally launched in 2007 as a service that helped casual sellers create professional listings and publish to eBay, classified sites and their favorite social network sites, including MySpace, Facebook and blogs.
In 2008, Ztail launched a new service that it called the first interactive pricing guide for anything under the sun, relying on the "Collective Wisdom of Communities." Its "What's It Worth?" application for Facebook created a game out of letting users "guesstimate" the worth of items for sale on Facebook Marketplace.
Ztail explained in its blog that "The cost of owning is the difference between the new product price, and the resale price, we call that the "Ztail price," it's what you pay to own the item." Interestingly, this principle of temporary ownership was expounded upon in Daniel Nissanoff's 2006 book, FutureShop, where he wrote that society was moving from an "accumulation nation" of hoarders into one where possessions can be constantly replaced with newer, better items. He pointed to auction drop-off stores as evidence that eBay was creating unprecedented levels of liquidity for everyday goods.
