As you know, I’m constantly experimenting with panty selling platforms to see which ones are worth the investment – of my money and my time!
I recently made the decision to leave panty selling site Kinkie.
It wasn’t the cost – £5 per month is pretty much nothing (although, of course, you need to stay on top of your outgoings – this is a business, y’all!)
It was the functionality of the site that prompted me to leave.
For those of you unfamiliar, Kinkie allowed you to post your items but after 7 days they’d disappear and you’d have to repost them FROM SCRATCH all over again. If you had the VIP package it was every 14 days. But still…
Any panty seller will tell you that the most tedious part of this job is listing items.
It’s not fun. It’s not sexy.
It’s a fucking chore.
So having to do it for EVERY SINGLE ITEM every 7 days was starting to grate on my nerves a little. It wasn’t just a case of reposting every 7 days, which would still irk me a little. It was repost the whole entire thing from the beginning.
The average seller has between 15-20 items in their shop so you can see how this would add up and take you away from income generating activity!
And so I asked myself why I was sticking around?
Don’t get me wrong, if I was making a tonne of sales from the site then it might be worthwhile to invest that time every seven days – provided you upload them all on the same day, right? If you took a few days then you’d have to relist every few days. CHORE!
And so I made the decision to leave the site.
But I want to share the conversation I had with them when they asked me for any feedback on my decision to leave. Sidenote: this is very positive if they care enough to ask. Sellers are what make a panty selling platform profitable or not. We are their business model. However, they respond with how much their buyers love it, which is mostly irrelevant if your sellers fucking hate it. Having Tweeted about this and asked, the response was that this additional workload is not relished at all by their sellers.
It’s not difficult to create a repost function and I’d highly recommend Kinkie look into this.
If they change that functionality, there’s a chance I’d return to the site. But for now, I just can’t commit to a site that gives me additional work to do on top of selling.
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Me to Kinkie:
I guess the feedback I’d give is that having to renew listings every 7 days is so tedious and not something I have to worry about on other platforms.
Further, there’s no way to interact with buyers.
Kinkie reply:
Just so you know, your listings are published on our website for 7 days, then they are automatically removed. This is to keep our website content fresh, and always up to date. Our buyers love it, it’s one of the features they’ve always appreciated. We do offer 14 day highlighted listings for our VIP sellers, which costs £25 per year (saving £35 instead of paying monthly), so definitely worth considering in the future.
We really appreciate your feedback, for the Kinkie website, to give you some insight we don’t force buyers to register on this website, to encourage more leads for sellers by removing the hurdles to enquiries, and many of our sellers prefer dealing with buyer off-site once the enquiry is received, so then can process the enquiry their own way.
We understand this isn’t for all sellers though, so we’ve got more website projects coming up in the pipeline, to offer the market some new alternative selling platforms with different ways handling listings and enquiries.
My reply to Kinkie:
It’s an added hassle for sellers that creates an additional obstacle for us. And without us, you don’t have a business and you ought to take our feedback into consideration. You’re the only platform that operates this way so it’s something for you to think about. Every other platform has a repost function – you would obliterate 95% of the work if you helped your seller press a button that would refresh the entry without making them do the whole thing from scratch! Surely that would simple to implement and keep the buyers happy that everything is brand new and up to date? Something that benefits them but not at our expense?
I understand your barriers for buyers point of view. But it really is a passive website where sellers post something then literally sit back and wait to be contacted. Again, the majority of other platforms are successful because there can be that interaction on the site, people are encouraged to hang out there. The only other platform that I know that does’t offer the option is Sofia Gray. Every other platform seems to have cottoned on to the idea that people in the community want to interact with each other.
It’s your business, your choice. But I’d be inclined to poll your customers (sellers) again and see if they’re happy about having to log in every 7 days (14 days is still a massive pain in the arse) to redo all their listings from scratch. I’d be willing to wager if you offered them the option to press ‘relist’ that they’d absolutely jump at it.
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What do you think?
How important is the functionality of the site you sell on?
For me, it’s a make or break.