You only need your phone.
This blog is, after all, dedicated to Sellou, but I never wrote a post explaining what it is, and why it’s important.
Sellou offers artists, craftsmen, and other small businesses a more convenient way to sell online. It is our take on re-designing the way we experience e-commerce today, not just as a buyer — but also as a seller.
The Journey
The whole journey from start to today, took about 18 months. We started wanting to make selling easier but made a LOT of mistakes. (I mean lots.)
One of the hardest parts of product development is getting out of our own heads, and looking at what people do today, and connecting it with how people could experience the same things, but even better in the future. It’s incredibly hard.
A big part of why its hard is because we don’t want to reinvent the wheel, we want to create new things, and new experiences. The truth is, to create a completely new need, you also need to be working in a completely new market that maybe isnt fully developed yet (looking at you Quantum Computing). Or a new twist on an existing industry (Blockchain).
We, as entrepreneurs are asked to balance the humility of looking at what’s around us, with the imagination of what could be. This very careful balance can often keep people in their heads, since it’s so much easier to imagine how different things could be — it feeds our ego.
It took us a lot of building, starting from scratch, and objective thinking about how we can offer people a new take on something as established as e-commerce. But we’re here. The result is a feeling of authentic pride, a feeling of truly building something that people can find useful.
Sellou: What It Is, and What It Isn’t
If I had a dollar for every time someone said”Oh you’re just an Ebay” “Oh, another Etsy” — we would go public by now. No. We are NOT another “X”, we are a new platform. If you look at Amazon, Ebay, and Etsy, in their simplest forms, they all are the same thing — a place to buy stuff.
The reason we don’t see them as the same thing is because of how they grew out to be.
Sellou is at its early stage, it will definitely grow out to be something different.
This page alone will tell you a lot of what the app is — and isnt.
It’s a place to post photos of products you want to sell, you do have to be a small business to sign up and get verified. Once you have all the products posted and you’re ready to go, simply click “Open Your Store” to go public. It takes 48 hours to get verified.
It’s the perfect place to launch a small business and sell to a global audience.
It isnt Instagram: your photos don’t go public unless you’re a verified business. It isnt Amazon: We dont have warehouses (nor do we charge a monthly rate). It isnt Etsy: It’s not only handmade products, it’s any small business. And it isnt Ebay: We’re not a secondhand marketplace. It’s Sellou.
The main difference is that Sellou is focused on discoverability. There are so many good artists, small businesses, and craftsmen around the world — but they don’t get the coverage they are worthy of. That is, and always will be, our main goal.
I’m tempted to show you guys more screens, but actually the app is pretty intuitive, it’s very easy to figure out. We’re constantly looking for feedback, so if you want to help out please download it from here, then send us feedback at: contact@sellou.com.
What about payments and shipping?
We handle all of it. The shipping label is issued to you, all the seller needs to do is print it, and ship. The money is wired straight to your Stripe account with payouts happening every week. Pretty nifty.
The only limiting factor as of today, is that we’re only available for sellers in the U.S. More places coming soon!
Sellou is a marketplace app that opens the doors for small businesses, artists, and craftsmen to sell online and make their work known. The application is available for iOS only.
