So you have a project that you love, and everyone else loves too. People start saying “you should sell this” but where? Well, there’s a new marketplace you might want to consider called SmallRun, aiming at makers and their, well, small production runs.
SmallRun will absolutely host your custom PCBs, on-demand 3D prints, and other traditional maker products — but they’ll also happily sell your merch, too. Along with electronics and hardware, they aim to allow you to sell products in categories like tabletop gaming, sciences, and yes, accessories/apparel.
For sellers, they offer automatic payouts and promise to take care of the taxes by integrating with Stripe. That said, they’re still working on getting the whole VAT thing set up for products imported to the EU. EU to EU sales are apparently OK. They’ll host build logs, which may drive engagement with your product. There’s even a handy tool to import your existing listings from eBay, Tindie, Lectronz, Etsy, Shopify, or Crowd Supply if you’re already in the biz. They make their money by taking a cut of your sales: ̶e̶i̶g̶h̶t̶ now reduced to seven percent, plus forty cents per listing.
Depending on your perspective, you might wonder if we need another marketplace, To that we can only say: “Let a thousand flowers bloom!” Competition should drive these marketplaces to continuously improve and we all win.
If you’re selling online, even packaging can become a project. If you’re not, but are interested in starting, our “From Project to Kit” series from ten years back remains surprisingly relevant.
Thanks to [Aron] for the tip!
It seems so strange to see this posted here, doesn’t Hackaday own Tindie? Oh, there’s no longer any mention of Tindie on Hackaday… Oh, it was sold? Wonder how that’s doing then… oh. Ohhhh. Ohh no. Now I understand why a new and different site is being highlighted.
Supplyframe acquired Hackaday. Supplyframe also acquired Tindie. So technically Hackaday didn’t own Tindie. I heard no gossip about the selling, but I assume it’s business as usual.
Yay! We can join the community on discord!
No thanks.
I’ll never understand why so many people flock to Discord. It’s a god damn terrible platform for anything other than fleeting, unimportant live conversations and on a purely personal level, I find it terrible even for that.
It’s a free chat rooms,voice chat,image upload, and it works well.
It works well in certain circumstances. This is not one of them.
Yes, but is a chat room with voice chat and image upload the right tool in this case? Perhaps Discord is the best option for free chat rooms, and voice chat with image upload. Even given that, we oldsters tend to think a chat room is a poor tool for community support.
The Discord server was added (at the request of several sellers) to be used as a collaboration tool for incorporating new features. It is not necessarily intended for support – there are other options on the site for that.
Good to know.
If your sellers want Discord, they should have Discord. If you’ve got other options for cranky old folk like yours truly, then we can’t complain if the young at heart are off doing their own thing in fancy chat rooms.
Its pretty simple to understand. So many people flock to discord because so many people have already flocked to discord.
That’s one of the things that makes me nope out of anything these days too…
That entire domain gets DNS blackholed by our gateways as there is no good reason to even acknowledge its existence.
I doubt they can handle intra-EU sales correctly. The VAT exemption for small businesses, reverse charge for B2B and other special provisions are not mentioned in their FAQ.
VAT exemption for small businesses ? What is that ?
Small businesses can qualify for VAT exemption either through a turnover-based threshold (if their sales are too low to require mandatory registration) or by selling statutorily exempt goods (like healthcare or education). Exemptions eliminate the need to charge VAT but prevent you from reclaiming VAT on business purchases.
See, this is why competition is great! If they were the only ones out there they’d just say “nah, it’s fine” and force you to work around them, but since Lectronz will eat their lunch in the EU market there’s good reason to get it all nailed down.
Let’s hope they manage to get IOSS set up – something that Tindie has not managed to do in five years.
This is something that Lectronz got right from the start.
SmallRun is actually well thought out and worth considering if you want to try selling your creatings. I am surprised that the way SmallRun came about is not part of this article. Once upon a Time geeks like me were happy selling their creations to other geeks on Tindie. Then, big bad Siemens told SupplyFrame that Tindie was not an appropriate mix in their portfolio. In the dark of night they solid it to a Chinese Holding Company. With absolutely no announcement, Tindie went dark for 11 days (claiming “routine maintenance”). When they returned there was little communication to us sellers. But more importantly, they had no way of disbursing the funds owed to us sellers. They kept saying they are working on it “ASAP” (note, not back ASAP but working on it ASAP). TL:DR, us sellers finally got got about a month later but their bumbling left suck a sour taste in the sellers’ mouths that things like SmallRun got created. Personally, I moved to Shopify and am glad I did – professionally run, good automation and lower costs. You can find a blog that goes into more detail about this at grbl.org, look for “Tindie Saga”.