Supplies v Marketplace

As we have been removing products that never sold and helped sellers make their product descriptions better, it’s become clear there are 2 different types of sellers.

• Makers selling their creations
• Resellers

Sure there is a little overlap from Makers reselling excess supplies, but for the most part it is pretty clear. So we want to propose a new change to the site that would (hopefully & finally) clear up the discrepancy between the two.

Instead of mixing the two, we begin to look at the Marketplace & Supplies as two totally different parts of the site. Each behaves differently and has different guidelines.

The Marketplace

• We continue to work with those makers to improve their listings, help show off their creations
• Higher requirements when listing a product (length of description, requiring more photos, etc)
• Highly curated
• Intended for businesses that stock inventory and sell a product over the long term
• Default sort by “Most Popular” right now

Supplies (maybe rename to classifieds?)

• Resale, one offs, vintage, supplies
• Mainly used for quickly selling something that will never come back in stock
• Let sellers list as is
• Default sort by most recent

Each would get their own search, link from the header, and basically be seen as a silo from the other.

To compare this against Etsy, they act like we have - by mixing them together. Honestly this has been something that has irked me for years. Subsequently, and as long time sellers know, we’ve tried many different solutions to this problem. Because each type of product has different sellers and buying behavior, I think it makes sense to just push them apart one and for all.

What do you all think?

The “supplies” (maybe rename to ghetto?) category as proposed seems somewhat tangential to the issue you’ve already identified. “mainly used for quickly selling something that will never come back in stock” doesn’t describe supplies or resold items, and it really seems like it’d a) become low quality and low value, and b) dilute both Tindie’s vision and split development time between two essentially distinct sites.

I think it’s a bad idea.

@arachnidlabs perfectly fair point

The “never back in stock” does pertain to normal sellers offloading extras. But you are right the resellers would want to keep selling longer term (even if they dont sell in the first place).

The tricky part for us is in managing this content. Putting headers along side maker made doesn’t work - and sellers don’t want to put the same amount of effort into a resold product as apposed to a makermade.

Maybe the answer is to simply stop doing quality control on supplies

The more I think on it, if we stop quality control on supplies, we would have to move it to another section. It’s an issue of an area people know there will be poor quality vs those products showing in the marketplace and that corrupts the overall sense of the site.

If we push it aside, we set the expectation.

Hi all, I am not sure if am I following correctly but here is my view:

As a seller/maker, I plan to have my creations and maybe some supplies. This supplies will help to give me some more extra income or maybe as you said, to sell something that I have in excess.
So, I think is a bad idea to slip the things (on two areas or pages or whatever).

My suggestions (or what I expected from Tindie) would be:

• Focus your quality control in the maker creations (the “I did it myself” products).
• Promote the maker creations.
• Maybe in the seller store, you can split it and have two selectable lists “Maker’s Products” and the “Supplies”… so the user will know if is looking for a maker creation or a reseller product in that store.
• I believe the good sellers will take care and improve their own supplies “listing quality”.
• If you focus your browse/search in “maker products” and control that quality you will have automatically a concentrated quality.

Btw, that rises me a technical related question: How does Tindie deal when a user order multiple items (ex: more than one listed product at the same time) from the same store? How is the shipping calculated?

Mario

@mrluzeiro thanks for your thoughts. Thats kinda how we’ve been doing it…

On shipping - we take the we take the highest base rate when there are multiple items. The thought process is that the item with the highest base rate is most likely bc it is the heaviest or largest item, and the one which can throw the shipping costs off the most.

I think this is almost clear and the subdivision probably will help a lot the maker (like me eh eh )

So, I perfectly agree with this politics.