Meet The Indie Marketplaces Challenging Big Tech’s Grip on Small Sellers

Photo by Jelly Luise

For small businesses trying to sell online, the e-commerce landscape has become increasingly unforgiving. 

Etsy has raised its fees multiple times, triggering waves of seller protests. Amazon’s third-party sellers now surrender nearly half of every sale once commissions, fulfillment and advertising are tallied. Even Shopify, once promoted as the independent seller’s escape hatch, demands rising app costs and ever-pricier advertising just to stay visible.

What was once framed as a democratizing force now more closely resembles the broader retail economy it was meant to disrupt: consolidation at the top, squeezed margins at the bottom and little room for the smallest players to breathe.

It’s in this environment that a handful of new indie marketplaces are beginning to take shape from founders who spent years trying to navigate the systems they now seek to reimagine. 

And while their approaches vary, they all seem to circle the same question: if the dominant platforms no longer work for small sellers, what might a more humane and workable version look like?

Kyle Lewis, the creator of OtterList, built his marketplace out of a simple observation: ethical shopping had become too hard. Years of greenwashing, vague certifications and inconsistent labeling had left consumers wanting to “vote with their dollars” without any reliable way to know where those dollars went. 

OtterList emerged as an index of small, transparent brands—items tagged with standards like vegan, non-toxic or organic, curated to remove the guesswork. 

It is pointedly described as “The Anti-Amazon Marketplace,” which is less a branding exercise than a structural one. 

Amazon’s search results, steered by advertising spend, rarely make room for small producers unless they pay dearly for the privilege. OtterList inverts that logic by limiting its scope, banking on the idea that people overwhelmed by abundance may actually want something smaller, slower and vetted.

Elsewhere, the response to the platform squeeze has taken a more forceful shape.

Mayhem Marketplace, founded by single mother and longtime side-hustle seller Jackie Xavier, was built as a direct countermeasure to what she describes as “monopolistic greed.” 

Her experience mirrors that of millions of small sellers navigating Amazon, Etsy or Shopify: rising fees, thinning margins and the sense that the platforms rely on independent workers without ever meaningfully serving them.

“It was positively grotesque how much these billionaires were stealing from small businesses while contributing next to nothing,” Xavier told Hyvemind.  “I got a first hand experience of all of their greed and failings and knew it could be done better, and for cheaper, by someone who simply cared.” 

Mayhem’s structure reflects that frustration. The platform charges no listing fees, no commissions and no transaction cuts—only a flat $5 a month for a basic storefront, or $10 for built-in payment processing and inventory tools. 

Xavier says the math is straightforward: hosting a shop costs about $2 a month. “Anything beyond that,” she said, “is padding.”

The most distinctive part of the model, however, is how it treats surplus revenue. 

The company caps owner income and directs surplus revenue into community programs: school garden initiatives, domestic-violence survivor support, rehabilitation funding, and long-term plans for not-for-profit health insurance and housing. 

Xavier calls the approach “Trojan Horsing” capitalism: using a corporate structure to redistribute profit rather than extract it.

“Our slogan is Putting Power and Profits Back in the Hands of the People,” she said. “We are not here to profit off folks, but to be a platform and space for them to flourish.”

Beyond its philosophy, Mayhem is intentionally flexible in what it allows sellers to offer. Creators can list physical goods, digital products, commissioned work, subscriptions or services—an unusually broad range for a marketplace of its size. 

Customizable storefronts function as full “shops,” not just product listings, giving small businesses a sense of ownership that larger platforms rarely provide.

For buyers, the platform reads like a hybrid between a marketplace and a community bulletin board. Products, services and blog posts appear in a single, unfiltered feed Xavier calls “Mayhem Mode,” where handmade jewelry, tarot readings, digital art and niche offerings mix freely. 

What looks chaotic is partly the point: a rejection of algorithmic sorting that tends to bury human sellers beneath sponsored listings and mass-manufactured goods. The result is a marketplace defined as much by the people it includes as by the economic model it rejects.

If Mayhem is built to loosen the financial grip of the major platforms, Latte, created by founder Sarah Moon, targets a quieter, yet equally problematic challenge for small businesses: the erosion of local visibility.

In a digital landscape dominated by search-engine optimization and corporate ad budgets, neighborhood shops and home-based businesses often disappear before customers ever know they exist.

Moon encountered that problem long before she set out to solve it. Before launching Latte, she worked as a pet-care provider and relied on a patchwork of outdated tools to reach local clients. 

Some platforms, she said, suggested posting on Craigslist. Others offered printable flyers. And local Facebook groups, which are full of people asking for recommendations, ban direct promotion.

“My frustration grew from two sides at once: as a customer trying to shop locally, and as a small business owner trying to be found,” Moon told Hyvemind. “Finding local businesses is surprisingly hard, especially the ones without storefronts.” 

And on social platforms, she added, “so many incredible shops rely solely on social media, and they get buried in search results. They’re forced to compete on the same playing field as big-budget companies, big box stores and faceless white-label resellers.”

Latte is Moon’s attempt to rebuild what the major platforms abandoned. Designed as a grassroots directory, it allows local shoppers to find the people running businesses in their own communities. 

Listing is free, and visibility isn’t tied to ad spend but to story, place and identity. Most sellers on the platform are one-person, women-owned shops operating on thin margins and limited time. 

Latte gives them a foothold the larger platforms rarely offer. Businesses can create a listing, share weekly updates and appear in a year-round gift guide organized by occasion rather than algorithmic ranking. 

Sellers can tag themselves with identifiers like first-gen, Asian-owned or military family—signals that rarely surface on larger platforms but matter to customers looking for businesses that reflect their own communities. 

The pricing mirrors the same ethos: Moon frames participation as “the price of a latte,” a way to keep the platform within reach for those most often priced out of digital marketplaces.

Local discovery may sound like a small inconvenience, but it shapes which businesses survive. 

When the digital infrastructure meant to connect consumers instead obscures the smallest players, the effects ripple beyond the screen: customers spend less locally, neighborhood economies weaken and home-based businesses struggle to gain traction before they ever have a chance to grow. 

Moon is not trying to replicate the scale of the major platforms, but to restore a basic function they left behind: helping people find the businesses that live in the same towns, neighborhoods and apartment buildings they do.

Taken together, these indie marketplaces offer a different reading of the e-commerce landscape: the challenges small sellers face aren’t isolated frustrations but symptoms of a system built to extract more than it gives. 

Each of these founders has built around what the Big Tech players left behind—ethical transparency, fairer economics and local discovery for real locals—suggesting that the limits of today’s dominant e-commerce marketplaces has less to do with technology itself and more to do with the priorities of the companies that control it.