Startup - Selling in multiple places

Startup - Selling in multiple places

Are your products available only on your website? 

There are many marketplaces a company like ours can participate in. Some of them were easy to set up and others had/have barriers to entry that are frustratingly steep. Getting our wares into other marketplaces has been a bit of a slog. My guess is that a lot of third world scammers and bot accounts can be thanked for this and the trepidation from various gate keepers. 

Facebook was simply the easiest to get started with, get our products on and start migrating our products from Shopify.


Instagram says we have to prove we're not scammers or bots for about 8 months before they'll let us sell any products. Even though we have an LLC and i've spoken with them on calls they don't care.


ETSY gave us quite a run with over a month of their automation not working, bugs updating via their portal and vague to no UI labeling indicating where specifically some form submissions were failing. Their tech support endured and i thank them for it but I could tell my case was ping-ponged around quite a bit. 


Pinterest initially said we failed their business requirements miserably and treated us like criminals with multiple rejections. The documentation for each rejection item is vague or nonexistent. Again, i can guess the "whys" for each item but their algorithms are rejecting a legit LLC as if i was someone who intended to flood the site with trashy irrelevant and disingenuous content. Baby with the bath water Pinterest! Boo!  


Amazon - is TBD. It's $40/mo for a pro account and we want to make sure there are enough sales to support that monthly burn. We need to get better traction before we can afford this jump.


Google - getting our product catalog into their online sales required us to hurdle a field mapping issue with Shopify. Their tech support was amazing, thorough, patient and responsive.

    We still have yet to fully leverage each of these platforms for sales but our mere presence in these places validates us as a true brand vs one of the many grifters who have tarnished these markets.

    ETSY product ads on Google showed up before any other listing in Google. That alone makes it worth their .20¢ per item listing fee. As our brand trust grows, we expect to start seeing sales in each of these venues. The lessons learned from this is it takes time to gain the trust from each of these platforms and it must be earned.

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