The Californer - Sellou: The Selling, Shopping & Sharing App

Trending...

Nostalgia, image sharing, transparency and usability sets Sellou apart

PALO ALTO, Calif. - Californer -- WHAT IS SELLOU?

The Details:

Sellou is a brand-spanking new app that makes selling and browsing more engaging and usable. It's ostensibly a fresh and contemporary take on the 90s e-commerce boom (think cool mobile eBay) but this time on your iPhone. Sellou handles everything from payment to shipping, and even includes a stylish AI background filter with some vibrant pops of color to give it a fun twist.

The Sellou app connects users with vendors and businesses all over the world, and opens new possibilities and opportunities for how you explore, shop and connect with creators.

For vendors and small businesses, it's as simple as turning on your phone's camera and taking a photo of what you want to sell. Sellou makes selling easy and accessible for everyone. Sell anything from your home to the world. Existing businesses are able to sell and ship internationally with the touch of a button. Gain access to a global community of customers and grow a brand-new revenue stream for yourself.

The Aesthetic:

It's difficult to recall the joy early apps brought to users, but Sellou rekindles that same feeling. The way Instagram felt in 2010, a small intimate place to share photos, chronologically, before it was modified to ultimately maximize engagement. Sellou pays tribute to a touch of nostalgia when apps didn't focus on algorithms and the unwanted storage of data. It was all to do with intimacy, reconnecting with old friends and making new acquaintances. It was democratic, fun, open and transparent. It opened windows into people's lives and their loves, dreams and creations. Sellou aims to reconnect with a simpler and more naive past twinned with the advancement and accessibility of new technology.

More on The Californer

Sellou, essentially, centers around creators and creatives, digital artists and people who want to make a living doing what they love.

Earning revenue from Sellou is incredibly easy. It partners with Stripe to link to your bank account and all you need to do is put on a price. Users are issued with a label, once it's sold, to seal on the shipping box.

Privacy and Transparency:

In today's muddy media climate, where large corporate giants dominate and control most of the content we see, it's refreshing to find a small and innovative app making its mark. New solutions like Sellou still have an opportunity to rewrite the narrative, navigating away from user engagement, into a more human and humane approach to business. The beautiful thing is, apps that have transparent business models, like selling physical products, rarely use your data as a source of revenue.

A large reason behind why many people distrust Facebook is because the source of revenue seems to be tainted with deliberate confusion. On one side we're told ads are sold, but seemingly there seems to be something else going on. A LOT of data is collected without people knowing, and that data is categorized into boxes that reflect who we all are. To many, it's a deep breach of trust and privacy that lingers in the back of their minds.

What Sellou does is offer a more compact, robust and more private alternative. Data isn't used to generate money, it's barely used at all. The sole source of revenue stems from it making the act of selling more engaging and easier. All Sellou does is take a small fee from this process.

More on The Californer

To put it in clear and simple terms, we've lost the sense that social media should be a mode of connecting with family and friends and for building social and business networks. The intimacy it once held dear has sadly dissipated. Now, it seems that we're bombarded with corporate propaganda in addition to being coerced into consuming disposable and trashy media. The core issue here is that social media companies focus on user engagement; a metric that guarantees how often people return to their platform. It's a metric that has obviously shown some level of success.

Sellou, however, is active in channeling a growing universal desire to steer away from intrusive algorithms, and eschews the feeling and knowledge that privacy is being breached.

Check out Sellou on iOS today