Market Pro in current state can kill your business

Shopify Discussion
1

When Shopify Merchant Acceleration team offered to join Market Pro, I immediately said “YES!”.

I’m a big enthusiast of DDP. I heard about Market Pro about a year ago, plenty of time for Shopify to test everything.

After being approved, I immediately activated Market Pro. While I was thinking about further steps, Market Pro was… banning our products for non-US visitors. We avoided the worst-case scenario thanks to our non-US business partner who noticed our catalog has big problems. We had all the chances to not detect it at all. (No international sales for weeks? Who knows why?..) Market Pro emptied our store for 7.5 billion people. In 48 hours between clicking “Enable Market Pro” and clicking “Disable Market Pro”, we were not aware of the problem.

An example to show the disaster. The same collection for US (21 products) and non-US (2 products).

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A few days later, Shopify sent an email that I would not quote. A punchline: Market Pro AI scans product titles and descriptions for keywords and restricts such products; Market Pro moderators can un-restrict restricted products in case of mistakes.

Even after so violent restrictions, Market Pro did not provide a list of restricted products with reasons. A Market Pro specialist has sent me an email with “examples”. These examples indicate Market Pro auto-ban products with occurrences of keywords “digital”, “resin”, and “sharpie”, regardless of usage, semantics, context, etc.

Examples:

  1. “digital Inclinometer Holder”

  2. “digital” in Q&A section

  3. “sharpie” in product comparison section as bulletpoint of another product

  4. “Resin bonded diamonds” among recommended other products

Market Pro bot restricts a massive number of products, with 0.5% false positives.

Market Pro people do not re-verify the restricted products. They repeat what said their silly bot.

[“Resin Bonded Diamond”] - Need clarification if resin is included or if the items are bonded by resin

Even if Market Pro has real moderators who will read my response “resin bonded is resin bonded, holder of digital device is not digital”, it did not happen within one week. The bot bans hundreds products in split second. Market Pro human can manually re-verify each restricted product in 2 seconds. No, Market Pro thinks it’s me who has to spend hours on supporting documents to prove “elephant is elephant”.

I protest against the restrictions imposed in such a violent mode!

A. Large number of listings disappeared for international customers immediately after activating Market Pro.
B. Market Pro team have not informed us this may happen.
C. No warnings after deactivating restricted products.
D. We detected the problem only after our overseas vendor started asking what was going on with our catalog.
E. Restricted products are hidden for countries not eligible for Market Pro.
F. Restricted products are hidden for countries where we don’t plan to use Shopify shipping.
G. Most of the restricted products are false triggers.

1 Like
2

We had a similar experience. No notice that products were restricted. There isn’t a way to determine what the issue is. Removed Markets Pro after customers outside of the US called or emailed us asking why they couldn’t purchase some of the products they had bought in the past.

3

We are just now going through our entire website not being available. It was once available and now restricted.

What are you using in place of Market Pro to sell internationally and take care of shipping, duties, tax, etc.

4

Hi Alondrav, check this webinar learn more about shipping, customs and taxes if u are selling to EU: https://global24.clickmeeting.com/cross-border-selling/register

5

My product, which is a paperback book, was just restricted but AFTER they were already sold. So now I can’t ship their orders and if I cancel them I get charged a fee. WTF?

6

I just experienced the exact same issue, after a customer pointed out that they could no longer see my jewelry - 2 products out of a collection of 50+ pieces were only available in France. I had been selling there for years, there is no actual restrictions, yet Market Pro decided they could not be sold without being able to provide the actual reason for the exclusion. So they excluded products without informing us, which affected our sales negatively, while selling the Market Pro service as a way to expand business reach.

When asked for a valid explanation for the restrictions, they were only about to take 2 days to ask the “market Pro expert team’ and come ups with vague general answers. As if I am supposed to believe that France restrict sales of “bracelets”.

They lied about having provided a list the of restricted products, but could not point me to where such a list it would be located nor could they provide a copy of said list.

This is clearly done without thought and by poorly designed AI. I wish I had realized what was going on sooner, but unless you are in the actual territory, you simply cannot know what they have arbitrarily decided to block you from selling.

Their customer service agent could not find answers for me and actually marked the customer service chat as closed to avoid giving answers to my very simple question requesting proof of the actual basis for the restriction. Bad business for sure, do not sign up for this service. I wish i’d never signed up in the first place.

1 Like
7

Thank you for your detailed comments.

The initial experience with Markets Pro can be a downer. I hope your business has moved past this phase.

8

Problems of Markets Pro: 6-Month Update (Follow-up)

9

Out of curiosity, have you found a solution to continue selling in France?

10

I sell jewelry and still currently have this issue with France, which is a shame because my style seems to be popular there. Luckily I can direct them to paying a paypal invoice with my presence on Instagram, but I am sure I am missing out on sales. I ship my jewelry to France and have no issues with customs so it doesn’t make sense that it isn’t something they can fix. I understand being cautious with export/import laws, but if everyone is saying its a non-issue it would really be great if something could be done about it.