Lovejunk

First Stage - February 2021

A partnership with lovejunk [[1]] was announced by the Board on Central 4.2.21 - https://discourse.ilovefreegle.org/t/paid-collections-in-london-via-lovejunk-com/2820 . The full details are in the announcement, but the basics are:

The idea is that:

• If you have something you want removing you list it on lovejunk.com.
• Businesses or reuse organisations, who are licensed to take stuff legally, reply, with a kind of bidding process.
• You choose your preferred bid - this is a paid collection.
• They come and take it away.
• Depending on who they are, they may reuse it, or may recycle it. 95% of stuff is recycled.

Lovejunk is currently London-only, but is highly likely to expand and form partnerships with some major furniture retailers in the UK. It is getting significant momentum - typical response time to a listing is now under a minute, and it’s something like 80% success from listing to pickup.

The Board agreed a partnership with lovejunk as follows:

• If, after some time, an OFFER cannot be freegled, we will offer freeglers in London the option of booking a collection via lovejunk.
• This is at the point where we currently send a chaseup/autorepost mail, and also via a button on My Posts. That means it’s not “competing” with normal successful freegling, and only kicks in when an item isn’t immediately shifting.
• There will be a popup which explains the process (see below).
• If they choose to go ahead, then it’ll take them over to lovejunk with some of the details filled in.
• All the arrangements between the person and the collector are entirely lovejunk’s responsibility, not ours.

In effect it’s a bit like we’ve offered them an easy way to organise a bulky waste collection, and we will get paid a bit for doing so.

Second Stage - October 2023

Integration (similar to that with Trashnothing) implemented with Freegle website. Edward explained with an Announcement on Discourse (sent to all volunteers) -https://discourse.ilovefreegle.org/t/announcing-integration-with-lovejunk/6810, and a discussion thread on Central - https://discourse.ilovefreegle.org/t/lovejunk-integration/5925

Outline of change:

What will happen?

Offer posts from Freegle will be sent to LoveJunk. They will show some of them (the larger items) to their users, as free items. Those users can reply, and communicate back and forth with freeglers (and indirectly, trashnothing users). All that goes into Chat as normal, so freeglers won’t really see much difference - they can view the messages on the site/app/email as usual. What do the users look like in ModTools?

You’ll see these users in ModTools as members of your groups. You’ll be able to see their name, and the LoveJunk user id. They don’t have email addresses, but messages you send will get to them just like when you send a message to a TrashNothing user.

All the usual spam checks, chat review, remove/ban stuff should apply as normal.

Can I turn this off? I’ll be turning this on by default for all groups fairly soon, once we’re happy that it’s working ok on a couple of trial groups. (Turned on for all groups 16th November 2023.)

Because this is Freegle, I’ve implemented an off switch in ModTools in Settings->Community->Status, so you will be able to turn this off. But please don’t instantly turn this off before you’ve given it a chance.

Why are we doing this?

It makes more freegling happen. Some posts get enough people replying, but a lot - especially for bulky items - don’t. LoveJunk users are more used to dealing with bulky items.

LoveJunk have also paid us to do this - an up front fee to cover the development, and will be paying a monthly fee which we will split with TrashNothing (since they are providing some of the original posts). So this helps keep Freegle going.

This is also good strategically, because it positions Freegle as the central “hub” for reuse. Obviously not all reuse systems are interested in integration, but it’s good for us to be at the heart of this.

Future

In future we will do the other side of the integration, where free posts on LoveJunk come through to Freegle as OFFERs. They don’t have WANTEDs. The number of OFFERs is fairly low, which is why we’re doing it second, but that will be good to have too.

Link: Other sites/interfaces