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Comment by shmatt | Hacker News Reader

* Your title is sell via Instagram, but your "free" product does not include selling via Instagram

* Yes, Stripe take a fee and that sucks, but you don't have to. Shopify had $0 monthly costs at launch. Obviously now they can charge what ever they want

* You just launched, putting some fake discount on seller fees just seems spammy. Like a 30$ product with a $60 + 50% off label. Seller fees were never 3.9%, there is no discount.

I think this is a great area to focus us. And you, or someone else will end up taking over the market. But I think whoever it is will give their product for free, or at a loss, for at least 6-12 months.

Before you figure out why people are/aren't signing up, why not see if price is the issue? Once people are locked in/love your product, raise the price as much as you'd like

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This is great feedback, thank you. We have $0 monthly costs to use the product to sell on Instagram, however we do still charge a transaction fee + the Stripe fee. We thought that for the IG seller community, it would be good validation to see if people would start out paying a transaction fee to use it. But your point makes a lot of sense - definitely something for us to revisit!

Maybe I (and any potential customer) am misreading the website. I'm seeing $6/month for IG shopping integration

What is your definition of "selling for free on Instagram" - does it mean not being able to sell tagged products?

IG Shopping is what Instagram has built to allow you to tag products from a website in your posts. In order to use that feature from Instagram, you have to have a website. Thryft sellers use our product to allow their customers to purchase from the link in their bio (for no monthly fee). If they want to be able to tag the photos in their pics, that's a separate thing, but we can set that up for them through IG Shopping (this feature is part of one of our premium monthly subscription plans for $6/mo). Thank you for brining this up - I can definitely see how that could be confusing to potential sellers. We'll figure out a way to redesign that!

With all respect (and I completely expected the downvotes to my original post) - "link in bio" is not what people consider selling on Instagram

You make selling on Instagram easy by charging $6/month. I don't think you should be ashamed of that, nor tell people they can use your website to sell via "link in bio"

I believe the winner in this unclaimed race will offer Instagram Shopping integration for free, by figuring out a way to minimize losses, while hoarding customers

Hi, Sam here (other co-founder) -- I think you're correct if you're talking about e-commerce on IG in general, but for the thrift/secondhand sellers that we serve, selling is a much more individualized/personalized process involving comment-bids, negotiations on DMs, live sales/story sales, etc.

So for the majority of these folks, Instagram Shopping is a nice-to-have but not a necessity because they're mostly dealing w/ one-offs and the convenience of a product tag is not that important when customers don't mind just going to their link in bio & browsing their 5-25 available products (they may even prefer this, because they may want to buy multiple items).

That's the main reason we made it a premium feature: the small minority of folks that really need this are willing to pay for it.

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