Sellar vs Spam

Photo by Hannes Johnson on Unsplash

At Sellar, we love feedback - both good and bad. Positive feedback helps keep us motivated to build the best trade ordering experience ever known. The negative feedback is how we identify the areas of Sellar that need to improve.

One area in which we had received negative feedback - reports of spam from Sellar. In this post, we wanted to address this. We’ll shed some light on where this feedback has come from and let you know what we’ve done to fix it.

When these reports came to our attention, we were concerned and looked into where this could be coming from quickly. After being initially surprised - as Sellar does not currently do any marketing to trade buyers - we learned that the cause was a combination of how we designed our supplier-to-buyer invite flow and certain suppliers sending ‘invitations’ to trade buyers who were only prospects they had details for rather than customers.

How this was supposed to work:

When a new supplier starts using Sellar to streamline their trade sales operation, we set up their existing customer accounts on the correct pricing and terms. Simultaneously, this would send an invitation to their ‘contact’ on that customer account to let them know that they now had access to their usual pricing and terms and could start ordering.

This worked just fine for the most part, but unfortunately, as it turns out, some suppliers were using this as an opportunity to ‘invite’ prospective customers rather than existing customers where a relationship had already been established. This resulted in emails being sent by Sellar, on behalf of suppliers, to trade buyers who they were not working with and who did not want to receive emails from these suppliers.

As soon as this came to our attention in August 2023 we took the decision to remove the invitation mechanism.

How it works today:

The removal of the invitation email also removed the seamless process we had designed for new trade buyers to get set up and ordering in seconds - one of the reasons many suppliers choose to use Sellar instead of other ‘single-player mode’ trade store options.

The team put a lot of thought into how to solve this and we are pleased to announce Availability Links - a more robust and flexible solution that will not contribute to trade buyers receiving unwanted emails from Sellar.

Suppliers can now share an Availability Link that’s got real-time product availability and comes preloaded with pricing. Availability Links will offer trade buyers the seamless onboarding process without the risk of any suppliers sending unwanted emails through Sellar.

We hope this update will create a better experience for everyone. If you have any questions, please drop us an email to hello@sellar.io and we’ll be happy to help.

Please continue to share feedback with us 💜