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Why we started Shopfront

We built the tool we wished existed when we were selling secondhand — Drew on the friction that pushed us to start.

Why we started Shopfront
Drew Flaherty
Drew Flaherty
30 Apr 2026 · 2 min read

Selling secondhand should be easy. It isn’t.

Nate and I met through Antler Australia in 2024. We’d both spent enough nights reformatting the same listing — once for eBay, once for Depop, once for Grailed — to know the problem in our hands. Every marketplace asks for something slightly different. Different titles, different descriptions, different category trees, different photo requirements. The work doesn’t get smaller; it multiplies.

The resellers, vintage stores, and charity shops we talked to weren’t asking for more places to sell. They were already on three or four. They were asking for less time spent retyping.

So we started building.

The first thing we shipped

The shape of the product was always clear: drop in photos, get a polished listing across every marketplace. Push it live with one click. Update inventory once, sync everywhere. The hard part wasn’t the idea — it was making it actually work across four marketplaces with four different APIs, four different category systems, and four different opinions about what a listing should look like.

We spent the first six months on the unglamorous parts: parsing real-world category trees, mapping condition fields that don’t agree with each other, handling the edge cases that only show up when someone tries to list a 1980s leather jacket with mother-of-pearl buttons.

What we still believe

We’re still small. We’re still in Melbourne. Every feature we ship comes from a conversation with a seller — usually one who emailed us about something that’s slowing them down.

The marketplaces aren’t going to consolidate. The fragmentation isn’t going away. But the busywork can. That’s the whole bet.

If you’re a reseller spending more time listing than sourcing, we built this for you.

— Drew

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