Interviewed By MBR Team

MBR: What prompted you to come up with the idea of SWAP? How far have you reached in achieving your targets for SWAP?

Mr. Parvez Hossain: Being a tech savvy person, I always had this interest of buying new tech stuff. This started from when I was studying in my university in IBA. I wanted to buy a laptop 18 years back but I would find it very expensive being a student to afford it. I found out Pre-owned stuffs would be a great way for people to afford desired items. The shelf life of products are misused. Some having better lifespan are used for less and end up in drawers. If they can come back to the economy that would not only help students or people in lower income tier to afford but also can save the mother earth by reducing e-waste which eventually is going to be a big problem with continuous advancement of technology. This can be another plastic waste problem globally. I started my business with a brick and mortar smartphone shop with a brand name of Livewire which dealt with pre-owned products and exchange of old devices to new ones. Within last 13 years I have managed to grow it to have a retail chain of 19 stores now.

Meanwhile I figured out that this reusable nature is getting well accepted by people and it’s not only phones that needs to be resold or resused; laptops, cars, motorcycles, home appliances, and furniture need too. With more furniture being produced, deforestation is rising higher. With more cars and bikes being imported, money is getting outside, whereas we can sustain the demand with more usage of the existing ones. The more all these items can be reused we would also require less importation of parts from abroad and eventually ensure lesser flow of money from Bangladesh to abroad.

The power of circular economy is immense and can help us in long run. That is why we created SWAP. We have a target of 100,000 units to be reused every month. We are just on the beginning. There is a long way to go with more than 20,000 crore worth of products sitting at home, it only needs customer education of circular economy and building awareness and some more innovative ideas like buyback programs, consumer financing to reach the target that we have set.

MBR: What were the impacts of the pandemic on your business?

Mr. Parvez Hossain: The pandemic has taken a toll on the overall industry. We work with a lot of OEM partners who have shops around the country. Since the outlets of our OEM partners and retailer agents were/are closed due to the pandemic this has taken a toll on our customer interaction. However, our team knows how to pivot. In this scenario we have identified how difficult it can be for people to sell their old stuff during lockdown with movement restrictions. And if anyone has a phone or laptop broken or out of order it can be very difficult to pass by at home without such products as now the whole world you interact with is through these kind of technologies. So SWAP has actually gained a great amount of leverage in current situation as we give
customers the convenience of selling or even swapping their old stuff sitting home without interacting with strangers or going outside in lockdown. Hence
customers have appreciated the value that we are creating and helping people sell and get cash from and also upgrade to newer technology with affordable
solution. 

MBR: What challenges did you encounter while bringing SWAP into existence and how did you mitigate those?

Mr. Parvez Hossain: The first challenge was to initiate something which no one knew how far can go. Having your self-belief come to existence, is the most difficult part of any startup. We had to undergo a lot of brainstorming in even designing the MVP. In order to build something great you need a great team. As I always believe that it is more important to have a great team than great individuals. Although we were lucky to have good people, the main challenge for us during the early days was to find the right resources and build the right team. I still remember someone, whom we almost hired. But he did not join when he got a job offer in a big company. We faced these kinds of difficulties a lot in the early days.

We started SWAP out of a one-room office where four of us used to work. Then after four months, we rented an office in Banani.

Startups are full of uncertainties. Getting the right people who believe in your vision and owns the startup by heart is imperative for the success of any startup. You need to form a team with people with the right mindset and skills to run a startup. Building the right team was the major challenge for us in the early days.
As we have grown and people started believing on the prospect of SWAP, it has attracted great talents from the country and now we are building a great team.

MBR: Could you kindly give us a brief insight on the services provided by SWAP, especially the range of products you cover, and the process of revenue generation?

Mr. Parvez Hossain: SWAP works as a C2B marketplace along with traditional B2B and B2C ecommerce marketplace as well. In terms of recommerce, SWAP enables the customers to sell their old product such as smartphone, laptop, tablets, wearables, car, motorcycle, furniture to our designated vendors in just 24 hours. Customers just have to answer some queries in a tap and go model and based on the algorithm set in our platform they get a price based on the condition of their old product. If the customer agrees, he can choose to sell from his home or office, sell to our nearest partner shop or any other
agents that we have in his vicinity. We pay instant cash to the customer and thus customers can sell hassle free without having the need to talk to strangers from social media or c2c platform, reduce the time of selling and get rid of haggling and not to mention the safety and security issue during this pandemic. As we enable the process, we keep a margin from the proceeds of sale which ranges from 5-10% on the GMV.

In case of ecommerce, customers can choose to buy any new or pre-owned product from our sellers and they get 15 days replacement warranty on the pre-owned products too. This is safe for any customer as they won’t be able to trace a seller in c2c platform if they find any issue. With such warranty coverage they can buy their desired pre-owned product with trust.

Our motto is to give customers the convenience with better customer experience to build a long term relationship with them. 

MBR: When customers sell products, how do you ensure the authenticity of the product, and what are the criteria’s of products they can sell?

Mr. Parvez Hossain: We have a great team with profound knowledge to check the authenticity. When we buy we do the proper due diligence and keep
customer’s NID copy, picture, and fill up form to make sure its from an authentic person who has been using it. We do it to ensure forward customers’ interest and safety.

The products that are listed in our system are the options open for customers to sell from. Actually we have phones ranging upto last 5 years and brands
which have demand in the used market. For laptops and automobiles it can range to even 20 years. Even if the customers can’t find their desired model, we have a customized sell option for the customers where they can request to sell any item and we help to get them sold.
https://swap.com.bd/customized-sell-request