Every marketplace pitch to sellers eventually runs into the same wall: "okay, but I have 400 listings on eBay already."
That single sentence kills more platform switches than pricing, trust, or features combined. Asking someone to manually recreate hundreds of titles, photos, prices, and descriptions isn't a small ask — it's a weekend of unpaid work before they've sold a single item. So when we were building TrueGether, a marketplace positioned as a practical eBay alternative for people who want to start selling online, new or used, without giving up a cut of every sale, we knew the "empty store" problem would matter more than almost anything else in the product.
The real friction isn't fees, it's the migration
We'd assumed price would be the deciding factor for sellers. It wasn't. In early conversations, the objection that came up again and again was some version of: "I believe you're cheaper, but I'm not starting from zero." Sellers who'd spent years building out a catalog on eBay or a Shopify store weren't going to abandon that catalog just to test a new platform, no matter how good the pitch to sell online without fees sounded on paper.
That reframed the problem. It wasn't "how do we convince sellers to switch," it was "how do we make switching cost nothing."
What we built: listings that carry over intact
We ended up building an import path that pulls existing listings in directly from eBay and Shopify — titles, prices, photos, quantities, and descriptions come across instead of needing to be rebuilt by hand. The seller reviews and confirms rather than starting from a blank form.
The unglamorous part of this work was category mapping. eBay and Shopify each have their own sprawling, inconsistent taxonomy, and none of it lines up cleanly with a simpler category structure. A listing sitting three levels deep in eBay's antiques tree doesn't have an obvious 1:1 home — we had to decide where the mapping should be strict versus where it made more sense to fall back to a broader parent category and let the seller fine-tune from there.
Photos were the other place small decisions mattered. Keeping image order and primary-photo selection intact sounds trivial until you're moving hundreds of listings at once and one broken mapping means every photo in a shop is off by one.
Reputation had to move too, not just inventory
Listings were only half the migration problem. A seller with 1,200 reviews and a 4.9 rating on eBay isn't just losing a catalog by switching platforms — they're losing years of earned trust and starting over as an anonymous new account. For anyone who's spent years building a track record, that's a bigger deterrent than rebuilding listings ever was.
So the import path also carries over the seller's existing ratings and reviews — not just an aggregate score, but the actual reviews customers left. A buyer looking at a "new" seller on TrueGether can still see the reputation that seller earned somewhere else, instead of everyone starting from a blank slate regardless of track record.
This ended up being the harder design problem of the two. Listings are static data — copy the fields, map the categories, done. Reputation is trust, and trust only means something if it's clearly attributed and verifiably tied to the account that earned it. Getting that balance right mattered more than getting the import mechanically working.
Why this mattered more than a fee comparison
None of this shows up in a "compare our fees to eBay's fees" pitch, but it's the actual product of taking migration seriously — not just cheaper, but nothing lost in the switch, neither catalog nor reputation. A cheaper platform that still costs someone a weekend of manual work and a blank reputation isn't actually cheaper — it just moves the cost from money to time and trust.
If you're building anything that asks users to migrate from an incumbent platform, the lesson generalized further than we expected: the technical lift of a clean, trust-preserving import isn't a nice-to-have feature, it's often the actual decision that determines whether anyone tries you at all.
If you're weighing TrueGether as your next storefront or just exploring it as a side hustle selling platform, you can see how listings and reviews come across on the seller signup page.
FAQ
1. What exactly gets imported from an eBay or Shopify store?
Titles, prices, photos, quantities, and descriptions carry over, along with category mapping. The seller reviews everything before it goes live rather than it publishing automatically.
2. Do reviews transfer too, or just listings?
Both. Along with the catalog, existing ratings and reviews carry over — not just an aggregate score, but the actual reviews customers left — so a seller's track record isn't reset by switching platforms.
3. Which platforms can sellers import from right now?
eBay and Shopify are supported today.
4. Is there a cost to use the import tool?
No — it's part of the same zero-fee model as the rest of the platform, so there's no separate charge to bring a catalog or reputation over.
