Marketplace startup!
Marketplace startup!
Hi everyone! I just want to say that I find this community awesome, I just found about it and it’s great.
So we incorporated recently in the US and we want to make a marketplace mainly for Latin America artisans. We want to give them more opportunities and channels to sell their handcrafts and art.
Our big struggle right now is about payouts and compliance. Since Stripe Connect is not available in LatAm we must hold on to the funds and then use something like Payoneer to payout.
Any advice in this particular subject? Should we do that or it’s better to stick with something like Stripe Connect and change the market?
Eager to hear your advice! Thank you
Is there a way you can sell data or do emails without accepting payment on their behalf to begin with? Meaning you make a connection, everything but do payment, and leave that up to the artists?
hi @AndrewKamphey
So the business model would be in selling the data? or sort of like an introduction fee like Thumbtack? I'm a bit confused by the proposal.
We believe that some of the value that we'll be providing is the ability to receive the money online, since there are not a lot of options at the moment.
Perfectly awesome idea, yes if you can accept and distribute payments go for it.
Just offering a slightly different perspective. Seems like you can go to market with the information you have already and see if payments really is the problem.
I'm working on a similar problem because my Aunt is an artists in Florida and selling her art to retailers is hard work. Lots of time and effort. I'm organizing data for her and outsourcing the outreach. Leaving the final selling, delivery and payments to her. Those last parts if she's doing, she's making sure the actual art is sent and I don't have to worry about accepting payment. Just need to price my time and effort for a profit.
I'd love to follow along with your progress or speak to you directly if you think you have something that could help local artists in U.S.A. too.
I’ll love to reach out if we have a solution for that! Thanks for your input and time @AndrewKamphey
When we encountered such issue for startup in Singapore, we ended up using https://www.adyen.com. Check it if it works for your market and use case because my knowledge is three years old.
p.s. Marketplace for artisans has a special place in my heart. :-) I prototyped and managed building lmbd.ru back in a day. If there is no strong competitor in LatAm — definitely try there! In Russia, there is a very strong competitor for LMBD, and artisans used to it. Chicken & egg problem, that's why they are struggling to gain significant market share. Payouts and compliance are less of a problem.
Thank you for your replay @rsedykh !
We actually reached out to Adyen a few months ago and sadly their pricing was too high for us at this moment (20k+/m) for their MarketPay product. They were really nice though.
https://lmbd.ru/ Seems really cool! Yeah there are no big competitors LatAm and we want to bring a product that we think would be used and you are right as a platform we have the market problem, make a profit, etc. But compliance keeps slowing us down. Maybe it’s our inexperience? But we are trying to be 100% compliant.