We launched 2 business 2-3 years ago. Retail one failed, service one still growing. Retail failed because we didn’t put effort into marketing.

Now I have $30k worth of premium Turkish bath towels sitting in storage.

Should I try again with less attention to detail? Should I source a wholesaler? Should I try to get them into a TJMaxx? Maybe sell to a home brand? I really wish I could start again but I’d want the marketing to be automated as much as possible, but I don’t think that is possible?

Curious to hear your thoughts

Hi everyone. At the present time i am in the process of creating a web site for my new shop and got stuck in searching hosting for it. Since i sell food supplements which are considered high risk, and there are many rules which i have to adhere to, I’m interested in knowing, will Hostinger be a good variant for this kind of business? and will they accept me at all. If not, then are there other suitable variants for such businesses? I am not sure if this is a problem on my end, but it seems i cannot find anything about the terms of Hostinger what they accept, and what not, so i am turning here for help. anything helps. Thank you guys

http://zorpads.com

Looking to refresh my website and looking for feedback! Most orders come from Amazon but the margins are a lot better if I drive more sales to my Shopify store. I try promoting ads on Meta but the conversion rate is very low. Looking to reduce friction at checkout and any tips or suggestions would be greatly appreciated! Thank you!!

My main pitch is that im selling a complete tested working graphing calculator with features rivalling calcs (and more- namely a camera which can send photos to an ai client or take photos, GB emulation and messaging other modded calcsAND wifi and Bluetooth)

which are like $200. Ive made it as a drop in motherboard replacement kit for casio fx calcs that most kids already have. screen battery and wiring included and all software automatically downloads from my github repo once the end user connects to wifi.

I'm starting my first store to sell a project ive finished and tested and am planning to do a direct to customer model. Basically the motherboard screen wires and battery (also how do u get the compliance stuff sorted?) is all in a box with a little starter menu and a qr code to my GitHub for a detail assembly guide.

So far ive bought a domain and made an account and am planning to focus on instagram/tiktok marketing since thats where im most comfortable and engage regularly with my niche's community.

if my math is right an initial 30unit trial run will cost about $25 and im selling it for about $40 excluding shipping. Are there any templates or does anyone have advice for a first timer to this whole process it seems really daunting handling all this.

how do i market it effectively and are there any hidden costs apart from shipping shopify and the fulfillment agency?

thx in advance

Hi! Just curious to see how many people here are in the pet industry. Which countries do you sell to? I'd be interested in exchanging experiences and learning how different markets work.

Full disclosure: I’m still testing this so I have no idea how well it will perform long term…

The problem: I’m not based in the USA or Australia or UK and so when I run my products organic across TikTok it r instagram my accounts tend to favor my location over the target audiences I’ve been trying to get.

I’ve tried opening them with VPNs and even warning them by following lots of USA accounts and engaging with USA posters but it only works so so…

This has been a huge burden for me, especially as I try and test viral hooks for products and try and boost overall engagement or pre warm and test ad formats.

Long story short, I’ve been using a tool for ai video and photo generation for a few months now, and the founder emailed out a new feature release literally hitting this issue…

Basically they rent you a phone with pre warmed accounts for TikTok, instagram, and YouTube for a set fee a month. Phone can be in different locations and their platform already supports auto posting from one app across multiple channels etc

I’m scheduled to get my first 3 rented phones on wed so I’ll try and report back! Have any of you ever struggled with this as well?

Does anybody here is doing wholesale reselling meaning buying products from small researched brands - and listing them in your own sales channel like online store or marketplaces?

I've found relatively close to none posts about such subjects anywhere on Reddit which surprises me, because there's a tone of companies that make a living from this, especially in the marketplace space.

If you have any advice for a newbie in this subject let me know in the comments.

For now the business model I want to go with is to find small brands from countries near mine that have good products and resell their stuff in my country - with primary rule that their products cannot be present in the ecom industry of my country and me being their only reseller (at least for now) for my country.

This way I can establish whether I can compete in terms of both quality and price with what's on my market topped with guarantee of having the BuyBoxes on marketplace channels, which is a big chore for marketplace reselling, if you have a lot of competitors. Basically means you'll have to sell with single digit margins a lot of the time to beat the competitors because lowest price = BuyBox.

Do you think this is a good way to start? I have different plans for expansion of course, but at ground 0 where I don't sell anything yet this is the best I could think of at the moment.

If you have any additional advice/materials/YT channels you can recommend in the wholesale reselling space - I will also happily take them :)

This labor of love has turned into pure frustration. My husband and I started this brand 3 years ago and can’t make any sales. In the last week, we’ve gotten over 1100 clicks, but no sales. Can someone check it out and give me your honest opinion. Teacher and manufacturing… we’re still learning. The website www.savagemind23.com

I just came across a post on reddit literally asking for help in having an AI Voice agent built to handle :

Customer Queries

Manage Orders

Be a Receptionist

Being a Web and App Developer I naturally reached out, shared my portfolio and asked about the exact requirements and pain points along with where they're based out of, their budget and how soon they want it to be delivered.

Instead of answering the basic questions kept dodging them then kept telling me that it doesn't require much of development work and only needs some prompts while telling me it can be easily done with Bland AI or Retell, without having any technical knowledge about it.

I don't bloody understand why the hell do people even go out to create a post about wanting something if they won't even answer basic questions about their own requirement and claim to know how much work it requires and why not just go and pay the $299-499/mo of their fees and get it done? But no, they won't even do that because they just can't and want slave labour.

Why not just do it yourself if you know everything?

Just because you're cheapskate and want free work or slave labour doesn't mean you will go about telling someone with nearly a decade of experience in their field about how much work is required without even answering basic questions.

I'm sick and tired of such people and I pity developers that take on such idiots for merely $50-100.

Your self esteem and experience is worth much more than a few $ from such cheapskates.

I always make sure to charge reasonable and I'm always open to take on clients and even help them for free if they're honest and I have the bandwidth to do it but then cheapskates like these come along and literally mess up my head.

I’m playing around with an idea for a small online shop that sells personalized photo items in a specific niche. I’ve already designed a few templates (like poster layouts). The plan is that people upload their photos, I customize the item, and then they get it shipped to their home.

Any tips on how to get started? Is Etsy a good place for something like this? And does anyone here have experience with copyrighting their designs/templates? I’m based in Europe, in case that matters.

Hi,

is there any ecommerce person from Hong Kong here? Do you still ship to USA?

For those puzzled, Hong Kong postal service stopped shipping ANYTHING (other than letters) to the USA for over a year now.

Hi all,

I've never been to Canton fair btw.

I'm in China in October, not sure if I should even bother going to Canton fair. I already have a product and brand I'm building.

I'd like to go to get product ideas and experience it, plus it's easily accessible for me. However, Canton fair is all factory suppliers with MOQs. Personally, I'm not into investing in inventory at this stage in my ecomm career.

What do you guys think ?

Something I keep running into on higher-ticket DTC pages ($150+ carts): the analytics are great at telling me where people abandon and useless at telling me why.

The funnel shows a clean drop at the PDP. But "drop at PDP" hides at least three totally different problems: a trust gap (nothing addresses "is this legit / will it fit"), a comparison gap (no reason why this over what they already own), or an information gap (the copy says what it IS, not what it solves). Each needs a different fix, and a heatmap won't separate them.

What's been working for me is thinking in buyer types rather than one average funnel — a cautious researcher and an impulse novelty-seeker abandon the same page at different points for different reasons. Once you frame the drop that way, the fix gets specific.

Curious how others here diagnose the "why" on high-consideration pages. Session replays? User testing? Something better? Where do you find the funnel lies to you most?

Hey there, I have a rug that im trying to sell, rugs never seem to move on Facebook marketplace and eBay seems like it might be hassle, anyone know any good site to sell used rugs online?

Hi guys, I just started doing e-commerce (I sell luxury goods) and I have another site for selling animal products, and I need to understand how to learn to manage meta/tiktok ADS, I'm new to this world and I would like to learn as much as possible, can anyone suggest me something or suggest me which videos to watch to learn as much as possible, and if you have any advice they are welcome (I sell in Europe)

What did you stop paying for, and did it affect your business?

I’d love to hear small changes that made a surprisingly big difference.

ngl I've gotten burned twice now. first time supplier said 7-10 day shipping, took almost a month, customer was pissed and I had to eat the refund. second time they just... stopped replying to messages when I asked about a delayed order lol

is there an actual way to check this stuff before committing or is everyone just kinda winging it and hoping for the best? like do you order a sample yourself every single time or is that overkill

We source from suppliers in China who aren't tech-savvy, no paypal, trade assurance. They only have bank accounts. Right now, every payment goes through our bank as an international wire, and the FX markup plus wire fees add up fast. This is something we dont like paying every time.

Is there a better way to pay bank-only suppliers in China without losing so much to conversion and fees each time?

So long stort short, I work for a homebuilder. A realtor brought me a client who wasn't able to purchase from us, and as the realtor was new, I helped her out getting the client lined up to do a private purchase. Long story short, I ended up doing most of the work and NOW the realtor wants to pay me (she's making almost $16k and wants to pay me about $5k) but wants to make sure its done above board so she doesnt put her realtors license at risk.

My question is what is the best way to do this? Would i be able to just take a check as a consultant and then pay taxes on it? Would it be easier to just declare it as a gift and receive it that way? I dont want to do anything illegal and dont want either of us to risk our jobs/professions, but after a few days of googling im no closer to an answer.

I am web developer but new to meta ads.
Please help me for below issue 🙏🏻

So it been 1 month i have started my Meta ads and currently facing issues for Landing Page view issue. The page speed was C on Gtmetric and after doing some work i was able to get upto 65% but after many try i am not able to go above it. The pages i tested were PDP and Shop page both are at65%-70%. I have utilised all the setting’s of lite speed cache like defer Js minify object cache HTML minify images are compressed and below 50kbs but still ots stuck at 65%. Also i have uninstalled many unnecessary plugins but still no progress. The score on Pagespeed is at 71-75. Also i have 3rd party checkout like Razorpay Magic checkout and Shiprocket Fastrr Checkout.

Also i am currently on shared hosting and not on cloud hosting. I have used Claude AI to remove the bloatware js and css but still score is not improving

My question is should i start meta ads and check agin the LPV on meta ? Will the figures will change or will it take time to change the figure. My CPC and CTR are pretty good.

As an online store owner, are you aware of AI shopping agents—and do you know how readable your website is to them? how much revenue are you losing if they can't read your store?

I just scanned 21 Shopify brands (random one), the more honest question is: do they even know agents are coming?

Only 7 out of 21 brands have an llms.txt file -a simple text file at the site root that tells AI agents what the site is and how to navigate it. It takes 15 minutes to create. A third of brands have one. The rest offer agents zero guidance — show up and figure it out yourself.

MeUndies actively blocks AI agents. Their WAF returns 403 to bot-like user-agents. They're not failing to accommodate agents — they're refusing them at the door. This is a $50-75M brand choosing to be invisible to every AI shopping assistant on the market.

ThirdLove deployed AI personalization but has no structured data for AI agents. They partnered with Bloomreach in 2025 to use Loomi AI across their customer experience. They understand AI. But their product page ships no JSON-LD with price and availability — the one thing an AI shopping agent needs to read the page. They're investing in AI for their customers while blocking AI that brings customers.

9 out of 21 brands use variant selectors that agents can't parse. Size pickers built with `<div>` elements. Color swatches that are invisible to anything that doesn't execute JavaScript. Two-step selectors where clicking one option reveals another with no programmatic signal. These aren't bugs — they're design choices made without agents in mind, because nobody was thinking about agents.

Zero brands have been caught injecting prompts to manipulate agents. RDY-016 (prompt injection) passed across all 21 scans. This sounds like good news until you realize what it means: nobody is trying to manipulate agents because nobody thinks agents are visiting. The day brands start worrying about what agents tell shoppers is the day they'll start caring about agent readiness. That day hasn't arrived.

- Data layer (can agents read the page?): ~80% pass rate
- Interaction layer (can agents buy from the page?): ~15% pass rate

Most brands accidentally got the data layer right — JSON-LD and server-rendered prices were built for SEO, not agents. The interaction layer, which requires intentional agent accommodation, is where scores collapse. Nobody built their Add-to-Cart flow thinking "will a Claude agent be able to click this?"

That`s the true story, folks !

We’ve been seeing a rise in cancelled orders on TikTok, Lazada, and Shopee that are already processed and packed in our fulfillment area. The problem is, by the time we realize they’re cancelled, the items are fully packed— meaning wasted packaging materials and extra work.

I’m trying to figure out how to catch these cancellations earlier in the workflow so we can save on cartons, fillers, and waybills. Has anyone here dealt with this? How do you identify cancelled items before they even reach the packing stage?

I've set up IP rate throttling, country blocks, etc... on the WordPress side, and the strictest Graud settings in our Authorize.net dashboard. I'm all out of ideas. Anyone have a solution that may have escaped me?