Since 2020 until oct 2024 About 70%-80% of my yearly revenue came from user initiated discount sales, I’ve heard a few arguments saying this just leads to buyers waiting for products to be on sale rather than purchasing them at full price but thats the same case with global discount sales anyway and global discount for me personally do not bring in anywhere near as close as seller initiated discount.
In my case my seller initiated discount sales were usually 50% off for 14 days once every 2 or 3 months, before 2020 most of my revenue was usually within the first 2 months of launching a new product but the marketplace became overcrowded and now with fab its 10x worse for new products. But of course discount sales where especially good whenever a newer product was on sale for the first time.
Anyway this is the problem I and probably many others are having, just before fab launched, user initiated sales shut down about 5 days into my last sale with less than 48hrs warning from the marketplace team, this specific sale was the first for the biggest project i have ever done which i expected to push me really far but i basically went from an average of $300 a day to near $0 overnight as user initiated discounts ended with virtually no warning.
I will admit that since fab launched my regular sales did increase for the first month or so but no where near enough to compensate the loss. And in the last 3 weeks ive barely made $200.
Ive now found myself stuck between a rock and a hard place because I want keep going forward creating and updating my current fab/marketplace projects but its not sustainable and I’m almost certain i will be forced to return to freelancing in January which will result in me suspending any fab works im doing now because freelancing takes just as much time and effort but unlike the marketplace it isnt a passive source of income which makes far less attractive but I would much rather freelance than make marketing a full time job which is the only other solution I see.
I’m sure I’m not the only long term marketplace seller in this situation, I hope that Fab can make user initiated discounts available again.
Is they’re a known reason why something that was already functional should be so far down the road map?