The world of dropshipping and print on demand has been forever changed due to the global supply chain issues over the past couple of years. We thought things would get better after a point in time, but it has continued to get worse. Sales have been pretty low, and we know that has to do with the costs of the items in many cases. We don't have much control over that due to external issues that are out of our control. This will also effect offerings on @blocktunes (BlockTunes.net) as well since we handle the merchandising for them. So we are looking to make changes to our print on demand service, so let's get into it.
Issues with product and shipping costs
Our print on demand vendor that we have been relying on since the beginning of starting the Hivelist Store has continuously raised prices on the product costs as well as shipping rates. Seems like they are making changes on a monthly basis, which causes us to have to go in and change ALL of the prices in the background for each of the print on demand products. This takes a lot of time that honestly is not worth the effort anymore.
To offer a flat rate on these products we also have to build in shipping costs and taxes, so the prices seem really expensive. But this also keeps us from having to keep up with different global rates, which is a lot. We took a lot of time and created shipping and tax averages across the globe and add that percentage increase to the final price of the item. So when they go up on these prices, we have to as well.
Go Woke, Go Broke - We're OUT!
Our vendor recently sent an email talking about a price increase for a carbon tax so they could buy carbon credits. NOPE! As we are as environmentally friendly as we can be, we do not buy into the globalist agenda and will not pay for these additional fees so they could buy carbon credits that they can use for tax right offs, or use to sell later on for a higher price to someone else. This happening while we pay the bill for that through rising product and shipping costs.
Oh we know how the carbon credit game works, and it stinks like the WEF!
This vendor also recently started making political stands in the business that we do not agree with like censoring certain companies for their political views. As Hive being a free speech platform, we can not go along with that, especially since the cause they censored was against the grooming of children, which signifies they are okay with it. So we are taking our own stand and cancelling our partnership with them.
On the lookout for new services and getting our own equipment
We have been on the lookout for other services, but it seems to be much of the same kind of issues, and often without the same quality and offerings as we get with our current vendor. The price issues seem to be across the board with many of these services, so we are looking to find the best deal with the best available products and services. There are a few major dealers that we can work with, but they are all pretty similar, or in the case of Printify, uses various vendors which leads to inconsistent quality, been down that road before.
In the future (hopefully fall/winter 2023) when we have a facility of our own, we will be looking to purchase our own equipment to make our own print on demand products. We are looking at professional printers, Cricut machines, and all the accessories needed to get into a service like that on a smaller scale with hopes to actually increase demand and reduce costs. We will also be looking into building a 3D printer farm to make pretty much anything else we want to sell.
Temporarily Discontinuing the Print on Demand Service
Until we can come up with a better solution for these issues, we are looking to temporarily discontinue our print on demand service until we can find a more viable solution. Sales haven't been very big, even over the holidays, so not sure much will be missed for now. Even with the shift to using all stablecoins, it seems people would rather stack their crypto versus use it to help grow a new economy using them as payment. Maybe it's just bear market woes and the fact that the global economy is melting down... That probably has something to do with it as well.
We will begin the process of removing items from our print on demand vendor from the store in the next week or so. This will happen on both the Hivelist store and on Blocktunes. They will are also looking for their own service to use for their merchandise.
Vendors are encouraged to manage their own products
We built the Hivelist Store originally to empower others to sell their products themselves. With these current issues, we are going to encourage vendors to find their own print on demand services and they can use those listings to offer their products for sale and just process the order themselves through the vendor of their choice. This was the plan from the beginning anyway.
We will act as an escrow service to ensure everything goes well with the order and process the payment to the vendor with a small processing percentage fee... Again, this was the original plan all along...
It's simply too much work on our end for not enough gain and it's started to bite us in the back side for lack of a better way to phrase it.
Adjusting to the times
We are having to look at our business model as a whole and make changes to stay alive in these crazy times. We cannot compete with these large companies on the scale on which we are doing business. Hopefully we can get some more eyes coming into the Hive community over the next bull market and we can increase our user base. But as of now, most of the users of our platform are in places in the world that cannot afford a $25-$30 t-shirt or a $50 hoodie when they need to put food on the table, and we completely understand that.
This is why we are making the moves we are making. Hopefully this will eventually help us grow on our own by making our own products. Every business has to learn to adjust to the market and to times, so that is why we are shifting major focus away from finding POD or dropshipping vendors to focusing on digital products until we can get our own equipment to make our own products.
If anyone has any issues or questions, please contact us in the Discord server.
Do you have designs or products you want to put up for sale and earn crypto?
If you are interested in starting your own ecommerce business in the crypto world, then click here to learn more about becoming a Hivelist Store vendor!
Don't forget, we have Hivelist Store gift cards!!!
Need to get a special gift for someone, but don't know what to get them? Have you tried introducing someone to the crypto currency world, but want to make it an easy introduction, then try out one of our in store gift cards! You can purchase them with any number of our accepted cryptocurrencies!
https://hivelist.store/product-category/gift-cards/
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Keep calm and Hive on!
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