Marketplaces

In this SaleHoo review we are going to be looking at what SaleHoo is, how it works, is it any good, and are there any alternatives to SaleHoo. By the end of this review you will have all the information you need to know about SaleHoo and whether it is a good source of wholesale and drop shipped products.

What Is SaleHoo?

As you have searched for a SaleHoo review, you probably know that it has made big waves in the drop shipping world. If you don’t have any idea of what SaleHoo is, we have explained it in detail below.

SaleHoo is a New Zealand based organization that was founded in 2005 by Simon Slade and Mark Ling. Slade was an online seller on TradeMe (New Zealand’s version of eBay) before starting SaleHoo. His experiences led him to develop a product that made it easier for online sellers to find suppliers and products, and ship them to customers.

SaleHoo is a wholesale directory that connects individuals to 2.5 million plus products from over 8,000 trusted wholesalers, manufacturers and dropship suppliers. It acts solely as an intermediary and does not supply or exchange or merchandise.

Suppliers are listed from a range of different countries from around the world, but most are based in Canada, China, Australia, the USA, UK, and New Zealand.

The great thing about SaleHoo is that the staff screen suppliers before adding them to the SaleHoo database. This helps to prevent any scam suppliers and timewasters.

Is SaleHoo Legitimate?

SaleHoo has been in the business for over 17 years now and there are loads of positive reviews. An overview of reviews from the Better Business Bureau shows SaleHoo received an A+ accreditation from 47 customers and clients. This shows that SaleHoo is a completely legitimate business tool that can help online retailers and drop shippers find suitable suppliers.

While SaleHoo is an excellent tool for online retailers, it is not for everyone. We will be explaining the positives and negatives of SaleHoo throughout this article and by the end of it you will know if it is the tool for you.

As proper customers, we can tell you that SaleHoo is perfectly legitimate and is not a scam. It offers a perfectly usable and useful product for $67 a year. However, while we find it to be an excellent tool, the only way you can really decide if it is worth it is to sign up yourself.

How Does SaleHoo Work?

SaleHoo makes finding products to sell surprisingly easy. You can use SaleHoo’s inbuilt ‘Lab’ tool to find profitable products that you can sell. The Lab lets you discover new products, compare products, save ideas and see product trends.  

The first thing you want to do is decide on an idea or product you want to sell. You need to research about the product or area of the market you want to occupy. With SaleHoo, you can research the sell rate, average price and competition for thousands of different products. You can an example of SaleHoo Labs in action below. Notice all the different filters you can change below.

If we click on the 4-Legger Healing Balm, we can see more details about the product. You will be greeted by a range of different suppliers you can choose from and their respective offers (minimum order, where they ship to, etc.)

Let’s take a look at a different product. The Hurricane Fur Wizard Fur Remover has a list of different suppliers and you can see that the sell rate is 100% for the product. Of course these are completely different products but it is great to be able to see which ones perform better at a glance.

Once you have selected a product that looks good, you can save that product idea to come back to later. When you click on a product, you can not only view any potential suppliers, but also any similar listings.

After you have selected a few different products, you can compare them against one another. SaleHoo provides a direct comparison between the sell rate, number of listings and average price of the products you are comparing. This is a great tool as you can quickly look at the best performing product and make a decision on what product you want to choose.

What Does the Sell Rate, Listings and Average Price Mean?

• Sell-Through Rate is based on the number of successful listings compared with the total listings for a product on eBay in the last month.
• The Average Price is pretty self-explanatory and it is the average price that a given product is sold for on eBay during the previous month.
• The Competition is based on analysis of the total number of listings and sellers for a given product. SaleHoo suggest that you avoid highly competitive products when first starting out.

How to Find a Supplier On SaleHoo

Once you have selected the product you want to start selling online, you need to choose a reliable supplier. As we wrote above, if you click on any given product you will be able to see a list of different suppliers you can choose from.

SaleHoo provides information on over 8,000 suppliers from all over the globe, including how long they have been on SaleHoo and how long they have been in business. You will also notice that SaleHoo provides their email, phone number, physical address and website, so that you can contact them.

It is recommended that you contact as many suppliers as possible to negotiate the best deal.

Start Selling!

Now that you have found a suitable supplier, you can start advertising your product. This could be on a website like eBay or Amazon, or you may even have your very own online store.

Additionally, you can decide whether you want to drop ship products directly to your customers or buy them in bulk and arrange your own shipping. Drop shipping is undoubtedly the easier method, but buying in bulk can yield larger profits.

If you decide to use drop shipping, your supplier will ship any products directly to your customer after a sale has been made. For example, if you sell a product for $80, but it only cost you $30, you keep the difference. However, you need to account for other fees such as credit card fees, eBay feels, PayPal and more.

For those looking to qualify for wholesale pricing, you need to purchase the products yourself and get them shipped in bulk to your own warehouse. Once you make a sale, you ship them items directly to your customers. This method is riskier because you have to front up the cash for the products before you can start selling. You also need to have enough storage space, which can be an added cost. Still, buying in bulk and shipping them out yourself usually results in larger profit margins than drop shipping.   

What Is Drop shipping?

If you are wondering what drop shipping is all about, we have put together a bit of information about it below.

Drop shipping is a retail method where a store does not keep the products it sells in stock. Instead, when a sale happens, it purchases the item from a third party and then sends it directly to the customer. This means that the store or merchant never touches the product.

The main difference between a normal retail model and drop shipping is that the seller does not own any inventory. The seller purchases stock as needed from a third party supplier, who is usually a manufacturer or wholesaler.

Is It Better?

Probably the biggest benefit of drop shipping is that less capital is required to launch a business. You don’t have to invest thousands of dollars up front and the risk is much lower. Additionally, you don’t have to worry about managing a warehouse, shipping orders, handling returns and managing stock level.

Drop shipping also lets you work from pretty much anywhere in the world and you have a wide selection of products to choose from.

How Fast Can I Start Selling with SaleHoo?

The great thing with SaleHoo is as soon as you create and login to your account, you can start contacting suppliers. The drop shipping suppliers do not require you to make an initial investment and can start shipping straight away. In addition to this, over 80% of the suppliers on SaleHoo ship products internationally, so you can start selling immediately.

Can I Make Money with SaleHoo?

By now, you are probably wondering how much money you can make using SaleHoo’s wholesale and drop shipping directory. The simple answer is that you can make money, but the amount will depend on how much effort and research you put in. It is not as easy as listing your products on eBay and watching the money role in while you sip on Pina Coladas by the beach.

This is because there is a large number of people who want to do the same thing as you and the competition is high. The market is over-saturated with thousands of different sellers selling the same items. However, do not let this put you off as there is still an enormous amount of money to be made and more and more people are purchasing their products online.

Profit will also depend on what sort of products you are selling and the market you are in. Are you looking to sell pet products, or do you want to sell clothes or electronics? These are completely different markets and profits will vary depending on which one you go for.

Additionally, you need to consider what platform you are selling on. Do you own a website with thousands of visitors a day, or are you looking to start a small eBay business? How and where you sell your products will have a large impact on how much money you can make.

In essence, making money online is not a get rich scheme and it will take hard work. Nobody can accurately predict how much money you will make with SaleHoo, but understand that you definitely can make money with the service.

We recommend that you use Google AdWords and Google’s Keyword Planner tool (don’t worry it’s free!) to do your own research on competition levels, number of searches and other statistics.

Is SaleHoo Safe?

If you have ever purchased or imported anything from China, you will probably already know how unsecure the process is. Most of the time you have no idea where the product is coming from and who the supplier is. It can be a gamble purchasing products online and sometimes you can get burnt. There are loads of counterfeit products that come out of China and you may not even release you are selling fake products.

The great thing with SaleHoo is that you know who you are dealing with and every supplier has to undergo a strict verification process. This eliminates any fraudulent activity, scammers and counterfeiters. SaleHoo ensures that all their suppliers are an actual company and will supply genuine, authentic products.

How Much Does SaleHoo Cost?

Access to SaleHoo’s directory of 8,000 verified suppliers and 2.5+ million products will set you back $67 a year. There are no other fees to worry about and PayPal, along with all major credit cards are accepted as forms of payment.

The $67 a year will also give you access to SaleHoo’s extensive range of training tools, tutorials, market research tools, forums and blogs. SaleHoo does not offer a free trial of their service, but they do have a 60-day money back guarantee.

What About SaleHoo Stores?

In addition to SaleHoo’s directory of suppliers, the company also offers an online store builder for those looking to get away from online market places like eBay. SaleHoo Stores cost $27 a month for the basic version, $47 a month for the regular and $97 a month for the premium version. Let’s take a look at how these different options stack up:

	Basic	Standard	Premium
Number of Products	200	5,000	Unlimited
Monthly Bandwidth	200MB	400MB	Unlimited
Image Storage	600	Unlimited	Unlimited
Email Accounts	1	3	20

 

There are other benefits to the standard and premium options as well, such as coupons and discounts, wholesale supplier directory access, market research lab access and more. We recommend that you check out the different options for yourself here.

SaleHoo Stores does not require any previous experience to set up and you get 15 professional templates to choose from. In addition to this, you can also use built-in marketing tools to improve your store’s performance. While there are better alternatives out there, SaleHoo Stores is an excellent option for those looking to build a store quickly. We would certainly recommend this for first time store builders as no technical skills are required.

Can I Cancel My SaleHoo Membership?

You can cancel your SaleHoo membership for any reason at any time. If you fail to find the products you are looking for, or it simply doesn’t meet your expectations you can send an email or call SaleHoo’s customers service department to cancel your membership.

For those who cancel within 60 days of creating their account, SaleHoo will refund you the full amount you paid for the service. However, those that go over 60 days are out of luck and are not eligible for a refund. If you request a refund, SaleHoo will ask for you receipt number that you got when you purchased your membership.

What Is Good About SaleHoo?

SaleHoo gives you access to over 8,000 verified suppliers and more than 1.6 million genuine products, which makes it one of the largest databases of its kind. If you are looking for a product to sell, you can probably find it on SaleHoo.

Another great benefit of SaleHoo is the security and safety of the tool, which is especially useful for those who want to dip their toes into the world of online retail. The strict verification process ensures that any fraudulent companies or counterfeiters are weeded out.

It is really difficult to find suppliers of genuine products or brands that are licensed. SaleHoo gives you some peace of mind that whatever product you are looking at will be what it claims to be. Fake and counterfeit products are a real issue because if you end up selling them as genuine products, you could be opening yourself up to legal ramifications down the track.  

We also like how easy and simple it is to find and compare products. The ability to search based on product type, sell rate, average price and competition is handy, and you can also search directly for suppliers or products.  

As SaleHoo is so simple to use, we definitely recommend it for newcomers to the industry. If you are just starting out, you don’t want too many options to choose from and SaleHoo gives you this simplicity. SaleHoo removes the frustration of trying to find the right supplier, which makes it much better and safer for newcomers.

SaleHoo offers so many different tools and tutorials that can really help you get better results, which is what we like to see. The active community is really helpful and can be great when you want a question answered.

The marketing labs tool is particularly useful as it gives you all the information you need to know about a product. It helps to remove any doubt you might have about a product and will speed up the product selection process.

We like that there are no additional fees attached and that you don’t have to worry about any start-up costs. The 60-day money back guarantee is excellent and protects you if you feel that SaleHoo has not lived up to your expectations.

What Is Bad About SaleHoo?

SaleHoo may be an excellent directory and it comes with some great tools, but as with everything there are some downsides as well.

• SaleHoo does not list as many products as some of the other services out there. For example, Wordwide Brands offers 16 million products compared with SaleHoo’s 2.5+ million.
• There are lots of big brands, but it can be harder to find products from smaller brands.
• Some of the products listed in the directory are cheaper elsewhere and some have very low margins.
• Customer support is excellent, but they do not offer to find suppliers for products that are not currently listed (Worldwide Brands offers this).
• You are paying $67 for a list of products and suppliers that you can find on your own. However, going it alone will be much more difficult for inexperienced people and it will be more of a hassle.

How to Get Better Results on SaleHoo

Now that we have talked about why you should or shouldn’t purchase SaleHoo, let’s look at what you can do to get better results with the service.

The first thing you should do is get an idea of what drop shipping is and how it works. We have explained a bit about it in this article, but there is loads more information out there. SaleHoo has a vast array of guides and tutorials that help you get familiar with how things work, so we suggest you check out those.

Once you have learnt about drop shipping and its benefits and weaknesses, we recommend that you write down all of your product ideas and the suppliers that you want to use. Contact as many suppliers as possible to find the best ones for you. You want to find at least two or three suppliers for every product that you want to sell and then compare the price.

We then recommend that you try to see what other users think about your products and suppliers by asking for feedback on both SaleHoo’s forums and on other ecommerce websites.

You need to remember that while someone may be having success with their product, you may not have the same success. However, this also goes the other way as well. Just because someone has had no success with a product, doesn’t mean you will be the same (it may just require a different approach).

Additionally, we also recommend that you learn how to market your products and yourself as a seller. You need to be inviting to customers and you need to make them want to buy from you rather than your competitor.

SaleHoo Alternatives and Competitors?

We know that SaleHoo is a good product, but you are probably wondering if it has any competitors. The answer to that is yes, there are a number of different competitors and alternatives to SaleHoo. The most notable of these is Worldwide Brands which features many more products than SaleHoo. Let’s take a look at how SaleHoo stacks up against its competition below.

SaleHoo vs Worldwide Brands

Worldwide Brands is probably SaleHoo’s biggest competitor and it is one of the most well known in the business. Much like SaleHoo, Worldwide Brands offers a wholesale directory that can be used to find products to sell. The main difference is that Worldwide Brands offers a much larger range of products and more suppliers are willing to work with them. Worldwide Brands is also more active at adding products to their directory, which is a major bonus.

Another benefit of Worldwide Brands is that they go more in depth when verifying suppliers. They go out and visit supplier’s warehouses and make test orders to make sure they are legit before adding them to the directory.

As Worldwide Brands has so many suppliers and products competing for your business, you are more likely to get a cheaper price than with SaleHoo. They also have more light bulk wholesalers that have lower minimum order levels.

The worst thing about Worldwide Brands is the price. At $299, Worldwide Brands is significantly more expensive than a year’s membership to SaleHoo. However, Worldwide Brands is a one-time cost, so you need to weigh up how long you will be using the service.

SaleHoo vs Doba

Doba is another option to choose from, but it does have its limitations. Like SaleHoo, Doba is essentially a middleman that makes it easy to find products that can be drop shipped to your customers. However, unlike SaleHoo, Doba handles the negotiations with the suppliers so you don’t have to do it.

Doba gives you access to over 2 million products from more than 200 suppliers. It uses a similar platform to SaleHoo that lets you browse products and add them to your inventory.

The main drawbacks of Doba seem to be the cost of the goods and the hefty price tag for a membership. Doba offers four plans that are billed monthly: Basic ($29), Advanced ($69), Pro ($249) and Enterprise. Compared to SaleHoo, Doba is significantly more expensive and you are really just paying for the simplicity. Still, if you want to try out Doba they do offer a 14-day trial.

SaleHoo vs Oberlo

Oberlo was founded in 2015 and has some key differences to SaleHoo. It is essentially a drop shipping app that lets you export products from Aliexpress and import them directly into your Shopify store. Once a customer buys something from your store it is shipped to them directly. The biggest downside to Oberlo is that it only works on Shopify stores, but it does that beautifully.

Oberlo is completely free for the starter pack, while $29.90 a month will get you access to the basic version, and $79.90 a month will give you all the features available in the Pro version. If you don’t need the extra features and sell a small number of products per month, the free version is a great option to try.

Compared to SaleHoo, Oberlo is very limited. SaleHoo gives you access to more suppliers and is much better if you are dealing with larger numbers of sales. You also have the option to bulk ship items to your own warehouse, whereas Oberlo only lets you drop ship items. If you are serious about starting an online retail business we definitely recommend SaleHoo over Oberlo.

SaleHoo vs Alibaba

Alibaba has become a giant of the online retail world, but how does it compare to SaleHoo. Well, the answer to that is poorly. Alibaba does have a list of drop shipping suppliers and you can buy products in bulk, but the risks are much higher.

There are hundreds of negative reviews left on SiteJabber and BBB.org about Alibaba. Many people have had less than stellar experiences with suppliers listed in Alibaba’s directory, and some suppliers have even provided false information or cheated customers out of thousands of dollars.

“Purchased $10,000 of marble urns… After nearly two years and dozens of emails to lots of different people, we finally received a shipment of product that we did not order. I am not the only one.”

We definitely recommend using SaleHoo over Alibaba, especially if you are a newcomer to the industry. SaleHoo’s verification process and great customer service will keep you safe and will protect you from getting scammed.

SaleHoo vs Wholesale Central

Another option is Wholesale Central, which is a company based in Bethel Connecticut and has been operating since 1996. The great thing about Wholesale Central is that it is completely free to use and is fairly simple to operate. However, Wholesale Central has a much smaller directory and only 84 suppliers out of 1,000 offer a drop shipping service. Overall, we feel that SaleHoo offers much more than Wholesale Central, but as it is free we really can’t complain.

SaleHoo Review Conclusion

SaleHoo is an excellent tool for those who are just starting out in the online retail world. It will protect you from being scammed and losing lots of money, which will give you peace of mind. We feel it is an excellent alternative to importing from Chinese suppliers (or any suppliers for that matter) that you do not trust.

While SaleHoo is a good directory, we feel it would be even better with a slightly larger range of products. A bigger range of products would give you more choice as your online store grows.

We love how much information SaleHoo provides to help you start up and grow your online retail business. The tools to find products are excellent and we like how easy it is to compare products.

Knowing that you are dealing with verified suppliers and a great customer service team will help you get better results. The SaleHoo team want to help your online retail business get up and running and with all the resources they provide it really shows.

We definitely recommend SaleHoo for those starting out in online retail, but it can also be a great tool for more experienced people as well. There are other alternatives, but we feel that SaleHoo provides the best customer experience of them all.

Original Audio

Review Transcript

What’s up everybody? It’s me back with another review. Today I’m looking at a content marketplace platform. Kind of in the vein of things like Higher Writers, and iWriter, only a lot more high end. Sort of I guess the aim is of this platform is to provide better quality content for people, and also give writers better jobs, and I do have to make it clear that I haven’t been active much on this platform in a long time now, but I did use to do quite a bit of work through it, and earn some decent money back in the day.

I still, I actually thought of doing this review, because is till get this sort of a writer call up emails from the people who run this particular market place, and I thought, “Actually you know what? I’m gonna give a review of this service.” So anyway the platform I’m talking about today, and going to be reviewing is called Constant Content. So just click the link here if you want to go and check it out.

And Constant Content, I wouldn’t call it a content mill, because it’s not for cheap sort of a $5, 500 word garbage articles. The content on there is slightly more expensive. Actually it can be quite a lot more expensive, and it’s really aimed at a higher class of content buyer, and writer. So if you’re the sort of person who’s used to buy articles off iWriter.com, or other content mills, you’ll probably find that Constant Content is a little bit too pricey for you.

But there is quite a bit of interest in this platform. So I’m gonna talk about it really quickly from the perspective of both the buyer, and of a writer. I’m gonna focus more on the perspective of it as a writer, because that’s what I did, and talk about the platform in general. I will keep this review short. It’s not gonna be a long one, so I’m just gonna cover the facts.

So look the way the platform works is really simple, you signup as a writer if you want to write, and you have to go through a little qualification process. If I recall correctly, it involves writing an article on a topic, and you actually get that article edited, and approved by a real editor. So it’s quite different to places like iWriter, and HigherWriters.com, which any Tom, Deckle, Harry can write for those sites, and they have no interest in quality control whatsoever. It’s just about getting the max number of jobs through.

Constant Content is quite fussy. I mean I’m a good writer. The articles on this blog might not appear it, because they’re transcriptions of audio I’ve recorded by and large, but yeah I mean I’ve got a degree in history, and political science. So I mean there was a lot of writing in that, and I always got good marks for grammar, and all those kind of things.

So and the crazy thing is, the first time I applied to Constant Content I got turned down, ’cause I made a couple small mistakes in my articles. And then I was approved when I fixed them. So yeah they are quite strict if the process is still anything like that, then that’s what it’ll be like. So this is gonna sound pretty harsh, but if you’re not a native english writer, if you just sort of writing …

Platforms like iWriter, most of the writers as far as [inaudible 00:03:34], aren’t native english speakers. They’re based in places like India, and the Philippines with five US dollars for an hours work, writing an article is really good rate of return. Which Constant Content does have a lot more high tier writers on it. So yeah, if you’re good at writing, and you back yourself, and you can write accurately, and precisely, then do apply.

And once you’ve signed up, there’s basically a couple of different ways you can actually earn through the platform. So one is that you can just write an article, really on almost any topic you want. There’s sort of presets, I used to write about internet marketing for example, because it was reasonable demand. And then you can set your own price for that article, which is pretty cool. So you could write a thousand words, and so right I reckon that’s worth $100, and you put it on a marketplace.

And what happens is that basically there are buyers browsing that marketplace and they go, “Oh I’m looking for a blog post about internet marketing, I’ll check out that category. Oh that one that Sam’s written there that’s $100, and it’s a 1,000 words. Wow that looks pretty good.” And they can see a preview of it, and then to actually access the full article they have to purchase it.

And then obviously Constant Content takes a cut, and you get the lion’s share. So there is opportunities to make some pretty good money from it. I mean when I was active, and this is quite some time ago now, I was fairly frequently selling articles. And you can do interesting things like you can make your article exclusive. So once it’s bought, no one else can buy it. Or for less money you could make it so that multiple people could buy it, and try and make up the money on volume.

So there are a lot of options. If I recall correctly, there’s an option for a buyer to make a counter offer. So they think, you’ve said your article’s worth $100 and they go, “No I think it’s worth 50.” And you might agree on 75, or whatever. So that’s pretty cool. That’s my favorite part of the platform. Both for buyers and sellers, ’cause it’s a genuine sort of marketplace, which is really nice.

And then as a writer you can also respond to job requests, so there’s a basically where clients have said, “I need five articles written about horse shampoo.” Or things like that, and there’s all sorts of projects that are available. I’ve honestly never had any luck getting into this projects. Some of them seem to have very, very stringent requirements. They’re often pretty specific that you need industry experience in the industry that’s being written about. Or you need an actual qualification in the industry, or you need to be in a specific location like if the buyer was requesting a series of articles about Toronto based dentists, you’d need to be living in Toronto, or Canada, or whatever.

So I never had much luck with that, but other people do, and those really the requests, they’re the main ways, requests in the marketplace are the two main ways you can earn money with constant content. And as a buyer, well I mean as you’d expect the process is pretty much the flip of it. If you’re buying on constant content, you’re probably looking for a higher class of content writer, and output. You’re certainly a number of steps above the people who are buying. I mean just cheap junk off places like iWriter.

And there are some people who write for Constant Content, or write on Constant Content, and sell their articles through there, who by the looks of things, have had some pretty successful writing careers, and they just do it for some extra side money, or whatever. So as a buyer, the platform works really well, and it’s efficient, and you can certainly find someone, whatever your requirement is, you’ll be able to find someone who can help you.

You’ve just got to bare in mind these aren’t people who write 1,000 words for $10. If you could get a 1,000 words for $75 you’d be doing all right there. And what I wanna do before I wrap this up really, because it’s gonna be a short review, I guess I’ll just do a big sort of talk through what I think about it. The actual nature of the platform itself, and how it’s setup is really quite good. It’s a lot better than any of the other content mills out there. There’s a lot of promise.

The big problem I can see, especially from a writer’s perspective, is it seems fairly dead. I mean even when I, in the time I used to write not extensively, but a decent amount for constant content, even I noticed it dying off, and it’s been a coupe of years now. And if you’ve gone back and looked, and it’s still around, and there’s obviously still volume going through it, because I still get a lot of writer call up emails. They come through saying, “We need a writer who can write about scaffolding in New York.” Or something like that.

Those come through fairly consistently. So the platform’s still alive and kicking, but certainly if you sign up as a writer and you go look at the forums, and you go look at the writers section, you’ll see a lot of people complaining about they haven’t sold stuff in a long time. And I think in many respects, Constant Content, the issue with it is the platform itself is great. I really recommend it, the problem is it’s a bit of a ghost town, unless you’re able to get in those job requests, or you sort of crack the code on how the marketplace works.

But I think that the problem with writers is the marketplace started to die off, and really unless you’re getting request gigs, you just weren’t gonna be doing well enough out of it. And I think partly this is because of how Constant Content is setup. People who want cheap crap will go to iWriter, or go to Upworth, or freelance, or any of those kind of sites and just they’ll put a request for a quote out, and they’ll pick the cheapest they’ll want.

They wanna do a 100 crappy blog posts for a click bait website, and they just get the cheapest, crappiest writer to do the work, ’cause they don’t care about the content. Constant Content, it’s kind of a no mans’ land. Organizations, businesses, websites, whatever that want really, really top notch content, they’ll probably go one step further and actually find someone who’s not necessarily in house, but a independent freelancer they can work with on a regular basis. Who might be getting $100 for every 500 words, or something like a really good rate like that.

Constant Content it’s like it’s not cheap enough to appeal to a volume of people who are out there buying, well crappy articles. And it’s not expensive enough that it’s gonna sort of I guess, not expensive and exclusive enough that it’s gonna work for people who really are dedicated to buying the best quality content. So I think in many ways it’s a sort of victim of it’s own genius.

It’s a great idea for a platform doing a content marketplace that works for buyers, and also provides a place for good writers to sell their content. So I mean look it’s a bit of a ghost town, but it is worth giving the try. If you want to buy content, you’re certainly gonna be able to get something on there, because there are people who are actively looking for work. If you’re looking to sell your articles, do give it a try.

You’ll probably find as I did that there’s just not enough going through on there. Some they will probably do really, really well on it, but other’s don’t. But yeah overall constant content, I review it as a decent platform that’s well worth checking out. So give it a try. Just don’t be disappointed if you don’t get many orders as a writer.

Want to save money on apps/SaaS/training products to help you grow your business online? One of the best places to look for a good deal is AppSumo. Check out my video review here. I’ll post cliffnotes shortly.:

Are you a fan of “daily deals” style websites? I sure am (for example, I always check out 1-Day.co.nz here in New Zealand).

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a daily deals-type site that was specifically for digital marketers, providing steep discounts on useful apps, SaaS and training products that can help you to grow your business and become more profitable?

Well, the good news is that there is such a site. In fact, there are a few of them out there, but I want to focus specifically on one called AppSumo.

What is AppSumo?

As mentioned above, it’s a deal site for apps, SaaS and other products that are for business owners and digital marketing professionals.

What Kind Of Deals Are On There?

Heaps. There’s usually a new deal every day or so, and there are always a number of deals running at any given time.

How Much Will I Save?

That depends entirely on the product, but I’ve seen some enormous discounts. The best ones tend to be lifetime access to products that generally have monthly pricing. e.g. $50 for a product that normally costs $30 a month or something like that.

Is AppSumo Safe & Trustworthy?

Yes, it’s a safe site that has been around for a number of years. If you’ve heard of a guy called Noah Kagan, he is the brains behind the site. There’s a really good article about AppSumo here on Wikipedia if you’re interested.

If you’re interested, check it out at AppSumo.com

Are you on the hunt for someone to do some SEO, content creation, or other web marketing services for you?

Maybe you want to make a bit of extra side money to fund your next holiday, pay your rent, or save up for something cool.

Enter Source Market. In this review of Source Market I’ll show you what is up with this popular marketplace, and look at it from the angle of both someone looking to sell services, as well as from the perspective of potential buyers.

This should be a really interesting review; kick back and keep reading.

What Is Source Market?

Source Market is basically a gig marketplace, very much like Fiverr or Peopleperhour. It is the brainchild of a guy called Alex Becker, and the site has been exploding in popularity recently.

People from all across the globe – people just like yourself – can join up and then sell their SEO and web marketing services to punters looking for anything from article writing to PBN creation.

Unlike the stupidly popular Fiverr platform, there is no real constraint around how you have to price your gigs. This gives you a lot more flexibility as a service seller, and better options as a buyer. However, there are some caveats around what types of gigs you can actually sell, which I will discuss later.

How Can I Make Money From Source Market?

If you’re not interested in buying services from Source Market, then you’re probably looking to actually turn a profit from the marketplace. After all, the main tagline for the site is “Sign Up and Receive 100% Of Your Sales and 20% Of Anything You Promote. No Fees.” – if that’s not appealing, then I don’t know what is!

According to Alex Becker himself, there are some sellers pulling down over $5k per week selling gigs. Now I’m sure there would be a lot of repetitive work involved in doing so … but where I live $5k per week, especially USD, would be a massive income. I’d love to be pulling in that much money per week!

I actually love doing freelance online marketing for people. Whether it’s working on an hourly basis, or just doing a couple of little keyword research gigs for some extra beer money, there is something deeply satisfying about providing clients with a good value service for their hard-earned money. In fact, one of my dreams is to build up a really successful freelancing business.

So naturally I was interested from the get-go in using Source Market to generate some extra income. I will blog more about my experiences in terms of generating sales in the future. But for this review I will talk more to how the process works for getting a gig set up and ready to sell, as well as pitfalls you need to watch out for.

Selling Your Services

The most fundamental way to make money on Source Market is to sell services. This is the bread and butter of the site. If you’ve got any skills you can offer in the following areas:

• On-page SEO
• Link building
• Keyword research
• Content creation
• PBNs
• Social signals

Then you could potentially be earning yourself a handy extra side income through selling your services on the Source Market. If you already sell on another platform like Fiverr or Peopleperhour, then you definitely should be on here doing work! It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to port your existing services over. And because you’ve got the flexibility to set pricing (unlike with Fiverr where the pricing structure is more fixed with $5 + add ons) you can sell a wide variety of services.

The most popular gigs seem to be those that involve selling permanent links on PBN sites. If you’ve got a bunch of expired domains with good metrics, then you could potentially do quite nicely out of this.

What Do You Need To Sell?

In order to sell your services on the marketplace, you need the following:

• A registered and verified account. This will take you about 10 minutes to set up.
• A Paypal account. This is so that you can actually get paid.
• Something to sell. The main focus of Source Market is on SEO; whether that is on-page, keywords, content, PBN link building, or anything else related to boosting rankings. Remember that you don’t have to do a little micro gig like you would normally do on Fiverr (or rely on gig extras to boost up your earnings). You can even sell hourly gigs on Source Market, although it is a little awkward to do so. I’ve managed to find a way to make it work for myself, which I will discuss more in the conclusion section of this review.
• A description for your gig. There is a lot more flexibility here than you see on Fiverr. Both WYSIWYG and HTML editing is available.
• At least one image for your gig. GIFs are allowed, which is neat. Try to make something eye-catching that will attract punters to your gig. You can also add a YouTube embed video, which will help boost conversions if done right.

How Long Does It Take To Get Your Gig Approved?

One question I see ALL THE FREAKIN’ TIME on the Source Market Facebook Group is “how long does it take to get my first gig approved”.

Your first gig needs to be manually approved. This can sometimes take up to several days to complete. Once your first gig has been approved, your subsequent ones will be auto-approved (at least that what happens on my account).

Source Market Affiliate Program

The other way to make money from this site is to partake in the Source Market affiliate program. This is one of the reasons why I believe that SM has grown rapidly to become a premier destination for getting SEO and online marketing work done. Influential SEO bloggers, online marketing experts and so on are jumping on the bandwagon to promote Source Market gigs for minimum commissions of 20% … and sometimes much more as affiliates can offer custom commissions.

A guy who does an awesome job at promoting his SM affiliate links (and probably earns great commissions doing so) is Frankin Hatchett from Online Dimes. For example, take a look at his most recent post about how he uses Fiverr backlinks. You’ll see him outlining his backlink strategy, including his use of Hatred’s PBN service. People are going to read about Franklin’s success and want to replicate his strategy, and will happily purchase that gig through his affiliate link. Franklin can then earn himself a nice 20% – maybe even more – on every gig purchased!

If you’ve got a list or blog in the web marketing sphere, then you could definitely be earning yourself some extra coin by promoting Source Market gigs as an affiliate.

Source Market vs Fiverr

At this stage, you’re probably thinking that Source Market sounds quite a bit like Fiverr. And, truth be told, you’re probably not too far off the mark.

However, when comparing Source Market vs Fiverr there are some key differences:

• Fiverr has a much broader array of gigs, with anything from voice overs to SEO to content creation to novelty gigs. From the perspective of online marketing, there is definitely more available on Fiverr.
• Loads more sellers on Fiverr
• Much better quality SEO gigs on Source Market
• As a seller, you can set just about any price you want on Source Market and upgrade your membership to sell recurring subscription products

Can I Hire You On Source Market?

You sure can! I offer a range of high quality SEO and online marketing gigs through SM. In fact, it is where I do the majority of my freelancing as I like the platform so much.

My main gig is where I sell 1 hour blocks of my time to work on any SEO, PPC, or general online marketing project that you have. Check it out here and give me a hire.

Conclusion

Overall, I’m a big fan of the Source Market. It is leagues ahead of Fiverr in terms of getting paid for doing an honest bit of work. You get direct to Paypal payment, and a much better interface for communicating with clients (as you can get away with communicating outside of the marketplace, which is a BIG no-no on Fiverr).

The only two downsides I can find to the Source Market are firstly that it looks and feels a bit old fashioned, and is perhaps not as user-friendly as it could do. Furthermore, there is a more limited range of gigs available. For example, there isn’t a lot going in terms of one-off graphic design or PPC management jobs (two things that are critical for online marketing).

I use the marketplace gig system to take orders and handle payments from my SEO and PPC management clients. We agree on a number of hours it will take to complete an itemized list of jobs, and then I get them to pay me the corresponding number of hours via a basic gig I have set up. 1 gig = 1 hour, and then there are extras for up to 4 hours’ total work. This makes it easy for me to work with international clients.

I really do like Source Market, and highly recommend that you go and check it out and make it a regular site that you visit when looking for quality outsourced SEO and online marketing work – or if you want to start earning some money.

There is basically no subject in the freelancing world that is more divisive than freelance marketplaces. In one camp, you have the people who believe that any freelance marketplace is a waste of time, and that the only buyers on there are people who are looking to pay cents on the dollar for low-quality work. On the other hand, there is a cadre of ardent believers, who argue that if you can find the right approach, there is a world of profitable work to be had on these platforms, such as Upwork, Freelancer and Fiverr.

In today’s review, I’m taking a look at a website called People Per Hour (www.peopleperhour.com)

I first heard about People Per Hour back in 2014, when a colleague of mine from a job I was working mentioned it might be a suitable avenue for me to earn some extra money from article writing. At the time, the site was very much a freelance marketplace in the most conventional sense. Anyone could register, and buy/sell services. It was a bit like Fiverr, but without the focus on $5 gigs and up-sells.

However, I never went anywhere with People Per Hour, and instead focused on consulting with clients I found through offline channels and inbound marketing, as well as affiliate work.

Fast-forward to 2019, and I’ve decided to revisit a whole bunch of freelance platforms. A big contract I’ve had is coming to a close, and I find the idea of doing some smaller-value, fixed-price jobs to be appealing while I grow my consultancy and build up my affiliate sites.

Therefore, I decided to give Peopleperhour.com another crack.

Please note that this review is basically being done “live”. It was only late Feb when I signed up for the platform. Over the coming weeks and months I will update with my experiences.

I will be doing more “journal style” reviews in the near future, ultimately finishing them off with a conclusion once I’ve had enough time to familiarize myself with the platform, product or service in question.

February 2019 Update

I don’t do this lightly, but I want to talk about the truly horrendous customer service I have experienced with Konker. If you go through my review in the sections below, you will see that I had been fairly positive towards Konker in the past – identifying it as an online service marketplace with good potential (just a lot of bugs that needed ironing out).

In an update I posted in January 2019, I talked about the fact that due to a serious bug in the platform, my account basically disappeared. I was unable to login (because my account could no longer be found). This was causing me issues as I needed to get in and grab some details about some of the gigs I had ordered.

As I’ve mentioned before, Konker doesn’t really have much in the way of support. There’s no live chat or ticket system or even email address. What you get is a private Facebook group that you have to ask to join. Inside this group there appears to be one guy who looks after support.

TL:DR? I was banned from Konker support for requesting assistance with the recovery of my account (or at least the personal data of my account). No apologies, no attempts to assist. Just straight up blocked from being able to request any help.

I now have no way of knowing what has happened to my personal information – whether it is truly deleted, or just locked away on a server somewhere under a pile of bad code.

January 2019 Update

I’m revisiting my Konker review – for a really simple reason. It’s coming up end of financial year here in NZ, and I want to get my accounts all sorted and submitted to the accountant.

I decided to go into Konker to export invoices and receipts for both gigs I have sold, as well as gigs I have purchased.

Lo and behold, a wild problem appears:

Firstly, I cannot log into my Konker account. I go to log in and my email address I used to sign up for the account is not recognised. There’s no option to log in with a username either. I also cannot reset my password because, once again, my email address isn’t found.

What would you do in this circumstance? Surely you’d go straight to support. Well here’s another doozy – Konker doesn’t really have support. It has a Facebook group (that you can’t post a thread in anymore, only comment on posts by the admins). There’s one guy – as far as I can discern – who is responsible for all the support.

I made a comment on a post asking for you to post any issues, explaining the situation. I got a reply back from the support person saying “email communication is down, you’ll need to wait”. Fundamentally, I’m not satisfied with that response. If your login and password reset system is broken, you should be doing EVERYTHING in your power to fix that. But this issue has been ongoing for a while now, and I can see others in the support group are having similar issues.

This is just another example of the kind of bug that plagues the Konker platform, and makes it feel very “hacked togeher”, as opposed to something like Fiverr that is polished and professional.

Another major error I’ve discovered in this process is that one of my gigs is now being sold by someone else. Seriously, I set up the gig, got initial orders and reviews, and now if I go to that gig URL it’s been “hijacked” by another seller. Madness!

But the biggest problem I’ve encountered (apart from being able to log in) is sufficiently serious to make me recommend that nobody who takes their business seriously should use this platform: You cannot get invoices for payments or purchases.

From reading through the Konker FB group, it has become apparent that you simply cannot go into your dashboard – when it’s working that is – and download invoices for gigs you have purchased or sold. Instead, you are told to rely on Paypal receipts/invoices. But this is massively problematic for a few reasons. Firstly, Paypal invoices and receipts made through Konker do not pass any information about the gig you ordered or sold, apart from the price paid and the email address and Paypal name of the seller. Secondly, because of the affiliate system in Konker you can wind up with gigs (that you ordered or received with an active affiliate cookie) that have a second output. So say you spent $10 on a gig, and you found that gig by clicking an affiliate link (or someone just hijacked the whole site with their affiliate links … happens quite often) when you get a receipt in your Paypal account it will show most of the money going to the gig seller, but a fraction going to the affiliate. It’s just so confusing to reconcile this, because of how everything is hacked together with Paypal.

I’ll upload an obfuscated screenshot to show you guys what I mean. But in the meantime, suffice it to say that using Konker will RUIN your Paypal export history. It becomes an endless litany of inflows and outflows with no invoices to tie to them … and even worse when you cannot even log into your dashboard to screen capture or screen print a gig order.

Same problem goes for affiliate earnings. I have fractional little inflows (50 cents here, $2 there) from when I used to recommend the old Source Wave marketplace and dropped my affiliate link in a few places. Reconciling would be so much easier if your affiliate balance and gig sales balances were stored in Konker until you hit a threshold, e.g. $100, and then withdraw that all in one amount with an accompanying invoice.

Because of this problem, I simply cannot recommend Konker to anyone who wants to run a bona fide business with good tracking and bookkeeping in place. It’s not acceptable, in my opinion, to have so many small transactions with no data provided. And it’s doubly bad when the platform is always broken so you can’t get what scant data would be avaiable anyway.

Original Audio Version

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Review Transcript

Hi everybody. Sam here again with another review. Today it’s going to be a pretty short review. I want to cover a platform. Sort of an online marketplace, I guess you could call it. That online marketplace is called Konker.

I’m not going to do a long review here, but I do want to talk you through this plant form. It’s getting some notoriety, and it’s worth knowing about and knowing what’s good about it and what’s bad about it.

What is Konker?

It’s a place for you to buy and sell digital marketing services.

If you sell key word research, or you sell on-page UCO, or you sell graphic design, or you sell article writing or whatever, you can register for an account and you can sell that service. You can set your price and the product you deliver. There’s quite good flexibility there. On the flip side of the coin, if you want to buy services, you go there and buy them, too.

I think what Konker does is it positions itself as being a slightly more, should I say, libertarian marketplace than something like Fiverr. Fiverr, especially in its early days, Fiverr was all about those $5.00 services. I will photograph myself with a silly mustache on and holding a sign with your name for $5.00, or something stupid like that. Or, I will write you a 250 article for $5.00.

Of course, now you’ve got Gig Extras, and different priced services and all that. That’s just the platform evolving with the requirements of this sort of marketplace. Konker, there’s not restrictions there, gigs that are a few dollars. I mean, there are gigs that are hundreds of dollars on Konker. It’s free to register as a buyer or seller, as well. You just go to Konker.io and sign up.

As I said, it’s all focused on digital marketing services, so the sort of things you would normally need a VA for. There’s a good variety of services on there as well. There are some good ones that I’ve used in terms of link building, citations, things like that.

If you’re the kind of person that sells a service to a client, let’s say you’re a social media marketing guru and you’ve got some clients in that space, and they say, “Oh, what about doing some local CO for me,” well, you could trundle over to Konker, and if they’re paying you $500.00 for a CO, you could probably buy yourself a decent package of gigs that you resell to them for a $100.00 or $150.00. That’s a discussion for another day.

Things I Like About Konker

What I want to focus on really is this sort of … I guess the good things about the platform and the bad things because that’s really what I’m all about. Good things about the platform: a lot of flexibility for the seller in terms of the services you provide, and that results in a good selection of services if you are a buyer.

I think Konker’s done a pretty good job at that. The other thing as well is you can get paid by PayPal as a seller. That’s nice. Money comes into your PayPal account. It’s easy enough to get set up and start selling services as well. There’s ranking systems and feedback and all that kind of thing. It fulfills all the sort of basic marketplace requirements that a service marketplace or gig economy marketplaces have got to have.

The good points are the foundations there, but what I want to actually focus on more is the bad points of about Konker.

Things I Don’t Like About Konker

The bad points about it is really, that is very buggy. Whether you’re a buyer or a seller, there are a number of bugs that occur on this platform. Way too much regularity. They are concerning, because if they were ironed out, it would be really, really good.

What you have to remember with Konker is it’s an updated version of the old Source Market, so Alex Becker, you might of heard of him. I’m not going to go into opinions on him. Some people love him, some people hate him. I think he’s very good at what he does. He set up Source Market. I actually started out on the old Source Market, and then he, for some weird reason, rebranded it to Konker. I don’t really get why because Source Market saved the work pretty well. Konker promised a whole load of new features, but the flip side of the coin is it often seems pretty broken.

I want to run through some of the bugs you might expect to see, because they can be quite frustrating and almost disturbing in some senses. Bugs I have personally experienced … just the other day, I haven’t sold anything on Konker in quite some time. I’ve sort of moved away from doing lower value services. Really, if you want to work with me, you’ve got to spend probably upwards of $1,000.00 to get in front of me, unless you’re a client whose been grandfathered in on an old sort of platform or an old service that I offer.

It’s not to say I don’t want to do … there’s opportunities I can see for lower priced services with a faster turnaround time as well. Anyway, that all aside, I haven’t sold anything on Konker for probably six months, maybe even more, like 10 months. I can’t remember off the top of my head. I was browsing my PayPal account the other day, and suddenly there was a few transactions for money flowing in, and then one for money flowing out.

I didn’t recognize I had absolutely no … the amounts I was receiving and paying out didn’t seem to make any sense to me at all. It wasn’t a payment I was expecting to come in. There was no payments I was expecting to go out. I’ve got a good track of what comes out on a regular basis such as my FPTraffic subscription, or anything like that. I thought, “What the heck can this be?”

I went through all my email addresses looking for receipts and everything. In the end, all I was able to do was … I found the buyer email, the payor email in PayPal for the person who’d paid me the money, and I emailed them. They’re a business on the other side of the world. I’ve never heard of them before.

I said, “Hey look, I don’t want to alarm you, but I think some money of yours has wound up in account somehow, and I want to pay you that money back because I don’t want to take money off you for free and get into trouble.” He came back and said, “Oh, yeah. This is weird. I had a bug with my Konker account. I was trying to buy a service off someone else,” and obviously what’s happened is he tried to buy the service of someone else, and then somehow I’ve wound up getting paid.

It wasn’t even an amount for service I’ve ever offered. It was just crazy. It’s basically like money was flowing to the wrong person. One of them might have lined up with one of my services, but then it got even worse because I can’t log in to actually shut down my account. This is a bad bit of password security, but for this particular account I had an email address I used, and I had a password that I absolutely 100% know of by heart.

I know I’ll never get it wrong, even if I got a frontal lobotomy, I’d still get this password right. I went to type that password in, and it just said, “Account not found.” It said, “Account login details not valid.” It’s basically saying either my username or password was incorrect. I then went to reset my password, and I entered the same email address. It then said, “We can’t find any record of this account,” even though I could still go on Konker and find my services for sale buried away at the bottom of a category somewhere and I could click into that profile.

That sort of thing is pretty worrying because there’s a guy on the other side of the world who had about $100.00 taken out of his PayPal account that wound up in my PayPal account. I’m on the hook for giving him the money back. I look bad, he looks bad because he spent money for nothing until I gave it back to him, which I was always intending to do.

It’s just a worrying scenario. Some of the other bugs with Konker, if you go in the private members group on Facebook, there’s a lot of issues with it. There’s been even a case, I believe, where someone actually manage to hack the whole site so that basically every PayPal transaction, for a reasonably short period of time, but it took a while for the developers to notice and for the other people to notice.

Basically, everything was being siphoned into this guy’s PayPal account. If you bought a service, the service provider would receive a notification that a new order had come through, and they would probably start working on it. The money never arrived in their account.

There was a whole lot of to-do with would those orders be canceled, and would people be on the hook for money and all sorts of things like that. In this day and age, that sort of thing shouldn’t be able to happen. If a hacker hacks a site, fair enough they might bring it down, they might hack an image on the home page and say, “Come check out this,” or something like that.

If you can’t run a platform so that people’s private PayPals can’t be hacked, well I don’t know whether you should be running it. There are other little bugs as well. Things not saving. I’ve a couple of gigs that are still pending on my order list, because someone’s paid me and then for some weird reason I can’t message them and I can’t find out any other details about them, either. Of course, like Fiverr, Konker has this system where you’re not supposed to try to communicate outside of the delivery system so you can’t take your regular customers off Konker and work with them and bypass the fees that they’d be getting.

Conclusion

Konker. Is it worth using? Well, there’s actually a lot of really good services on there. I think for like ACO and digital marketing, the services are better than what you’d find on Fiverr. The issue I’ve got is the bugs. It really does feel like something that’s sort of either been put together by some cheap, off-shore development house that doesn’t really care, or it’s just a case of careless, almost afterthought on the part of people who’ve created it, which is a shame because I think Konker could be really, really good.

I think the name is stupid, as well. Fiverr makes sense, because it was all about $5.00. Source Market was a little bit market that’s in the name. Konker, spelled incorrectly, I don’t understand it, but whatever. Look, there’s potential for it to be a good marketplace, but the bugs need to be ironed out. I just have a sneaking suspicion that I think it will gradually die a death, which is a shame because the ability to pretty much sell the service in the way you want to … mine is the restrictions you’d get with something like Fiverr is really good.

In that sense, they are to be commended for trying hard to make a much more innovative platform. It’s just those kind of bugs, anything that involves people not getting paid, or people paying too much, or people’s money going missing … you have to stamp that out, and that has to be fixed.

Even things like accounts being lost. I’ve got a level two account, really good feedback, all positive feedback for all the gigs I did with Don. I’ve made probably a couple of grand through there doing some little side services. I can’t get into it. The support seems pretty useless. Well worth checking out, but do be weary. Those bugs are annoying.

I’m not going to recommend in a sense that it’s the greatest thing ever, but I think if you can work around the bugs, there’s some pretty good services for sale. Things like TBN links, and other little services like little citation packs and things that are quite good. Konker.io, I’m into mines. The bugs are bad. It feels unfinished, it feels unpolished. There’s a nucleus of something very good there, but you do need to be weary.