Any locale I searched had zero results. You should at least encourage people in that situation to be the first to list something.
Probably a good idea to focus on a particular location first and spread out from there. And prioritise that location on the front page, rather than having it empty with just a search field.
If I visit and find nothing for my location, I will never return. Just pick your home town or something and focus on that.
This — two sides marketplaces are probably the hardest type of business to grow and scale, you'd be much better at focusing on a specific locale and directing traffic there (even with social/PPC) than going with an empty search box.
As someone who has floundered in this space, some advice: local matters to shoppers less than they will tell you to your face.
To consumers, Haddock from Iceland they buy at their local grocery store is local. You cannot disabuse them of this notion while simultaneously taking their money.
We tried a variant of this with token/credit-based accounting instead of local current Failed miserably. We learnt that "Confused says no" the hard way.
So I looked at https://blunum.com/manu-4cf782dm4.mjs, which is kind of weird? Like, why does it define empty functions just to fill out a()-z(), and how is it decided which characters get a non-empty function body? The static data structures holding stuff like currency and country information also make me itchy, as does the convoluted string stitching.
Probably a good idea to focus on a particular location first and spread out from there. And prioritise that location on the front page, rather than having it empty with just a search field.
If I visit and find nothing for my location, I will never return. Just pick your home town or something and focus on that.