Facebook shop goes bankrupt by not using ‘Apu, inbox for prices’ policy

A Facebook shop, which became a disruptor-in-chief by listing the prices on the image of their products, recently declared bankruptcy.

Sweet Surprises, which sold the most random assortment of products ever, took the Facebook marketplace by storm when it launched earlier this year. Instead of having to inbox them for their prices, their page bravely displayed the prices right on the photos of their products.

This was an unprecedented move in the Bangladeshi market, where Facebook pages religiously maintained the "inbox for prices, please" message or the more annoying automated "check inbox" replies to price queries.

"Things were going well initially. People applauded us and we got the Trend-Setter of the Year during last year's Good Business Awards. However, since the pandemic, things started to shift," Mehnaz Milon, owner of Sweet Surprises, said.

"People had so much free time on their hands that they started coming to the page and commenting on pictures, saying 'We can buy this for Tk 50' on products listed at Tk 500 or more. They all began to demonstrate this weird bargaining power-trip, which drove away customers," she said.

In time, Sweet Surprises' Facebook posts became the brewing grounds of one of Bangladesh's most talked-about price wars of the year. Other companies also got in on the action, talking up their pages on Sweet Surprises' posts.

Sweet Surprises, at the advice of a marketer, decided to brave the storm by continuing with their posts unchanged.

Amin Bari, head of social media of Sweet Surprises, admits the decision back-fired but stands by it. "We had tremendous engagement in the first few months. Thousands of comments, likes and shares. And you know engagement means sales, right?"

When pointed out that engagement did not really mean sales and it was usually people tagging each other and saying "for you" or "buy me this", with no one really buying anything, Amin said that was the whole point of social media.

"Listen. Engagements are all we care about. That is basically my job. To drive up engagement. Everyone does it by not listing prices. Well, we wanted to do something different," he said.

 While the exercise has failed, Mehnaz feels it is not over. "We plan on coming back next time. This time, not only will we not list prices, we will also not even show the product's picture. This way it will be a real surprise when people buy something. They won't even know what it is that they bought! We will take the market by storm," she said.

Whether that works or not remains to be seen. For now, there are high hopes for Sweet Surprises V2. 

Lubnan Khaleesi cannot stop eating. And it's not even hunger anymore; just the thrill of tasting all kinds of food.