Doing a business isn’t smooth-sailing. What we do well, we love to bring it to everyone’s attention! But without substantial conviction or “meta-proof”, we may not want to acknowledge our not-so-good efforts.
One of such efforts is expanding on multi-merchant ecommerce stores. In our case, we started with Shopee, then Tiktok Shop ( including the livestreaming aspect ).
Disclaimer: May work for you, just didn’t for us
If you hear Shopee, you think dropshipping, or convenience for major brands. If you hear Tiktok Shop, you also think dropshipping, and “crazy” discounted deals for a few major brands. We are neither dropshipped nor a renowned brand. Thus, this lack of curation of merchants on these platforms already set the stage, making it such that most of our target audience would unlikely visit these platforms to begin with.
Therefore, high traffic platforms don’t equate to high traffic to your store, let alone converting them to paying customers. You’d still have to run ads for more product-related posts anyways.
We need preorders, these platforms don’t support our comparatively long pre-order duration of 2-3 weeks ( rmb, we don’t just dropship ). To do so, we either do just a google form ( super limited and boring form filling ), or we do our own site that supports pre-orders.
Furthermore, if you’re reading this, you’re already on our main website which has lots more views and is custom tailored to our local audience, which segues into our next topic
We are creatives, creatives thrive better on instagram as a whole
Most artsy, craft brands are dominant on Instagram. With a few exceptions of individuals who market themselves on hype-marketing, instagram, at least for us, has been the best algo to work with, both on organic discovery and running of product ads.
Instagram is more “link friendly”; advertising your shop url is perfectly ok on instagram, not so much Tiktok, much less Shopee. Since our store is the best impression of our brand, it’s important people who first see us, first go to our site or see our nicely crafted IG profile page.
Small business, all timely profits count
Both Tiktok Shop and Shoppee take 12% cut on average, and shipping fees tend to be more expensive than settling yourself by using Singpost, or perhaps even arranging self-collection. Furthermore, it take a good 1.5 weeks or more for the funds to be disbursed. Small businesses don’t have much runway, and for some this 10% eats into most of their margins. For stickers, due to shipping and perhaps minimum absolute value cuts, our $6 sale became $3 take-home profit. If paynow works, why not just stick to that?
Early early businesses are better off using paynow. Paynow is immediate transfer, no chance of refund on buyer request. 0 transaction fees while card in Singapore is about 3.5%, paypal about 4%.
Then there’s the issue of returns and cancellations. We’ve been able to handle both just fine ourselves as our usual clientele are really sweet people. However, tiktok shop and shopee don’t really make that connection easy, and a few times we had to deal with ridiculous loopholes such as a parcel wrapped, just 5 mins before shipping then they cancel ( tiktok “can’t” stop it ), users receiving the product and then just cancelling for no good reason ( product can’t be retrieved ). These shouldn’t be the things a small business should be handling. Imagine all that work, getting the transaction, packaging it, mailing it and customer receives it. Few days later, they return it and product gets refunded with tiktok’s auto-approval.
Reputation is defined by the big players
Small business owners handling their own craft are busy as they are building up their brand image with brand marketing, brainstorming for new products and designs, planning ( and saving up for ) events etc. Therefore, at least in Singapore, such brands are judged on such criteria.
Tiktok and Shopee, especially Tiktok, as previously mentioned, lump big players and small players, dropshippers and local-creators. As a result, fulfilment times are 1-2 days ( or if the person ordered at 2359, essentially half a day and 1.5 days ), your store rating might drop if you don’t reply prospective customers “fast enough”, redirecting users to our website or instagram strictly not allowed for “safety reasons” doing so would incur temporary or perma bans on tiktok live shops.
To top it off, bigger brands can afford the upper 5% of livestreamers, which matters because often times the large viewership count is artificially boosted between a collab between the livestreamer and Tiktok themselves. Actual organic viewers is definitely fewer than what’s shown. Passively waiting for viewers to stream in works partially, until tiktok deems you too inactive and penalises your live.
Also let’s be real, if you’re a small crafter building your brand from the ground up individually or in a small team, would you want people’s first impression of you to be a non-stop yapping looping ad about a few products, or a reel that covers your creative process? Would you rather people see your product as a product listing in a sea of potato chips, supplements, AI-art clothes, etc. or a properly crafted experience via content on socials and dedicated website customised to your very style.
Fradualent third-parties
THEY STOLE OUR WORK AND ARE RESELLING ON TIKTOK! Not aware of shopee though, but there’s been an individual recently taking other Singaporean brands’ shirts and reselling for one tenth the price!
When we complained to tiktok, the perpetrator kept coming back, using the same shipping-out address as well! We barely got much success with tiktok and yet more harm was done in the end 🫤
Then why not Shopify and SEO-maxxing?
That’s a topic for another article, but in short: HIDDEN FEES.
See you there!