Consolidation and a relatively small customer base has turned the parking lot supply industry into what Pacific Cascade Corp. president and CEO Mark Curtis calls a “boutique industry.” To maximize his online sales within this limited universe, he’s expanding how his company sells products used to operate parking lots.
Vancouver, Wash.-based Pacific Cascade is the parent company of ParkingZone.com, an e-commerce site that sells new equipment and supplies like lock-box cash drawers, parking signs and graffiti-remover solvent to parking lot operators. Now the company is looking to connect buyers with sellers of surplus parking lot products on the newly launched marketplace, ParkingZoneAuctionHouse.com.
“As a major supplier of parking lot equipment and supplies, we are in tune with the needs of the industry, and we often get calls from customers wanting to find someone interested in their surplus equipment,” Curtis says. Built on e-commerce technology from RainWorx Software, the marketplace launched in the middle of last month.
ParkingZoneAuctionHouse.com charges sellers fees ranging from $1 to 10 per item listed, depending on the value of the product. It also collects a commission for each sale transaction equal to 10% of the transaction value. To maintain its role as strictly an intermediary of transactions between users, ParkingZoneAuctionHouse.com plays no role in providing shipping services, Curtis says.
Sellers are free to list their products at fixed prices or to auction them off to the highest bidder. Products appear across six categories: Collecting Revenue, Valet Equipment, Speed Bumps and Delineators, Revenue Control Equipment, Fee Computers, and Event & Other Parking Supplies. In the Speed Bumps and Delineators category, for example, products include a rubber parking stop, a rubber strip placed on pavement to indicate the boundary of a parking space. It’s priced at $15 per unit; similar products sold as new on ParkingZone.com are priced at $39 each.
Curtis says ParkingZoneAuctionHouse.com features dozens of products, though he expects that number to grow. To help the new site offer more merchandise, it displays some excess merchandise from its sister site, ParkingZone.com, which features about 1,700 SKUs, he says.
As ParkingZoneAuctionHouse.com grows, Curtis says he expects the auction site to rely less on ParkingZone.com’s products, and eventually operate purely as a portal for other parking operators to sell their equipment. Because the site is newly launched, Curtis declines to provide specific sales or traffic numbers.
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