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Im having problems attracting vendors on my website.

parkerscott

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I found a niche that has a ton of people selling their wares, but they have no official platform. They do not move enough product to be accepted into retail. There are a ton of these very small time businesses running off instagram, and they are selling through shopify or free sites like bigcartel.

It seems like a lot of these guys are flying under the radar, and would do better if people could find them in one place, similar to the etsy platform. I would estimate that they are doing $500 or less a month in sales, but there are hundreds of these businesses. Ive contacted a few of them to try and get them to list their products on my site, but they were not interested, and I don't know if they didn't want to be bothered, my pitch was presented well enough or to enough people, or if i wasnt established enough.

I can't really think of how I can attract these people to the level I want though, and the only idea I have gotten so far is to try some arbitrage. Im thinking about listing all their products on my site and when somebody buys something i can just place an order through the vendor and have the item shipped to the customer. The big negative I see is processing fees and people looking for the vendors actual site to get the product for a little bit cheaper. Im hoping I can get some traction though and people will jump on board and I wont have to fake the whole process.

Does anyone have any ideas of what I should possibly do?
 
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Lex DeVille

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I found a niche that has a ton of people selling their wares, but they have no official platform. They do not move enough product to be accepted into retail. There are a ton of these very small time businesses running off instagram, and they are selling through shopify or free sites like bigcartel.

It seems like a lot of these guys are flying under the radar, and would do better if people could find them in one place, similar to the etsy platform. I would estimate that they are doing $500 or less a month in sales, but there are hundreds of these businesses. Ive contacted a few of them to try and get them to list their products on my site, but they were not interested, and I don't know if they didn't want to be bothered, my pitch was presented well enough or to enough people, or if i wasnt established enough.

I can't really think of how I can attract these people to the level I want though, and the only idea I have gotten so far is to try some arbitrage. Im thinking about listing all their products on my site and when somebody buys something i can just place an order through the vendor and have the item shipped to the customer. The big negative I see is processing fees and people looking for the vendors actual site to get the product for a little bit cheaper. Im hoping I can get some traction though and people will jump on board and I wont have to fake the whole process.

Does anyone have any ideas of what I should possibly do?

Contact people who sell on sites like Etsy.

They're already open to using 3rd party websites for exposure.

Contact more people in general.

Not sure about the last part, but you can hire help - a developer or freelancers or something to automate once you have money.
 

parkerscott

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Contact people who sell on sites like Etsy.

They're already open to using 3rd party websites for exposure.

Contact more people in general.

Not sure about the last part, but you can hire help - a developer or freelancers or something to automate once you have money.

The people im targeting dont sell anything on etsy, and if they did they would do very very poorly.
 

Jake

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I can't really think of how I can attract these people to the level I want though
Numbers, traffic data, who are your customers.

If someone approaches me with a website that gets 0 traffic why would I be interested? If someone says here is my website, we average 2000 visitors a day, x% from the U.S, and they're generally interested in... then ok, let's talk.

what's in it for THEM
 
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parkerscott

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Numbers, traffic data, who are your customers.

If someone approaches me with a website that gets 0 traffic why would I be interested? If someone says here is my website, we average 2000 visitors a day, x% from the U.S, and they're generally interested in... then ok, let's talk.

what's in it for THEM

I don't have any numbers because i cant get any vendors. Its a real catch 22.

Would you suggest i fake it until i can actually get the numbers?
 

parkerscott

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No. Find items to sell and run some traffic

The site doesn't sell stuff i can just source from a supplier. All the items i plan on selling on the site are supposed to be from hobbyists running small businesses.
 
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Mcfroggin

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Why not go to fares, conventions, etc and offer to help add them for free. Without a known platform, you will not earn money from this short-term.

You will likely need to offer extra support free of charge, and have a strong PR team to get things moving.
 

Leo Hendrix

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Generate enquiries for them offline Manually, link it up through your website.

DO something for THEM first then make the ask or have some proof or credibility before asking as mentioned already, work for them for free at first, dude there is a lot of info you can find online via google and NOT here.(although you probably could find something valuable from searching)

Try searching for offline to online or online to offline examples and reverse engineer it.

There is ALWAYS a workaround.
 

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