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About My Community Made
The eCommerce Platform for Handmade Products
My Community Made is an eCommerce platform with no listing fees or transaction fees. Instead, we are dedicated to helping small business owners grow their small businesses without us getting in the way. We encourage shoppers to buy local with our geolocation product search, and we moderate all content manually ourselves. No algorithms picking winners or losers. If you love our platform, you can choose to upgrade your free account to a paid account, increasing your product limit to 50 products.
We offer a suite of feature to help small businesses succeed online. These include an easy-to-use product listing editor, the ability to manage orders and track sales analytics, and a customizable storefront. Plus, we’re always working on new features that will make selling even easier for small business owners.
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Trusted by 2,973 Small Business Owners
Why My Community Made?
Most e-commerce platforms are attempting to follow the Amazon roadmap to success. Sites are designed to maximize transaction volumes, using AI tools to ‘discover’ highly salable products and push them to the top of the product feed. Additionally, sellers are encouraged to lower prices, provide free shipping and upload large amounts of product. This model works for general consumer goods, but in the creative market it leads to saturated and unhealthy marketplaces. The transaction fee model also provides a poor incentive for a marketplace to remove products that go against copyright and trademark laws, because if these products are salable they contribute to the bottom line of the business each time they are purchased.
We believe, that just by removing the transaction fee incentive, an e-commerce site can become a healthier place for creative individuals to sell while also being a more interesting place for creative individuals to shop. Product feeds can be based on novelty rather than salability, sellers stop competing with each other to capitalize on trends and the focus returns to producing creative products that individuals haven’t seen before.
Almost all of our income comes from vendors who choose to pay for a higher tier My Community Made account. Therefore, our profit incentive is in continuing to grow traffic, sales and to continue improving the site experience.
How Do We Make Money?
This is one of the most common questions we get from users when they first hear about our zero transaction fee policy. We offer one paid tier currently for My Community Made called the “Basic Tier”. This tier is essentially the same as our free tier but without the limit on the number of products that can be uploaded. So users in the basic tier can upload up to 50 products for sale at any time.
We also allow vendors to purchase advertising on the site, displaying their product at the top of the homepage within a row of products called ‘Featured Products’. We will likely introduce additional advertising services in the future in order to continue growing the site in a sustainable way.
No Transaction Fees
Our no fee structure makes it easier for our sellers to offer quality prices and plan for future success. Transaction fees on other sites often cause the profit margins of sellers to compress to uncomfortable levels
Useful Selling Features
We offer a full suite of selling tools including
- Staff Management – invite your employees to help manage your storefront
- Utilize our Search Engine Optimization tools to help you target keywords that can give you an edge over the competition. We provide control over all aspects of your product and store metadata
- Full customer interaction. Customers can follow your store and receive alerts when new products are added. They can also contact your store via live chat, email and your socials.
For a full list of selling features be sure to review our Features page.
Fair Competition
We manage our marketplace a bit differently than other companies do. Because we don’t collect transaction fees, we don’t have an incentive to increase overall transaction volume in the way that creates the “race to the bottom” effect on product pricing with other platforms.
Instead, all products are distributed evenly through the site, with customers being given tools to allow them to filter products by location or category and sorting tools to find products based on price or ratings. By sticking to these objective metrics, we give you clear metrics on where your product is likely to appear in the My Community Made product feed.
Additionally, we have a few rules that prevent unfair competition on My Community Made. Our staff combs the store to ensure all products are handmade, vintage or self designed. We don’t allow any network marketing products, drop shipping products or copywritten material. By using humans to moderate the store we limit the amount of random suspensions that occur on other sites.
When artists are able to sell their products without transaction fees, they’re able to offer better pricing than on sites where they need to pay out 30% of their profits to another company. We don’t utilize feed algorithms, so artists don’t engage in keyword stuffing or in trying to rank for various trending products, instead they can focus on making cool things.
Customers on My Community Made can be confident that their money is going directly towards helping an artist and that that artist is receiving as much profit as possible from that transaction.
Who Owns My Community Made?
My Community Made is owned and maintained by the Fisher Tech Solutions LLC team. Fisher Tech Solutions LLC is a digital marketing and web development company located in Wales, MA. We built My Community Made originally as an option for local businesses who may not be able to afford a full custom website..