Hingeto Supply — Start your own Amazon-style marketplace

@leandrew @rrhoover thanks for dating me :-). 9 years, helped e-retailers sell about $600M so far. 1 big surprise 1 big learning and some tidbits. 1. How companies like Amazon (hella huge) and Wayfair ($6 billion) are able to hide their "product sourcing" advantage in plain site so well. To give you perspective Wayfair has over 14,000 vendors and millions of skus (how can a retailer with 80 vendors and 500 skus compete?). The tools are there (recently, thanks internet) for other home retailers to become a marketplace too but traditional buying model is super hard to break free from (largely because leadership came up from "old" retail and need to justify investments). My advice: find a way to sell product to your customer without taking on the risk... period. You never never never know what products your customer is going to love (or hate) so don't take the risk and move fast... kinda like lean start-up 2. I think media sites, publishers, influencers will be the next billion dollar retailers. Kylie Jenner proved this out a bit recently but others will join. The organization or person with the audience can be a billion dollar retailer now. Going to be exciting to see who strikes first and I hope we get to work with them (we are in talks with some of the biggest media properties in the world and they are hungry and serious... and have good data on what customers want). No longer do they need a huge warehouse and millions to buy product or a big retail merch team. With those barriers gone & traditional retailers struggling to pivot from so many physical store locations... new billion dollar retailers will be made. Scary Mommy is a good case study; we power them. https://shop.scarymommy.com/ Other short-winded thoughts: - Vendors (even popular ones) are ready to dropship (they are already doing it for their own websites). Just gotta be easy enough for them. - Retail Buyers (I love buyers); are often gambling when buying inventory, sorry. - Customers don't care as much as we think they do where their package ships from, just be fast. - Customers want to see new products weekly or daily; it's entertainment. - Retail is being democratized... in a crazy way; join in, a new world order is underway.

@leandrew @rrhoover @leandrewrobinson couldn’t have said it better myself

@hnshah @yawza That's very interesting for sure, but a bit expensive to start. $199/month feels like you need to have already a customer base and marketing in place to cover the costs just for Hingeto.

@hnshah @yawza @mrdobelina Absolutely love the product concept, but do agree that the pricing is quite expensive. Have you considered adding a freemium tier that limits the amount of products stores can list?

@yawza @mrdobelina Filippo thanks for the feedback! The retailers we can serve the best right now are those with some marketing/customer traction. We are connecting our retailers to specific vendors (brands); sometimes it's a one-to-one relationship so having traction and the ability to drive a few orders weekly is appreciated from the brand side for sure. Either way we will definitely test different tiers and find ways for folks to test and start for less of a monetary barrier as time goes on.

@mrdobelina yes currently that's the case. we may have a lower tier plan in the future where you can test

@lachlankirkwood appreciate the love. Thanks for the feedback and great suggestion. We've played with freemium to varying success. The stores we've helped the most are those with the ability to drive end-customers relatively quickly. We think this is largely because our platform connects their stores with real brands who can be pretty discerning about where they sell to. Also what we replace for a retailer is much more expensive than even $499 per month. When I ran a $130M per year business we'd buy $80M in product per year to support this business - some would sell well and other product would sit ultimately be liquidated for a loss. If I had Hingeto and paid the higher tier I'd only have to pay $6K upfront and never have inventory risk and fixed profitability. Now everyone doesn't need to do $100M but when you price Hingeto against buying product, having a warehouse and inventory risk, anyone who endeavors to do $50K+ per year, Hingeto starts to make a lot of sense. All that said, I'm confident my team will end up finding a win-win for a freemium model as time goes on. :-) Thanks for the feedback seriously.

@imdaeshawn Daeshawn noted buddy. Ping me at Leandrew@hingeto.com so I can learn more about your store and what you are up to in ecommerce.

@hingeto @leandrewrobinson Sounds good. Also, my comments are just for me as an individual wanting to support and satisfy my curiosity to see what Hingeto has to offer. I'm aware of what you said above, that Hingeto is a great deal/replacement for the current situation your target customers are facing. I'm just starting out in the ecommerce world, but will gladly email you.

@mourad_ben_mahmoud Hey buddy. Once you come off of the waitlist you will see a lengthy length of new brands you'll have direct access to.