Rumgr brings community to its local commerce mobile app

Local commerce app Rumgr recently released its first major update since its launch in February, adding new social features in hopes to become a player in the mobile social commerce market. Rumgr is an iPhone-only app that allows users to buy and sell new and used goods on mobile. The Las Vegas-based Rumgr was founded by former Zappos developers including Rumgr co-founder and CEO Dylan Bathurst. Users can sell products by taking pictures of items with their iPhone camera and posting them to Rumgr. Users looking to purchase can scroll through the app's Rummage tab that displays all the items for sale based on your location via GPS and sorted by distance and newness of the item. Once a sale is accepted, a private chat between the buyer and seller is initiated to complete the transaction. The app is not about searching for specific items, but rather finding hidden gems in a user's local area from friends and neighbors. "You don't go to a garage sale looking for something specific," Bathurst tells Inside Mobile Apps. "You go to a garage sale for that fun experience of finding something really interesting. We wanted to bring that kind of aspect of local commerce to an iPhone app." In an effort to continue making the Rumgr community a focus, the recent update added new social features including two tabs titled Profile and Following, so users can follow their friends and neighbors and also set up user profiles. The Rummage section also saw some changes like the ability to move the map to different areas, which aren't local, meaning users can see what's being sold from non-local areas. Community guidelines specify what can be put on Rumgr. If the people at Rumgr see an item for sale as a problem, they'll reach out to the seller and tell them why they took their item down. On the other hand, Rumgr still wants to let users have fun by letting people use the app in different ways. Rumgr release top 10 lists each month on its blog of what interesting items people post on the app ranging from houses to pens and pencils. The app currently has no monetization features and has about 300 to 500 daily active users. Rumgr is still developing the idea for the app and also trying to see where it fits in the mobile local commerce market, but the company is seeing steady growth, says Bathurst. The company also makes it a point to get out of the office and meet customers at coffee shops to chat about the app. Bathurst even personally emails every user who signs up to ask them how they like the app so far. That user feedback is helping to set the course for where Rumgr goes in the future. Bathurst says he's seen a lot of mobile location-based buying and selling apps come out trying to tackle similar problems but with very different approaches like Yardsale, HipSwap and Craigslist. "We have goals beyond just buying and selling. That's what really differentiates us is that we're not just trying to be a place to hock your goods and get rid of them, but kind of a place that people want to go to sell because they know they're going to have a great experience there." Our AppData traffic tracking service shows that Rumgr doesn't rank on any leaderboards as of today. Right now the folks at Rumgr have priorities and are only focusing on the iPhone app and its community, but they do plan expand to different platforms once the iPhone version is nailed down, according to Bathurst. "The biggest thing that the future holds for our company is really focusing on the social aspect of buying and selling," he says. "Really going down the road of helping people have great quality sales between their friends and neighbors and really focusing on building that community where there wasn't one before." As for the future of local commerce on mobile, Bathurst believes the potential over the next five to 10 years is huge. He adds that the used goods market will always be huge because times are always going to be rough, which means people wanting to sell used goods to make money. Rumgr has received $500,00 in funding to date and is backed by Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, Zappos "No Title" Fred Mosseler, Zappos CTO Arun Rajan and CEO of Resort Gaming Group in Las Vegas Andrew Donner.

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Rumgr brings community to its local commerce mobile app

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