Swap.com an online con­sign­ment space where par­ents can buy sec­ond­hand kids’ cloth­ing, gear, books, toys, games and more has raised $4 mil­lion in fund­ing for its website.

Here’s what Swap.com has to say about their ser­vices, “Swap.com is the first online con­sumer-to-con­sumer depart­ment store where you can buy, sell and swap pre-owned items. The online con­sign­ment sales mod­el lets item own­ers get more val­ue for their items while com­bin­ing the con­ve­nience and enjoy­ment of online shop­ping with the effort­less­ness of get­ting rid of items at a local thrift or con­sign­ment store”.

Dr. Juha Kopo­nen, the CEO and Co-founder explains that Swap.com oper­ates as a true con­sign­ment store, where­as most of its com­peti­tors do not. First they accept all brands rather than just lim­it­ing them­selves to just high-end appar­el. They also allow cus­tomers to sell non-cloth­ing items like baby gear, books, toys, games, decor, movies and music, sport equip­ment, and also mater­ni­ty clothes. Swap’s com­peti­tors basi­cal­ly want you to ship your goods to them, where they pay you for them, or a peer to peer mar­ket­place occurs. At Swap, they only pay you after the item is pur­chased by anoth­er shop­per, and they sup­port swap­ping since a swap­per can receive more for items on their site. They only take 20% and a dol­lar for every item it sells.

Swaps are free on Swap.com but the com­pa­ny does charge anoth­er flat fee for sort­ing, pho­tograph­ing, stor­ing and list­ing items on sell­ers’ behalf.  It behooves the cus­tomer to send in larg­er lots rather sin­gle items, the fees could eat away at any addi­tion­al prof­its you could make here over a com­peti­tors’ site. Dr. Kopo­nen thinks Swap.com’s “secret sauce” will be the rea­son for its suc­cess, which hap­pens to be increased effi­cien­cies on the ful­fill­ment side of its busi­ness com­pared to their competitors.

The cur­rent report from Swap.com says they have been grow­ing 20% each month since 2013, this of course hap­pen­ing after Swap was bought by Euro­pean swap­ping site Net­cy­cler. They cre­at­ed a ful­fill­ment cen­ter in Illi­nois for the ease of ship­ping to the East and West coast. At present they appear to be adding 50,000 new items month­ly, with the site hav­ing 150,000 items right now.

The first round investors are Marc Onet­to, for­mer VP of World­wide Oper­a­tions and Cus­tomer Ser­vice at Amazon.com, Ari Hyp­po­nen (first employ­ee at F‑Secure), Ahti Hein­la (Skype found­ing engi­neer), Jaan Tallinn (Skype and Kazaa found­ing engi­neer), and Clean­tech Invest Plc.

Look­ing at this list of names make you want to run out and send your resume, does­n’t it? Always good to try to get in on some­thing when it’s start­ing, nev­er know what the oppor­tu­ni­ties are. Let’s not for­get about the fact if you’ve got some kids or old stuff lying around, go and get busy.