Fewya

Before starting Octopus Control, I had discovered a way of selling online that nobody was talking about: marketplaces like Wallapop and Vinted. But not to use them the way they were intended—selling the second-hand products lying around your house; nor to buy products there, restore them, and resell them. My idea was to buy products wholesale (anywhere) and sell them on those platforms. The same thing I would do in a traditional e-commerce store with its own website or on Amazon, but with the difference that here I would already have customers with the intention to buy and wouldn't need extremely complex configurations. And it didn't go badly at all. But this definitely wasn't being as efficient as it should be. Manage stock? Forget it. You'll have to re-upload the listing after every sale. Variants? Nope. You'll have to settle for uploading a new listing and hope your customer happens to come across the best option for them. What happens if a customer wants several units of a product or to buy several of your items? Well... upload a new listing just for them! Was this the worst part? No, definitely not. "Is it still available?", "What's the price?", "Hi", "Do you ship?", "I'll offer you €5", "I'm interested", "Is it new?"... If you want to sell professionally, this will be your bread and butter. You can have the most professional photos, the best copy, an extensive and carefully curated catalog, and even be listed on the NASDAQ; to the buyer on these platforms, you'll be just like every other seller. It's definitely not the buyers' fault. I highly doubt that, when they buy on Amazon, they also contact the sellers to ask for permission before doing so. The problem is the over-humanization of these platforms. The informality and the lack of professionalism you breathe in them. How ingrained chat is, both on the platform and in the minds of its users. As if all this weren't enough, we have one last problem, and perhaps the root cause of it all: The platforms aren't interested in you. Yes, you might be selling the same amount each month as 100 private sellers, but the professional seller is a ridiculously small minority. It would be business suicide to start changing things that already work for the majority of their users and that would, on top of that, be contradictory to their brand image based on second-hand consumption. On the other side of the coin, we have Amazon. You can't say it lacks professionalism, and there's no need to explain all the options it offers sellers. Maybe you can find that functionality you need there... after going through its endless forms, completing all its verifications, suffering through an interface straight out of the '90s (sorry Jeff, but it's about time for a redesign), and praying hard enough not to make any mistake that ends with your account suspended for life. Despite everything, let's suppose you've managed to complete all the initial setup and beat the competition to make your first sales. But... Remember what I said about the over-humanization of Wallapop and Vinted? Well, on Amazon we go to the opposite extreme. Is anyone really aware of the store they're buying from? You know you're buying on Amazon, how long your package took to arrive, and maybe you know the product's brand. But Amazon makes it really hard for the buyer to know that it was you who made the sale. On Amazon, you'll be just a price. Wallapop and Vinted over-humanize the transaction, while Amazon dehumanizes you as a seller. This is where Fewya comes in. A marketplace with the ease of selling of the platforms already mentioned, but with the attention needed by those entrepreneurs who are just starting out, or those brick-and-mortar stores that want to begin selling online to the rest of the world.

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