How to build your reputation before your first order

There is an interesting catch 22 with marketplaces like Tindie. Sellers with a great reputation get more orders. However if you don’t have a reputation, how do you get orders to build your reputation?

This is a problem we saw at Yelp when a new restaurant wanted to get a great Yelp review, but was new and no one knew they existed. Interestingly I was reading about Tor marketplaces and their sellers also face this same problem.

The solution we would give at Yelp was to invite a Yelp Elite, Yelp’s super users, to come to the restaurant and then they would leave a review. On the Tor marketplaces, a similar phenomenon is happening with drug dealers. They send free product to other highly reputable members of the marketplace, and they write reviews to initially get a seller up and running.

This got me thinking. This year we’ve been very focused on trying to make it easier for new sellers to get started. It seems like there should be a way to help sellers jump start their reputations.

What do you all think?

Makes sense to me I notice i get a lot of customers when you guys send out a newsletter. People who buy from me love my products but others dont know I exist so while i have sales it wont go far if the word doesnt get out about my cool stuff.

I dont know a thing about marketing but would love to be a “test” in the process

Yeah that’s part of the reason we started ‘New Products at Noon’ - if all of the new products for a day come out at a specific time, chances are people will pop over to check them out…and thus more traffic for new sellers

A YouTube video showing a functional product, that is short and has a non-technical description written below can promote a new product. Include links to your social media, and prominently display that you “sell on Tindie” (get one of Tindies logos!) .
On social media, search and follow influential people - not necessarily CEO’s, but active users of similar products, then tag them in your posts. Follow and support their posts, ask questions, etc. Show interest in their progress.Worst that can happen is they will block you.
-Louis

Making videos isnt a problem. But having the video as the first image is. When that can be changed then ill start. Or how about letting us embed a video?

Funny thing - videos don’t actually impact a product’s chances of selling as much as we thought. It has very, very little impact so I actually have a pull request up now to move the video to the bottom of a product’s description.

Emile, that could be because any positive impact of the video is counterbalanced by it replacing the main product shot on the details page. If videos were obvious but not intrusive, they might have more effect.

Just an example. I have a product that is interesting - maybe - (not yet sold nor listed) but the better thing to explain how it works is showing a full demo video. Without this a long doc should be uploaded and the impact for the users and potential buyers will not be the same. What do you suggest ?

thanks. Enrico

I found just now a good twitter policy and the new products listing everyday. I had not yet orders returns but I see it moves well the things.

As for almost every Arduino compatible product I am publishing an article on the popular electroschematics.com magazine, I started a sort of test: subscribing on LinkedIn to most of the interesting groups related to Arduino and put on them posts about the articles with the links and in the promotion side I put tindie info and product link with a special discount for them. Maybe it works, if you are interested I’ll keep you updated.