General Info on starting a shop?

[Joseph Arze]

Hi! I'm new to perfect pokemon, and after reading Gia's and Chaos' shops, I'm just wondering, How do you provide these pokemon?

Advertised is that people can buy shiny eggs and all these custom pokemon and such, but I'm curious as to how this would work. I would honestly love to know how so that I could do it myself. I want to earn credits so that I can use them, and thinking logically, the economy of this website would work very well if we could work to make a step by step process guide on how to start setting up a shop selling pokemon. Then, more people would buy because more people would be accessible to credits! Instead of buying them, you would actually work to earn them. Anyway, if any shop owners would be able to answer some of these questions, that would be greatly appreciated!

 

[Krelbit]

Most of the site users are genners.
The market is actually a bit harder to get into right now.
Update 11 drops a large percentage of homebrew entrypoints, which is what most people use to get into the market.
These days, you'll either need a lot of knowledge on 3ds hacking (and a 3ds with firmware low enough) or a second / third / fourth 3ds to gen at a reliable pace.

But, if you can already gen, here are my tips.

1) Don't butch your store thread. These things take a lot of work to structure. The shoddier and less detailed it looks, the worse. You wouldn't buy from a guy with 6 lines of text, versus a guy with 50 and pictures.

2) Trusted sellers
Trusted sellers are funny. They get a larger share of the market, often at higher prices, because of a green banner under their names. Silly, but it's a perfectly competitive market so we've got to keep some kind of product differentiation somewhere. Becoming a trusted seller means you need 30 positive SALE feedback, which took a long time to get when I started out. There are even more trusted sellers to cockblock your sales now, so it'll take YOU even longer. Try not to complain about them, because they've usually got site tenure and could give less than half a crap about what you're moaning about.

3) Availibility
This one is why Austrailian sellers don't work very well. Keep an open schedule. After leaving this site, I have so much free time. It's great. Got a girlfriend. Aced the shit out of my final exams. Got a hobby that doesn't make me hate pokemon. Long story short, you'll need to be available, really available, for hours. You might not even make much during those hours. I've been available for 12 hours to make a grand whopping total of 150PC before.

You won't be able to scoop up custom order threads elsewise, and that's what you really need to build a reputation, because stores are nice, but the trusted sellers have stickied and dominated that area.

4) Store partners. Don't do that.

5) The site's losing a ton of viewers really quickly recently, so I don't know how relevant this info is, but shoutbox camping is awesome. That's how I made a lot of sales while starting out.

This market is very hard to get into now. High barriers to entry, no product differentiation, slowly dying market. I would recommend not even trying, because you'll waste so much time and not get anywhere. Maybe if you're really lucky you can get one or two big sales, but you're not gonna get much else.