Rather than fixing the bugs in the botched relaunch, Zibbet CEO Jonathan Peacock today announced that only a few "outliers" will be successful at the Zibbet Marketplace, despite his taking our money for it. And refusing to refund it. So, for our sakes, apparently, he is abandoning efforts to promote the very site we all paid for in favor of his own hosted standalones, where sellers have to find their own buyers. It keeps him up at night, and SURPRISE! The solution to nobody selling at the Zibbet Marketplace is a side venture that you have to pay extra for!!!!
And no discussion allowed of this disturbing announcement. In fact, he no longer wants sellers to comment on the forums open to only a few. What sheeple are supposed to do NOW is make up ideas and vote on them, with an upfront caveat (is this a first?) that he will do whatever he wants anyway.
For those of you who don't know HOW to access the hidden forums without signing in and being approved by Peacock to view, here is the transcript:
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The future of Zibbet + a new place to add your ideas...
Posted by Jonathan Peacock (Zibbet's CEO) on October 7, 2014 at 9:20pm in Announcements from Zibbet
Hi everyone,
A few members have expressed some level of confusion about where Zibbet is heading. I had planned to address this in a later blog post, but hopefully this will shed some light for you…
Since the beginning, Zibbet has always been very “seller focused”. The thing that keeps me up at night and gets me out of bed in the morning, is a desire to help creatives be successful in their small business. I really really want you guys to be successful; maybe so successful that you can quit your day job and live your passion out full-time! With the current “marketplace store” model, I just don’t think we’re giving you the best chance to be successful. You see, marketplaces are great because they send you organic and in-built traffic, and hopefully some sales. However, in order for a seller to be truly successful, they need to be acquiring their own customers, through their own promotional and brand building efforts. Although there are some outliers that have built successful businesses within a marketplace, it’s not very common. When you drive your own traffic to your marketplace store, you will lose a percentage of that traffic to other stores within the marketplace. Marketplaces are all about helping shoppers discover new items and therefore keep them clicking from item to item and store to store.
Because of this, and many other reasons (more professional etc), we believe that sellers need to be building their brand and their customer base on their own stand-alone website, not a marketplace store. We believe this is the future of ecommerce for our creative industry and will become more apparent as marketplaces burst at the seams, as they overpopulate with millions of sellers within the one marketplace. This is why we are moving quickly to give all sellers on Zibbet their very own, stand-alone website. We think that this is an opportunity that our competitors have missed, or refuse to acknowledge. Plus, it is completely in line with our overarching mission of helping sellers be successful. We’re really excited about the possibilities this opens up for our sellers.
As mentioned, we still think marketplaces are really valuable to sellers, especially as they’re getting started - due to the organic sales it produces. The marketplace will still be a big part of Zibbet and every seller will still have a store within the marketplace.
We think the multi-platform approach of having a marketplace store AND a stand-alone website that is easily managed from the one dashboard (with your inventory perfectly synced), is a HUGE win-win.
We understand that not everyone will agree with taking Zibbet in this direction, however, we want you to know that nothing is being taken away from you, only added. If you don’t like or want the stand-alone website, you don’t have to use it. You are obviously welcome to continue promoting only your marketplace store, as you always have.
Improving Zibbet
For awhile now, especially since relaunch, the forums have increasingly become a platform for sellers to vent their frustrations about what they would like to see improved on Zibbet. As you know, our team is small and we simply don't have the resources to manage the forums effectively and make sure sellers are getting the answers they deserve.
We would like to see that change.
In light of this, we are launching a separate platform for you to add your ideas and vote on your favorite ideas submitted by others. You have a limited amount of votes, so you will need to choose wisely! This will give us a centralized place where we can clearly see all the ideas submitted and, based on the votes, see which one's sellers deem most important.
Whilst this is not a guarantee that we will be able to do your idea, even if it has a lot of votes, it is your chance to have your voice heard and potentially affect what we build next. As mentioned, our team is small and we can’t afford to drop everything and fix the thing that you want us to fix. We have a product strategy that we’re working hard to execute on, because we are convinced that that’s where our growth lies. Of course we want to fix and/or improve anything and everything that comes our way, but the reality of the situation is that growth will stall if we do, and if growth stalls we won’t be able to expand our team to keep getting more done, faster.
Here's the link for you to add your ideas and vote for your favorites:support.zibbet.com/forums/259301-ideas (to post an idea, sign in with your Facebook or Google account. It is not linked to your Zibbet account, so your Zibbet password will not work)
From now on, we’re asking that members use that link for their ideas (large and small) instead of posting in the forums.
Thanks for being on this journey with us. We’re really excited about the future of Zibbet and would love for you to continue to be a part of it.
Best,
Jonathan
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Note that he fails to acknowledge that plenty of folks DO make a nice living off marketplace sites, namely Etsy and Ebay. If he is to be believed, people actually get more traffic and have better sales on standalone websites than marketplaces. I think he's the only one who believes that...or more accurately, thinks he can get others to believe that!
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