Reverb feed widget for any website.

Reverb launched in 2013, founded by David Kalt of Chicago Music Exchange to fix the problem that eBay and Craigslist were the only options for selling used and vintage musical instruments and neither understood the category. Kalt and his team built a marketplace specifically for music gear from day one, with category taxonomy that knew the difference between a P-90 and a humbucker, condition grading that respected vintage provenance, and a Price Guide built from real sold-listing data the platform aggregated from its own transactions. The bet paid off. By 2019 Reverb had become the dominant music gear marketplace globally, and Etsy acquired the platform in a deal that valued Reverb at roughly 275 million USD. The Etsy era brought scale and infrastructure investment but also strategic drift, with Reverb sitting awkwardly inside Etsy's broader handmade-and-vintage portfolio that did not really know what to do with electric guitar amplification or boutique synthesizer modules. In April 2024 Etsy sold Reverb back to its founders (Kalt and a group of original Reverb investors) at a reported price below the original acquisition. The founder return has so far been a stabilizing force for the platform: the Reverb API for sellers continues to operate with full read access to shop listings, sold history, Price Guide data, and category taxonomy. Bump (Reverb's promoted-listings auction system) still runs the same way it has since 2017. Reverb Protection coverage on shipping disputes is intact. The platform that vintage dealers, boutique builders, and recording studio gear sellers depend on is still operating and still embeddable. For a huge slice of the music gear economy (vintage guitar dealers, hand-built pedal companies, small amp builders, used studio outboard sellers, brick-and-mortar music shops running primary online sales through Reverb) the platform is the actual store. Embedding the Reverb feed on your own site is how you connect your domain to the marketplace without losing the visitor to reverb.com's discovery surfaces or sending them to a checkout that lives outside your brand identity.

Reverb publishes a documented public API for sellers with read access to shop listings, sold history, Price Guide data, category taxonomy, and condition grades. Authentication is OAuth-based for full shop access, with a fallback structured-data path through public reverb.com/shop/shop-name URLs for sellers who do not want to authorize an OAuth scope. The widget exposes five distinct embed primitives. A full shop inventory feed pulls every active listing on a shop sorted by creation date or price, with optional sold-history interleaving for social proof. This is the primitive most dealer homepages use as the primary catalog. A category filter narrows the feed to a specific Reverb category (electric guitars, effects pedals, synths and keyboards, drums and percussion, recording gear) which is essential for a multi-category dealer that wants different page sections to surface different inventory. A brand filter narrows to specific manufacturers (Fender, Gibson, Boss, Strymon, Moog) which is gold for shops with brand-specialty pages or for builders showcasing their own inventory alongside vintage examples. A decade filter for vintage gear (50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s) is the primitive vintage dealers need most: a serious collector landing on a vintage-focused page wants to see only pre-CBS Strats or only 70s Marshall stack, not the full inventory diluted by modern reissues. The fifth primitive is a manually-curated featured listings selection for hero placements: pick five gear pieces by listing ID, render them in a hero carousel above the full catalog grid, and rotate the selection without re-embedding. Poper supports all five primitives from the same widget config, with the ability to combine them on a single page (a hero featured carousel above a category-filtered grid above a sold-history wall is a typical dealer-page configuration).

The single biggest difference between a vintage music gear listing and a generic marketplace product listing is the authentication story. A 1959 Gibson Les Paul with original PAF pickups can sell for over 400,000 USD. A 1973 Marshall Super Lead with original transformers and intact PCB sells for 4,000 USD. A reissue of either, while often a great-sounding instrument or amplifier, sells for a small fraction of the originals. Buyers paying serious money for vintage gear need to trust the provenance, condition grading, and seller reputation before they hit checkout, and Reverb's category-specific tooling exists exactly to make that trust legible. Condition grades on Reverb run on a six-tier scale (Mint, Excellent, Very Good, Good, Fair, Poor) with each grade carrying specific guidance about expected wear, originality, and playability. The Reverb Price Guide aggregates real sold-listing data across the platform to surface a fair-market value range for any specific instrument, amp, or pedal model and year combination. Buyers reference the Price Guide before they make an offer; sellers reference it before they price a listing. Reverb Protection is the platform's third-party trust layer that covers shipping disputes, item-not-as-described claims, and authentication challenges, and the badge appears on every shop listing that qualifies. Poper renders all three layers natively on the embed. Condition badges color-code by grade. Price Guide reference figures appear inline on listings where the seller has opted to display them. Reverb Protection eligibility is surfaced where present. Vintage provenance fields (year, country of origin, original vs refinish, original-case yes/no) render on a dedicated spec strip below the listing photo for instruments where the seller has filled them out. A vintage dealer's catalog page on a Poper-embedded site reads more like a curator's portfolio than a generic e-commerce grid, and the buyer trust signals that close five-figure deals all surface inline.

Reverb embeds present a structured-data SEO opportunity that most music-gear widgets miss entirely. A typical Reverb listing is a Product (a specific instrument, amplifier, pedal, or piece of recording gear) with an Offer (the price and availability), often with an AggregateRating (the seller's reputation score from completed transactions). The right structured data on the page where the widget is embedded therefore includes Product schema for each listing with brand, model, year, mpn where applicable, and category mapping to Schema.org's MusicalInstrument or product subtype. Offer schema for each listing includes price, priceCurrency, availability set to InStock or OutOfStock based on Reverb's inventory state, and itemCondition mapped from Reverb's condition grade to Schema.org's NewCondition or UsedCondition vocabularies. AggregateRating schema for the seller pulls reputation count and average rating from the public shop profile. Most Reverb widgets emit none of this. The native Reverb shop iframe (the default embed Reverb gives to verified shops) is invisible to Google's product index because Google cannot crawl what is inside an iframe. Poper auto-injects all three schema types as JSON-LD on the page where the widget is embedded, populated from the structured listing data returned by the Reverb API. Validate with Google's Rich Results Test on any embedded page. Beyond Google, Product structured data shows up in Google Shopping, Bing Shopping, the merchant carousel results that appear for product-intent queries, and increasingly in AI search engines like Perplexity that build product answer cards for gear-shopping queries. The combined effect for a vintage dealer is that long-tail searches like 1959 Gibson Les Paul Standard for sale, Strymon Timeline used, or Neve 1073 mic preamp can turn your domain into a third option alongside reverb.com itself in the search results, with your shop's reputation and condition grading visible inline in the SERP.

It is worth comparing Reverb to Sweetwater because both are dominant in the music gear category and the comparison helps clarify what a Reverb widget is actually for. Sweetwater is a Fort Wayne, Indiana retailer founded in 1979 that sells primarily new gear from manufacturer wholesale relationships, with a famous customer-engineer sales-rep model and a catalog that tops out at roughly 30,000 SKUs across guitars, recording gear, synthesizers, drums, and live sound. Sweetwater is a retailer; the inventory is theirs and the customer relationship is theirs. Reverb is a marketplace; the inventory belongs to thousands of independent shops, builders, dealers, and individual sellers, and the customer relationship is split between Reverb (transaction trust) and the shop (catalog and brand). Sweetwater publishes affiliate links and an embeddable product widget for partners but does not let an outside seller embed the Sweetwater catalog as their own shop. Reverb does, because every Reverb shop is independently operated and the marketplace structure is designed to surface third-party shops on third-party sites. This is why a Reverb widget has a use case that a Sweetwater widget structurally cannot: a vintage guitar dealer with a 200-listing Reverb shop wants their own domain to be the catalog, not a Sweetwater rep page. The Lighthouse cost story is the second piece. A Reverb shop iframe pulls roughly 350 to 500KB of JavaScript on initial load (heavier than a Bandcamp player, lighter than a YouTube embed), sets first-party cookies for cart and watch-list state, and frequently regresses Largest Contentful Paint by 600 to 1,000ms on a typical 4G connection. A 200-listing dealer page with the native iframe loaded 200 times in a grid is essentially a non-starter for Core Web Vitals. The Poper widget renders only listing-card thumbnails on initial load (cover photo, title, price, condition badge, Reverb Bump flag where applicable, all under 8KB per listing in WebP). The full Reverb listing detail iframe only loads on click for a buyer who wants to see the full description, full photo set, and Reverb Protection badge before checkout. Visitors who scroll past the catalog pay zero performance cost. The combined result is that a 200-listing vintage dealer page with Poper embedded routinely hits Lighthouse Mobile 90+ across all four categories, where the same page with native Reverb iframes lands in the 30s. If page speed matters to your SEO or your bounce rate matters to your dealer-page sales, this is the single biggest reason to choose carefully which Reverb widget you embed.