It would indeed be a pain in the butt to admin merch. Here are the steps that you can help out to make it happen (if you all are serious):
Select a quality custom print vendor that would print and ship merch on demand
The LH community comes up with a design
The community votes on a design
The winning designer sends us the vector file so we can set up the merch store with the design
All proceeds goes to our Tech Support Fund
From our experience with the stickers, not many people ended up buying it. With clothings, sizing adds complexity. If we don’t have a critical mass who would be interested in the merch, it doesn’t make sense to order in bulk (We also don’t have space to store the unsold merch). Custom print on demand seems to be the only way to go, but we would need to vet the quality. It also won’t be cheap so it won’t leave much money for our Tech Support Fund.
It would be a fun community project nonetheless if we could put it together. Imaging passing by someone wearing a LH shirt on the street (IYKYK). I wonder how dealers would react if we wear them into dealerships…
This would be great! And car magnets. Passing an EQS on the highway and seeing an LH badge is an entirely other emotional thing than passing one without.
One indicates bad taste in cars and poor purchasing decisions, and the other is just a sweet green unicorn on wheels.
Go to Canva, create a design, download it, sign up for a shopify account, download printful, and go from there. When you get an order, the supplier will fulfill the order.
Edit: LH was very ‘comforting’, like a security blanket, in 2020/2021. We talked about home office setups, cooking, and just stuff in general. It was great… there were also the Tacos and Tundra fire sales, the Bolts… so many things. and then there a couple of days when LH went down… those were some seriously bad days almost like withdrawal symptoms
So whatever it takes to keep things running, I’m all for it. And I think one of the best things about LH is how it constantly evolves.
That leaves out the in-between noobs that have been “on” the site for a year or maybe two, have closed maybe one deal that was bootstrapped off of others hard work, posts nonstop with LH as their FB/Reddit place to fire off nonstop nothing burgers, bad life hacking advice, LOLs and other nonsense.
If I have to guess is mindset is like this: I got this deal let me go check with the “experts” on LH what they think of it.
A post on how to easily evaluate a deal would help these people instead of annoying users here.
To summarize ChatGpt, just go to True Car and check the prices.
I think people just want validation if they received a good deal or sometimes after they sign and ask, “Was this a good deal?” and get hammered here. Lol
Psychologically, if 2 or 3 people say, “yeah it’s a great deal!” most people will sign the contract and move on. They won’t invest any more time to check other resources cause their question has been validated.
They do have fulfillment centers with full service where you sublease a warehouse and they will process your PO and ship out to the customer but they take fees from top of the line. Merchandising is a lot of work, it’s pretty much a new dept where you would need to hire someone to get that going and process the customer service and returns. Most merchandise have a 10% return rate. Unless your pulling in mid 6 digits in gross income, it may not be worthwhile.
How about offering a subscription at, say, $99 a year and requiring brokers who advertise in the marketplace to offer a discount on their broker fee by a predetermined amount ($50?) for subscribers, and / or to grant early access to subscribers on posted deals. Couple that with subscribers-only features, such as a dedicated forum section, access to the calculator, etc. Access can also be granted to a subset of non-subscribing users who contribute in other ways to the community.
It’s not a perfect system, but it’s a fast way to eliminate majority of users who have not contributed to the LH community.
Frankly speaking, we didn’t create the Supporters Lounge to bar off users. Yet given the increasing demand for a smaller, more focused discussion space, repurposing Supporters Lounge is the easiest way to get it started. We can also include regulars who have a high trust level as measured by the system.
We are open to suggestions. Depending on how we want to define this space, we might rename Supporters Lounge too.
Personally I think it should be some qualifying combination of longevity, days visited, posts read, etc. Discourse collects these and I think the odds are that you’ll get quality people.
