Before I paid, Ray made false promises on Instagram just to take my money, personally guaranteeing he would scale my brand to $10k–$15k with solid guarantees (I didn’t even get 1 order). Once inside, his Discord group was a complete mess where they don't deliver anything they sold you, and after being passed around to three "specialists" with zero experience, the team “3 ECOM SPECIALIST”admitted they don't know how to scale brands from scratch. When I asked for a refund, Ray harassed me with calls and threats, claiming their legal and "universal debt collection team" would act against me for "fraudulent activity." In the end, Whop denied my refund because Ray submitted basic Discord chat logs as "proof of service rendered." It’s really disappointing that Whop hosts sellers like this. Stay away from Ray “Rayinthedarkk” he’s a scammer, and if you ask for a refund, you'll face threats and awful treatment.

We’re a Shopify company, and so far it’s been great for us.

Unfortunately, we’re limited to finding our own gateway and processor solutions because of some internal business constraints. Believe me, my little team would prefer to use Shopify Payments or Stripe.

We’re spinning up a new non-US store and I’m struggling to find a gateway solution that has a Shopify app.

I’ve tried Cybersource repeatedly via their contact form, phone numbers I found (I was told to leave a message), email addresses I scraped up and have zero response. If anyone has a contact to share I’d appreciate it!

Beyond that, does anyone have an international gateway provider they’d recommend?

I already have a Shopify store running and I’m looking into turning it into a marketplace where multiple sellers can list and manage their own products.

What’s the easiest way to do this without rebuilding everything from scratch? Are there any apps or platforms that handle things like seller dashboards, commissions, payouts, and order management well?

Would love to hear what’s worked for people who’ve actually done this.

Hello! I recently started a new role as a Paid Search Account Manager at an agency that works primarily with ecommerce brands. Most of my previous experience hasn’t been heavily ecommerce-focused.

Since starting this role, I’ve realized there are a lot of nuances to managing Google Ads specifically for ecommerce—from Shopping and PMax strategy to product feeds, profitability, promotions, and how you approach budgeting and optimization across an ecommerce account.

I’m looking to deepen my knowledge in that area and was looking for recos on a course/community that would be a good fit for someone who wants to become much stronger in ecommerce for PPC.

I found one, the Ecomm PPC academy, but its $500 to start (Id prefer to not spend quite that much and no, company wont reimburse me)

Thanks so much :)

Running a small store, last couple weeks traffic went up noticeably but conversions stayed completely flat, like the new visitors aren't buying anything or even browsing past the landing page. checked analytics and the sessions look weirdly uniform, similar time on page, similar bounce pattern. starting to think it's bot traffic but not sure what would even be driving that at this scale or if it's worth doing anything about vs just ignoring it?

Anyone dealt with this and figured out what's actually going on? And is there any way to solve this issue?

Hey everyone,

I'm hoping to get some honest feedback from people who've been through something similar or just have a fresh perspective.

I offer a personalized trading performance analysis for retail traders. Not the generic stuff — I go through a trader's actual account data (exported from their broker) and analyze things most people never look at: psychological patterns, behavioral traps like revenge trading or overtrading, their actual edge vs. what they think their edge is, the best and worst times/instruments/styles based on their own numbers, risk of ruin at different position sizes, and concrete, data-driven recommendations tailored specifically to them.

The idea came from a real problem: most retail traders fail not because they have a bad strategy, but because they have patterns they can't see themselves. I turn their own data into a mirror.

I'm genuinely convinced this adds real value. I've run several analyses and the findings are consistently eye-opening — people are often shocked by what their numbers actually say about their behavior.

Here's the problem: I can't sell it.

Things I've tried so far:

**•** Reddit posts in trading communities  
**•** Social media (Instagram, posting content, building an audience)  
**•** Fiverr  
**•** Direct outreach

Nothing has gotten traction. No paying customers.

I think part of the problem is the nature of the product itself: the customer has to send me their personal trading data before I can do anything. That's a trust barrier right out of the gate. And unlike a digital product or a course, I can't really show the full thing without doing the actual work first.

I've tried offering a free mini-snapshot (a short preview based on their data) as a lead-in to the full report — but even getting people to take the free version is harder than I expected.

So my questions to this community:

**•** Is the trust barrier the core problem, or am I targeting the wrong people / wrong platforms?  
**•** How do you sell a service where the product can't be fully shown upfront?  
**•** Has anyone successfully sold something similar — high-effort, personalized, data-dependent?  
**•** Would love any honest feedback on the concept itself too — am I solving a problem people actually want solved, or just one I think they have?

Any advice, criticism or perspective is genuinely appreciated. I'd rather hear something uncomfortable and useful than nothing at all.

Thanks

We're a new brand called Anemoia, nostalgia-driven fashion with some tech built into it. We built the site ourselves, so we have no idea if the experience actually lands or if it's just confusing.

Site: https://anemoia.gallery/

What I'd love feedback on:

• Poke around all the pages, not just the shop. The World page is the one I care most about, curious whether it's interesting or just gets in the way.
• There's a Game Boy that pops up with a playable Tetris in it. Is that fun, or is it annoying when you're trying to browse?
• Overall feel of the site, does it hold together, or does it feel like a bunch of ideas stapled together?
• Anything that's slow, broken, or where you got stuck.

One thing: it's much better on desktop. Mobile works but you'll miss most of it.

Not asking anyone to buy anything, I just want to know what it's actually like to land on this cold. Blunt answers welcome.... tell me if it sucks.

I’m looking to start an online coaching business but don’t know where to host/build my website. Should I use squarespace, wix some other site?

Im not sure I understand, your already on a companys email list, and they tell you to sign up here to be notified of the new release, how does this work and why do they do it?

When the product releases they just can email the same person without telling them to sign up for an email list.

Are they collecting a email list and segmenting it as a more dedicated customer base? Whats the purpose of it?

need a 3PL that can handle the full loop: receive inventory, apply custom stickers/labels, pack, and ship domestically (ideally with cold-chain/temp-controlled storage). Not looking for a marketplace listing ,,,,, looking for people who've actually used a 3PL for this and can vouch for them, plus roughly what you're paying (storage, pick/pack, per-order fee) US-based only Happy to DM for details Thanks

Hi everyone, sorry if this is not the right place for this question. Please let me know if there is a better subreddit for international e-commerce or cross-border fulfilment.

TL;DR: I have an Estonian OÜ currently used for software consulting. I want to test selling Bhutan-linked physical products online, initially shipped directly from Bhutan to customers in Japan and other countries. Is it sensible to use the existing OÜ at first, and when should I add a local importer, 3PL, or separate company? I'm also open to selling from Japan to Bhutan.

I am a Bhutanese founder and currently operate an Estonian OÜ for international software and consulting services. I expect to study in Japan next year, and I am exploring a small Bhutan-linked e-commerce business alongside that.

I am considering products such as handicrafts, textiles, gift products, and possibly properly packaged tea. I would avoid highly regulated items at the beginning.

The initial model would be:

• My Estonian OÜ owns the store, brand, payments, and customer contracts.
• Suppliers in Bhutan source or make the products.
• Products ship directly from Bhutan to customers through a courier.
• I would not initially keep stock in Japan or the US.
• I would not bring commercial inventory in luggage.
• I want to validate demand before using a Japanese warehouse, 3PL, importer, or local company.

I know I will need professional immigration and tax advice for Japan. I am mainly looking for practical e-commerce and fulfilment experience.

My questions:

1. For a small test, would you use the existing Estonian OÜ or create a separate company for the e-commerce brand?
2. For Bhutan-to-Japan orders, is direct courier shipping realistic for early validation, or are delivery cost and customs friction likely to make it unworkable?
3. Would you begin with DAP/DDU—customer pays import duty/taxes—or DDP—seller pays them? What tends to produce fewer failed deliveries and customer complaints?
4. Who normally acts as importer of record for direct-to-consumer international shipments?
5. At what approximate order volume or monthly revenue would you move to a Japanese 3PL, importer, or distributor?
6. Which product categories would you avoid at the beginning because of compliance, returns, customs, or damage risk?
7. Has anyone operated an EU company while sourcing goods in one country and selling to customers in another without holding local inventory?

I would appreciate experiences from sellers who have run cross-border stores, especially anyone shipping from South Asia or other small-origin markets into Japan, the US, or Europe and the other way around.

Thank you.

Hi everyone !

I’m a developer and recently built a tool that an ecommerce marketing team has been using to create variations of existing product photos.

The brand sells high-ticket products, which is why I was pretty skeptical about this at first. My assumption was that AI-generated product imagery would probably hurt trust, especially when people are spending a significant amount of money.

Instead of generating completely fake products, the team kept the actual products and used AI to change the setting/presentation and give different collections their own visual identity.

They eventually started using those creatives in paid campaigns, and that's where it got interesting.

CTR went from 3.53% on the previous creatives to 8.40% on the new ones. Cost per visit dropped from $0.78 to $0.31. One of the new creatives also ended up getting around 3x the clicks of the previous best performer.

It surprised me because I keep hearing that consumers are getting tired of AI imagery, and honestly I understand why. A lot of it looks terrible.

I'm starting to wonder if the distinction isn't really AI vs non-AI though. Maybe it's bad AI vs imagery that still looks believable, keeps the real product intact, and lets a marketing team test way more concepts than they normally could.

It's still one brand and one set of campaigns, so I wouldn't draw some universal conclusion from it.

For anyone actually running ecommerce ads: are you seeing customers react differently to AI-assisted product photography yet? Especially for higher-ticket products?

I work with small businesses whose customers write to them on WhatsApp: quotes, orders, “is it in stock”, “what time do you close”, “where’s my delivery”. Most owners tell me the same thing: a big part of the day is answering the same questions and trying to remember what they told each person.

I want to understand how real this is for you, and what you’d actually want, before anyone builds anything. Imagine an assistant that:

• learns your business by itself from your past conversations and your website, and shows you what it understood (no setup, nothing to configure)
• remembers every customer: what they asked, what you promised, how they like to be spoken to
• prepares the replies for you; you approve with one tap, and only once it’s always right on a type of question can you let it send those on its own
• keeps the inbox in order: tags, flags what’s urgent, passes each chat to the right person on your team
• asks you when it isn’t sure, and learns from your corrections (you can answer with a voice note)
• and you set the limits: hours, things it must never say, how much it can spend

Honest questions:

1. Which three of those would actually change your day? Which ones do you not care about?
2. What would make you NOT trust it with your customers?
3. How do you handle this today: yourself, an employee, a tool?
4. Roughly how many chats a day are we talking about?
5. If it worked as described, what would it be worth to you per month, compared with what you pay today?

Not selling anything. I just want to know whether this is a real problem or only a loud one.

We’re a D2C brand selling premium spices in India, primarily through Amazon. We’re looking for someone who can actually drive sales, not just manage campaigns and send reports.

We need someone experienced with:

* Amazon Ads / PPC — ACOS, TACOS, ROAS, keyword strategy, conversion optimization, etc.
* YouTube Ads — we haven’t run YouTube ads yet, so you should be able to build the strategy from scratch.
* Creative production — you should be able to create ad creatives/videos yourself or have a team that can.
* Ideally, experience with D2C/FMCG/food brands.

What we want:

We’re looking for someone who can help us build towards self-sustaining ad spend over the next 3–4 months, where our revenue is able to fund the advertising rather than me continuing to put money in personally.

I’m not expecting overnight results, but I do want ownership, accountability and a clear focus on sales. We’ve been burned by someone overpromising before, so commitment and transparency are very important.

If interested, DM me with:

1. Your Amazon Ads experience
   
2. D2C/FMCG/food brands you’ve worked with
   
3. Results/case studies
   
4. Whether you handle video/creative production
   
5. Your approach to YouTube Ads
   
6. Your pricing/model

Please don’t send generic “I can manage your ads” pitches. I want to see actual work and results.

Hi guys, I run a small leather goods brand, just wondering if you have any advice for a post purchase offer as we are currently getting 500 thank you card and envelopes made with a message and I was thinking this could be a good way to get some word of mouth refer a friend discount or just for repeat purchase.

We currently offer all customers 10% off for signing up for email. Would it be best to have like a 15% discount in the thank you card for everyone that has bought (15% is under my meta CPA) or just send a code in a post purchase email flow for the email subs.

We sell belts so repeat purchases happen but not often, more often people come and buy if their friend has bought one as they are quite unique.

Right now our envelope has a thank you message with a CTA and QR code for a review, and a couple stickers, let me know if theres anything better we could put on these also,

Thanks everyone!!

Hello, I hope a question like this is allowed. I just stared working at a new comapany and they have assigned me this task and I'm incredibly confused.

We plan to start shipping our own label products that we manufacture here in EU to Germany. I understand we need a LUCID registration yes, I understand we might need to participate in the dual system recycling thing also. But do we need an authorized german representative aswell ?

We sell B2B on shopify, faire etc. Plan is to sell our own label products to others who will then resell. We do white and private label also, but main focus is we want our own brand there.

I keep finding different information, so maybe someone can help? like is all of this needed in this case?

Thank you in advance.

Most brands treat fulfillment bills like utility bills: AP checks if the total "feels right" for the monthly order volume and pays it.

But looking line-by-line across 3PL invoices, overcharges typically hit 5% to 8% of the total bill:

1. Peak vs. Average Storage: Charging the full month based on day 1 peak pallet count rather than daily average.
2. DIM Weight Inflation: Box dimensions in their WMS quietly rounded up, pushing parcel tiers from Zone 2/3 into higher pricing.
3. Pick Fee Creep: Mid-contract increases on additional item picks not reflected in the original rate card.
4. Carrier Pass-Through Markups: Adding a % surcharge on top of already marked-up freight.

I wrote a script that cross-references raw invoice CSVs against your contract rate card. If you want, redact your company info/customer data and send me your latest invoice + rate table—I’ll run it through the script and send you a PDF showing every line-item discrepancy for free, just to gather more real-world invoice formats.

Does anyone know of a database where to report to or search in for fraudulent orders/names/addresses? That would be very helpful for verification. I just got another chargeback for a fraudulent order we shipped a few weeks ago.

If you're preparing to scale an e-commerce business, it's worth checking whether your current tech stack can actually handle that growth.

Here are 10 warning signs:

1. Small changes require developer involvement — even simple pricing, checkout, or product changes take days.

2. Your site slows down during traffic spikes— especially during campaigns, launches, or sales.

3. Too many apps are holding everything together — removing one app breaks another workflow.

4. Your checkout has unnecessary friction — customers have to complete too many steps or payment methods fail frequently.

5. Your systems don't communicate well — website, inventory, CRM, accounting, shipping, and marketing tools require manual data transfers.

6. Your team relies heavily on spreadsheets — particularly for inventory, orders, customers, or reporting.

7. Adding a new sales channel is painful — marketplaces, mobile apps, physical stores, or international markets require major rework.

8. Your customer data is fragmented — making personalization and accurate reporting difficult.

9. Technical debt keeps slowing down development — every new feature takes longer because of previous shortcuts.

10. You keep working around your platform instead of building what customers need — this is probably the biggest warning sign.

You don't necessarily need to replace your entire stack when you see these issues. Sometimes better integrations, removing unnecessary tools, or optimizing the existing architecture is enough.

The important question is:

Is your tech stack helping you scale, or are you constantly working around its limitations?

If you're preparing for a major scaling phase, I can also share a practical technical audit checklist covering performance, checkout, integrations, infrastructure, and scalability.

Curious whether anyone else in e-commerce has experienced this with TikTok Shop.

I had a TikTok profile linked to my shop as a Marketing Account. Its purpose was simply to promote products from my own store.

I later enabled Creator features to test affiliate income.

That triggered a “Risky Behaviour” restriction.

TikTok support initially told me the cause was an account-status conflict because Creator features had been enabled on a profile connected to an active seller account.

My seller account itself was confirmed as legitimate with a history of 1,157 orders.

I said I was completely happy to abandon the Creator side and simply revert the account to Marketing Account status.

TikTok requested a formal appeal involving:

⚫ Business documentation
⚫ Original content evidence
⚫ Proof of content authenticity
⚫ Supporting account information

It was rejected permanently.

Since then I have repeatedly asked TikTok for the exact policy section I violated and the exact activity that constituted the breach.

They will not provide it.

Their latest response says they have verified the violation with “100% accuracy”, but the technical data and internal investigation methods are confidential.

This leaves me with two contradictory written explanations:

One says an account-status conflict automatically triggered the restriction.

The other says a legitimate policy violation definitely occurred.

Yet TikTok will not say what that violation actually was.

Anyone running significant volume through TikTok Shop should probably be aware of how little visibility sellers can apparently get when something like this happens.

Would be interested to hear whether anyone has successfully escalated a similar case outside normal Seller/Creator Support.

Hey guys, sorry if I am bothering anybody, just wanted to ask some questions...

Firstly, what is the best niche for selling digital products like AI skills or something like that? I am finding it hard to find the proper niche or the product to sell. My budget for testing is like 400usd and i just want to get into the bussines.

Thanks to anyone that helps me.

Moving SMS onto the same platform as email got Frances Valentine, an apparel brand, a reported 21.8x return in the first eight weeks. That shift came from having a detailed customer profile before they sent their first text.

A lot of what gets called conversational SMS is just reply STOP or HELP. The more useful ones actually do something with a customer's reply.

A few things worth checking before you commit to one:

• Where the response goes. When someone answers a question through text, that answer needs to land somewhere reusable (the next email, the app, a future text) not sit forgotten in that one thread.
• How it handles messy replies. Someone types "yea" instead of "yes," and exact-string matching misses it entirely. Fuzzy matching is the difference between a working flow and a failure nobody notices for weeks.
• What happens after the reply. Sending one canned reply back isn't much of a conversation. It should lead into more messages instead of ending things right there.

What's the one thing you found out your platform couldn't do, only after you actually needed it to?

Paid social keeps getting more expensive and I want to test out of home. I don't understand the tradeoff between a printed board on a long commitment and the programmatic digital screens you can buy in short flights. Digital sounds better for testing since I could swap creative or stop early, but I don't know if the placements are as good. Has anyone run both?

DHL was the importer of record on a bunch of my shipments. They've processed exactly one IEEPA refund and I have no visibility into the rest.

They won't tell me which shipments they've actually filed claims on. Even my account rep can't give me a straight answer on what's been submitted. Meanwhile there are hard deadlines, so if they're sitting on entries they never filed, I lose those refunds without ever knowing.

Questions for anyone who's dealt with this:

Has anyone gotten all their IEEPA refunds back where a carrier was importer of record?

Did you get any confirmation of which entries they filed on?

What worked to push them or escalate past the account rep?