Storenvy

Buyer Beware! I received my item, late. Quality was good. But, coincidently, my email used for this site was immediately compromised and another person hacked my email. Luckily, I checked my recent account activity, and blocked the user.

I want to clarify that the store on Storenvy is called ShadowTown and my experience with that store was not good. I never did get any response from ShadowTown, nor did PayPal. Storenvy is responsible for non existent customer service, not the fact that one of their store owners could be a scam. PayPal refunded my purchase money after I put in a claim.

Item ordered December 1 but wasn't shipped until December 9. So did not arrive in time for Christmas. Arrived December 29.8 days to get one sweater shipped is not acceptable, especially at Christmas time. I left feedback on their site but they will not post it because it is negative. They never sent a tracking number as promised and their customer service in response to my inquiries was very poor. Although I did receive the item, will not do business with again.

I used to be a seller and loved it because it was the cheapest alternative to your own custom store. I sold for almost a year without problems. Early this year they made a bunch of changes including marketplace commissions and adding Stripe. After that they had so many glitches and site outages. People were contacting me saying they couldn't check out, I couldn't get in to see orders and the last straw was when someone was charged 7 times for a single order because the site was malfunctioning and not showing that the order was processed on her end so she kept hitting the submit button. There were so many outages that I had to think how many people were not buying because of problems!
They have a marketplace but honestly it is a joke. I searched the marketplace for my product (keyword used, words in title and description) and it didn't show up until page 6. My product is not common, so it is not like other items were pushing me back to page 6, it was 5 pages of completely irrelevant products, then on page 6 items with the keyword you searched.
If you want to be a seller and have customers come to you, you would need to use a marketplace that actually pulls the words you are searching like Amazon, Etsy and Ebay. I tried my keywords on those and they were all up on the first page. So I am not sure why you would pay 10% commission on a marketplace that sucks if you can use Ebay for 10% or Etsy for 3.5%.
If you drive your own traffic to the site and do not rely on the marketplace it is a very cost effective option, as long as you don't mind frequent bugs. (there are less than 10 people running this huge platform so they have lots of problems without a lot of help)

Your reviews say it all... no thanks, will not be ordering here. I trust what people have to say and the bad outweighs the good so thanks to all that left a review; be it good or bad! I was always told if it sounds too good to be true then it's more likely to be NOT TRUE!

I'm writing this because the CEO Jon Crawford requested his storenvy members to leave a "positive" review on sitejabber because he doesn't like seeing all the negative ones on here. Instead of the rest of the reviewers below me, I'll leave an honest review for you guys who are debating to open a shop here on storenvy.

1. PRICING: Costs are affordable (at the moment), but I'm not sure if they will be in the future because storenvy is considering raising costs and/or finding new ways to make money since they are failing as a company and have admitted that they are not making enough profits to keep their company going (coming directly from the CEO himself). Right now, it's $5/month to have your own domain and $5/month for coupon privileges. Purchases from the marketplace take 10% commission off of your sales. Regular Stripe/Paypal transaction fees apply as well.

2. MARKETPLACE: Marketplace exposure is not that impressive compared to etsy or ebay because storenvy is not as well known as them. People complain a lot about not having a lot of views through the marketplace and it's most likely because storenvy does a poor job of advertising it. Two biggest issues for people is that you can only use Stripe as your payment processor and and the 10% marketplace fee is "too much" (in my experience so far, Stripe has not been an issue for me and also, the fee honestly isn't that bad considering ebay charges 10% final value fee as well).

3. FEATURES: The best part about storenvy that everyone will always speak highly of is storenvy's custom storefront. It is fully customizable with the knowledge of html/css/liquid markup, there's no page limit, and it is completely FREE. Other features that stood out to me were google analytics, variant pricing, and being able to check off whether your item is "on sale" or "pre-order". They just added a new shipping feature also which will let you ship products out directly from your dashboard instead of using 3rd party apps like shipeasy, but I haven't tried this yet.

4. NEW IMPLEMENTATIONS: They wanted to start a new program where they would have a marketplace sale and everyone joins in and lists 20 of their items for a $10 fee. The sale is advertised as "20% off" off everything, so considering there is no guarantee in making a sale, you are certain to be left unprofitable since you have to account for losing $10 (assuming nothing sells), and IF you make a sale you will also lose 10% of your sale price in marketplace fees, 20% off your sale price do to the promotion, and stripe transaction fees. A lot of people were egged on to join the sale and ended up losing money because there were bugs during the first launch, and marketplace advertising was a joke. For most people overall, it was "not worth it". Aside from that, they are also considering adding new features like "bulk editing," etc. Nothing written in stone though.

5. PAYMENT: If you plan to sell in the marketplace, the only payment processor you can use is Stripe. The current issue with Stripe is that there are A LOT of fraudulent buyers who use Stripe. Storenvy's team says they are working on this at the moment. And if you sell through your custom storefront, you can use paypal OR stripe.

6. CUSTOMER SERVICE: Sucks. Straight up. You only have like, 5 people running this website, and when there is an issue they can't solve, they stop replying to you, and you will most likely never get an answer. Lol. First reply is within 24 hours, but after that, it's questionable. You can only contact them through their FAQ support fill out forum thing on their website. Email's will redirect you. No direct phone number to call either. That's why you have the storenvy community forum facebook page... where everyone goes to rant about their problems. Then the CEO Jon Crawford gets fed up with the fact that you don't appreciate his website and what he built for you. And you're stuck in a position where if you have something negative to say, your opinion doesn't matter.

7. EXPERIENCE: I've been on storenvy as a seller for 3 months. I love the fact that they offer a lot of features that are free like % off discounts and a custom storefront. All the sales I've had on here were fraudulent, even when I've changed my Stripe settings to block out suspicious buyers. Fees are reasonable. But the exposure here sucks. I think for most of us, we were baited in because we think the marketplace will get us sales. I only get about 1-2 marketplace views a day. All my exposure is driven through my custom store, where I've made it SEO friendly and spend a lot of time advertising through social media. I'm annoyed that I can't customize my shopping cart for my custom storefront. When people go to my custom storefront, they believe it's my website until when they checkout, they get taken to storenvy's checkout page and they get redirected to other stores. I don't like how there aren't any search filters either. And when you put an item on sale, you don't get to show what the original price is before it goes on sale. Part of marketing tactics is that you need to show buyers they are getting a good deal. Just writing "on sale" and seeing the price isn't enticing enough for shoppers to want to buy from you. They want to know they are getting a deal. I haven't had any sales on storenvy (other than fraudulent ones), so I moved my business to ebay sometime last week. I've made 12 sales within 5 days and over $200 in my pocket. It's really sad to know storenvy isn't as promising. With this in mind, I may consider closing down my storenvy shop soon.

Overall, there are a lot of things I would want to see changed about storenvy. There are a lot of things they are "planning" to fix. They have a lot of bug issues that need to be sorted out. I really hope I can see these fixes before I leave. With that being said, as a starting up business, I would recommend storenvy to save on costs, but after your business grows, try moving somewhere else that's more professional and worth the additional costs, like shopify or squarespace. With those websites, at least you get google adwords to help advertise your website. I also suggest trying out different outlets to see what works best for you.

I sell products online on several website.

This website caters to a age group of around 13 - 35.

I have not purchased any products from this website so I cannot make any comments in regards to the Sellers.

But what I did do is to set up a shop there. Setting up the shipping information on this website is messed up. I had all kind of complication where I would put in a ship price for one product and found the same ship price was listed on all my products not just that specific item. Customer Service is not very helpful. They basically repeat the same thing they have written in their FAQ.

The other problem I had was setting up a second shipping fee if a customer purchased multiple items. (example: $5.30 shipping for first item. $2.00 Shipping for second item.

I decided not to sell on this site. There are website they have issues. But the one thing that has to be right on any site I sell on is the shipping. Putting up a banner on this site may not be easy for someone that is not computer savvy in this aspect.

Has anyone received there swinsuit from urban fawna? I'm trying to figure out why does it take forever to receive an update from postal service. Does It really take 7 to 15 days?