146: The Fall of Jane.com - The Danger of Using an Online Marketplace

Launch Your Box Podcast with Sarah Williams | Start, Launch, and Grow Your Subscription Box

An online marketplace that connects buyers with sellers with a HUGE reach and the potential to sell a lot of products without having to spend time or money building your own audience? Sounds almost too good to be true, doesn’t it? And for thousands of sellers on Jane.com it ended up being exactly that. The collapse of Jane.com highlights important lessons all small business owners need to learn.

How did Jane.com work and why was it so attractive to so many sellers? To sell on Jane.com, small businesses had to submit an application and meet certain requirements.

Sellers set their own shipping prices and were expected to pack and deliver items to customers within six days of purchase. Jane.com collected payment from the customer, kept 20-25% of sales and distributed the remaining funds to the seller.

Jane.com had tens of thousands of sellers. There was always a good variety of products available to customers. A big part of what made Jane.com so attractive to buyers was their flash sales. Every three days, they ran 72 hour flash sales. Jane.com promoted these sales through multiple channels including email. Sellers would sell hundreds to thousands of products in only 72 hours.

Small business owners who sold their products on Jane.com didn’t have to build an audience - they used Jane.com’s audience. All they needed to do was provide product at a great price and deliver it quickly. This feels like a huge win to small business owners who know how hard it is to build an audience.

So what happened?

Had there been signs of trouble?

The fall of Jane.com and what it means to these sellers shines a bright light on three things all small business owners MUST do to ensure something like this doesn’t happen to them.

Can you benefit from a platform with a built-in audience? Absolutely. But, realize you cannot take shortcuts in business. You cannot skip the work of building your audience yourself. You have control of your business. For much more about what is working now to build your business, listen to episode 144.

Join me for this episode to find out what led to the fall of Jane.com, what it means for tens of thousands of small business owners, and what you can do to ensure something like this won’t happen to your business.

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