What Helm is, and who shops here

This lesson prepares you to: Describe Helm as an interest driven, family safe live shopping marketplace, and say whether your products fit it.

The short version

Helm is an interest driven, family safe marketplace where people buy from creators and small businesses, including live on camera. It is not a search box with a warehouse behind it. The feed runs on what people are interested in rather than on who paid to be seen.

Three things that change what sells

1. Discovery is interest based, not ad based. Your product reaches people because it matches something they follow, not because you outbid somebody. There is no ad auction to buy your way to the top of, which cuts both ways: nobody can outspend you, and nobody can shortcut their way past a boring listing either.
2. Selling happens live as well as on a page. A product page is a page. A live stream is a person holding the thing and answering questions in real time. Different products suit each, and some suit both.
3. Families are actually on the platform. Not as a slogan. Kid and teen accounts exist with real parental controls, and a purchase from one of them routes to a parent for spend approval before it goes through.

Who is on the other side

Buyers here are people who followed an interest and found you inside it. That produces a different shopper from a marketplace search result. They tend to arrive knowing something about you, and they are more likely to have watched you than to have compared four sellers on price.

Practically, that means the things that win here are the things that survive being shown up close: real photographs, honest descriptions, a person behind the shop.

Products that fit well

• Anything with a maker attached. Handmade, small batch, designed by you.
• Anything that demonstrates. If holding it up and using it is more convincing than a photo of it, live selling will do more for you here than anywhere else.
• Anything a family would buy together. Kids' goods, games, hobby supplies, home things.
• Anything with a story. Where it came from, why it exists, what it is made of.

Products that fit badly, and we would rather say so

• Undifferentiated commodity goods. If your advantage is being 40 cents cheaper than the next listing of an identical item, that advantage does not travel to a platform without a price sorted search wall.
• Anything on the prohibited list. Alcohol, vaping, cannabis, weapons, adult items and several others are not allowed at all. That is lesson 0.2 and it is worth reading before you plan a catalogue.
• Anything that only works with paid acquisition. There is no ad product to lean on.

What Helm is not

It is not the biggest marketplace, it does not have the traffic of one, and it is not going to be the whole of your business on day one. It is early. If you need volume this quarter, be honest with yourself about that before you build a catalogue here rather than after.