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Shopseen Mini Wiki
Updated 1/10/2022 - Back in 2015 when this article was originally written, there was a company located in the California, Bay Area (aka Tech Valley, Silicon Valley) called Shopseen created by Adeel Ahmad.
Mr. Ahmad came up with an idea and developed a way to connect multiple marketplaces like Storenvy, Ebay, Ebluejay, Etsy and several others together on a single website where you would create product listings. Once a listing was created on Shopseen, you could connect to any of the marketplaces available, and list the product for sale on that marketplace. The product listing details would automatically be exported from Shopseen to the marketplace, eliminating the need to refill in the product description, price, shipping weight, etc. This made it very easy to list the same product to multiple marketplaces with in minutes.
What made Shopseen unique at that time in addition to providing a method to easily list a product for sale to multiple marketplaces, was its ability to monitor and respond to the cross-shared products inventory count. If the product sold on etsy for example, the other marketplaces the product was cross listed to would update the available inventory for sale on the eBay, or perhaps Storenvy by subtracting the amount sold on etsy.
When a product sold out on one marketplace, the Shopseen algorithm would deactivate and end the listing on the other marketplaces where it was listing. This was especially useful for online resellers with limited quantity of inventory.
For several years Shopseen was available as a free service. It's targeted audience however were larger stores and resellers than those who it was attracting and when it eventually began charging for its service, the pricing structure that targeted larger sellers didn't carry over to attract them. Instead, its price point per single product to store cost was to high for the free customers who it had found a following with.
The pricing structure was based on marketplaces and quantity of products. 26 products a month, connected to a single marketplace, or two marketplaces, etc. When dividing the cost per product to each marketplace selected (There were different tier levels for the amount of marketplaces you wanted to use and quantity of products you intended to list as inventory per month, the lowest being connecting a single marketplace to Shopseen), it ended up adding to high of an additional cost for the eBay, Etsy, eBlueJay, Poshmark and other non-business sellers it had as its customer base. Had it offered a single unlimited structure that it was built on and offered for free as, it might have become profitable, even if there were monthly limitations on quantity of listings in a tier. Its owner decided against that structure, and ultimately Shopseen went out of business.
While Shopseen was still being beta tested, at least two other companies in tech valley saw the potential of Shopseen and quietly began development of their own version of a cross-marketplace inventory and listing website.
Shopseen was being developed slower and had only one other key coding developer working on it, where as the other two companies had more developers working on their copycat versions. Additionally, these other companies didn't have to build theirs entirely from the ground up, since Adeel Ahmad had already built the proto-type and was allowing anyone to help beta test it. These two other entities presumably were involved in the Shopseen beta tests, allowing them to observe how it functioned.
Shopseen also struggled with maintaining updates when a marketplace changed the API that granted Shopseen the ability to interact with a marketplace. This created frustration for its beta testers since products that sold in one marketplace that needed updated in Shopseen would fail to delist or end the cross-listed product on the other marketplaces. As a result, sellers were sometimes finding themselves in a situation where a product that had already sold out on Poshmark for example, would still be being sold on eBay, even though all of the inventory was gone.
One of Shopseen's big marketing pushes was the upcoming feature to be able to cross-sell inventory between Amazon and other marketplaces, though that feature never materialized.
In its final year of beta testing, before turning to a paid tier structure, Shopseen designed the first method to sell products on Instagram through Shopseen, which was a big marketing point for many sellers.
Shopseen also tested out a iphone app for a year which had poor adoption and low interest.
During the year or so that Shopseen was struggling to survive as a paid service, Mr. Ahmad teamed up with several others to develop PostCart.co which focused entirely on selling on Instagram. It used a similar method as the Shopseen version, and after the demise of Shopseen continued under Mr. Ahmad until he turned over PostCart.co to CEO Jennifer A. Jones. Though Post Cart was designed, developed and originally founded by Adeel Ahmad, Angel List has CEO Jennifer A. Jones listed as its founder. Randy Dreammaker was consulting as a key beta tester for Adeel during that time, and as someone working with Mr. Ahmad virtually, can account that Mr. Ahmad is the actual founder of PostCart.co. It's possible that Jennifer Jones was one of its originally investors or co-founders, but Mr. Ahmad is the actual founder of Post Cart and created the technology that it was built-upon.
Five years later, Post Cart essentially became obsolete when Instagram (a Meta Company aka Facebook) opened their own version of stores incorporated directly into Instagram. In 2020/21, Randy Dreammaker reached out to Jennifer Jones through the various contact methods available, and was unable to obtain an update or response back about Post Cart or its current state. It's website still exists at a different web address as of 2022, and it could still be a viable option for the many Instagram sellers who do not meet Meta's requirements to sell on Instagram, however at the time of this update, 1/10/2022 we haven't been able to confirm anything other than that the Post Cart website is still online.
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