The peer to peer marketplace is growing at quite a pace, with new platforms seemingly arriving on a daily basis to impact well established industries. Last year for instance I wrote about the growth of a number of sites offering a peer to peer postal service.
The basic gist of these services is that you share with your contacts when you’re going somewhere, and if they can take a package with them (or bring something back) then you begin that conversation. There are even tentative moves by retailers to offer similar customer delivery services, although that seems a little way off yet.
Another industry that is being impacted by the peer to peer process is the self storage industry. A new site called Boxbee has launched with the aim of applying peer to peer principles to the industry.
They believe that having items tucked securely away in storage facilities is a bit of a waste, so have built their site to help people share those items to friends and family rather than leave them gathering dust in a warehouse.
The company, based in San Francisco, send users a heavy duty box to place their belongings into. This is then sent to the company’s secure storage facility, with the items added to an online inventory that can be managed by each user. If they require any particular item from their box, they can locate it online and request it be delivered back to them.
The social part however allows users to also do this to 3rd parties. So if a friend wants to borrow something, the user can easily request that instead of being delivered to home, it can be delivered to their friend’s house. It’s all tracked via the users dashboard, so they can easily keep up with which friend has which item.
The service costs between $6 and $9 per month, although it costs $15 to send an item. This last figure sounds rather high to me and may limit the amount of sharing that goes on, although I have to confess that I’m not a user of self-storage so don’t know how these prices stack up against rival services.
As a concept though it’s certainly an interesting one, and worth keeping an eye on.
Certainly an interesting idea. Not sure I'd want to lend my stuff out to any Tom, Dick or Harry though. Friends sure, but not strangers.
Piece about the rise of storage on the Economist this week.
http://www.economist.com/news/britain/21595424-cr…
Thanks Danny, good find.
Having friends, roommates or relatives share some storage space could seem perfect if you're looking to have a garage sale together in the near future or having a good "drop off point" for items you wish to deliver or transport. Security may be an issue though as typically only a few members may access the store. It would be a good idea to keep things "in the family" if you don't have the resources to take inventory of what's gone in as opposed to what you want to take out. Generally the bigger companies have the capacity to do so, and needless to say as a business, there would be a certain guarantee to the security of a person's possessions before it's being loaned out to another person.
It would be a wise decision for the business owners to hire a warehouse for storing the saleable commodities and the precious articles, while carrying out the renovation of their commercial premises, as most of the storage services use the hi-tech security systems, which helps preventing any loss.
The whole peer-to-peer thing has been astounding. Several years ago, an incubator company called sparefoot.com was starting up in Austin, where they were attempting to create a market place to rent out your own garage, your own basement, your own attic, etc. Unfortunately there were too many barriers to that business model (items not secure in an other’s home or garage, etc), but sparefoot took their business model and readjusted to become the strongest self storage aggregator in the self storage space, selling storage rentals to self storage facilities like ours. We love them and we hate them, but mostly, we love them!!
Having friends, roommates or relatives share some storage space could seem perfect if you’re looking to have a garage sale together in the near future or having a good “drop off point” for items you wish to deliver or transport