>>10738>Any chance of us every bringing back the store?In a word, no. In two words, probably not.
The specifics are in that archived post the other anon quoted, but the basic gist is that the original store we had in 2017 was run by a friend of mine who is no longer associated with the site, and it's gone forever. A few years ago I did manage to get another store going, through one of those Shopify type dropshipping sites where you upload your designs and they sell it for you (I honestly don't remember which one I used).
I ran into two significant problems. The first is that Shopify (or whoever I used) kept randomly deleting our products without explanation. I suspect it had more to do with copyright infringement concerns than politics, but I have no way to verify this because they don't warn you or give you any kind of guidance, they just yank your products down without telling you why. If you ask their customer service department for an explanation you just get a bunch of vague, boilerplate jeetspam in response. This seems to be a pretty common problem in dealing with these types of sites, as I've heard similar complaints from other people trying to sell horse-related products.
The second problem was that nobody actually bought anything. In its entire short life, the second mlpol store made exactly two sales: one to me personally, and one to another staff member. I'm not trying to scold anyone or call anyone out, but the fact is that despite several anons clamoring for us to bring back the mlpol store, none of those users actually made a purchase once we actually did bring it back. Maybe the missing products were part of the issue, or maybe people were concerned about giving out their private info. The bottom line though is that there just wasn't enough serious interest to justify the hassle of setting up and running a store, so it's probably not something I'd do again. The guy who ran the original store shared a similar experience when I asked him about it, he said that probably about 80% of his total sales occurred within the first few months of mlpol.net being a thing. By the time he shut it down it had gone months without making a single sale.
So, as a purely money-making venture for the site, it makes no sense for us to have a store. Personally, I'd kind of like to have one just so people could own memorabilia from the site, but there's just no practical, cost-effective way to set it up and keep it going. The only way I can see is to either find a dropshipper that gives no fucks, which would probably entail dealing with someone in China or Russia or some place similarly dubious, or to make and stock our own inventory and handle the shipping ourselves. The first option would probably create a lot of undue complications, and the second would involve spending a lot of money up front, only to end up with a closet full of Aryanne t-shirts that nobody is buying.
A better way would probably just be to do what
>>10739 is suggesting: make your own products and sell them yourself wherever you can, without trying to build a branded storefront. There is limited interest in mlpol as a concept at this point in time, but Aryanne in general is still well-known and popular, so maybe a single user trying to appeal to the broader 4chan side of the pony fanbase would have more luck.