Shopless: Celebrating Our First Milestone

I have been working on Shopless for the past 4 years and what I have learnt is that working on an “online marketplace” is an extremely hot topic… from the teller in the bank to the technician who came to fixed my TV antenna, they all had a highly opinionated view about my job…

“You can’t compete with TradeMe” said the antenna guy, as soon as I told him that I work on an online marketplace… that’s normally the reaction that I get… most people argue that since there have been a of failed attempts in building a new online marketplace, Shopless will fail too…

“you need to be the first”…

“you need to come with a new idea”…

Some people go beyond these arguments… there was a shopkeeper who once told me that TradeMe is part of the Mafia and they would hack whoever tries to compete with them!!! (Disclaimer: I don’t agree with these kind of conspiracy theories)

One Thousand Ads

Last week we reached our first milestone of 1000 listings. This is really small number compared to big brands such as TradeMe and Facebook Marketplace… and we have a lot of work to do in building our community… but we are really excited to about reaching this milestone and feel that we are on the right track.

Our community is small (560 users, as of today) but the feedback that we are receiving from our users is exactly what we aimed for: Most of our users have told us that working with the website is simple and they like the minimalist design.

We are also very excited about the number of job vacancies that are listed on Shopless (especially because around 15% of these jobs are not listed on other big platforms, such as Seek)

Business Model

Being a free marketplace, a lot of people ask us, how do we make money? Our business model is pay-for-promotion… which means we give our users the option to list their products for free, but we do charge them if they want to promote the listing to get more attention. AND WE DONATE HALF OF OUR REVENUE TO CHARITY.

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