I find this quite brilliant. I'm a fan of simplicity and minimalism, and this is a good example of implementing the bare-minimum and getting something useful out of it. I'm actually a bit jealous I didn't think of it first. Good work, and good luck to you!
well you've caught us on that point! but a little frivolity is ok too, right? "A little madness now and then, is relished by the wisest men" - Mr Willy Wonka.
I did not say I did not like the fact that one could change the background (in fact I like it because it doesn't go in the way), I just noted that the use of "minimalist" repeated twice in parent (now GGP) was not proper.
This is the first time I've deployed on Heroku so any advice would be brilliant. If you get any errors, please email us on support@listofthingsforsale.com.
It's a cool concept and you could go a lot of directions with it.
My main feedback is that I don't know which step to take next. I see 6 links in the yellow bar ... be a little more deliberate/forceful in directing me on what to do next.
Not that you asked, but here's some wacky/random ideas off the top of my head:
- Do Stripe checkout in addition to PayPal (ask for Stripe API key & secret over SSL)
- Provision a Twilio phone number for each list after registration. Use it as a temporary way for sellers to call the buyer, for notifications, and to add/remove items via SMS
- For quick mobile integration, use MailGun to post incoming email messages to your app and turn them into listings. That way people can add items & pictures from their smartphone. I've done this and you can literally get it going in < 1 hour.
- Allow me to sell a digital file. If I add a [d] to a line item in my list, prompt me to upload a .zip file or high-res JPG. BOOM, instant store for selling stock photography, ebooks, or WordPress themes.
My main feedback is that I don't know which step to take next. I see 6 links in the yellow bar ... be a little more deliberate/forceful in directing me on what to do next.
I agree with this one. There's already a "Now Click Here" button at the start. I'd suggest extending that concept to successive pages until the seller has filled in whatever info you think most pages should have. Sidebar and config come to mind as two that most people will want to fill out.
And perhaps during that first time there should be a stronger visual emphasis on the top buttons so that customers are more likely to link them to the options they're seeing.
Thanks, this is a great point and is borne out by the stats. Last night we saw 83% hitting the "Now Click Here" button but far far less taking it beyond that. We're talking about a consistent "what to do next" element now.
wow - I really like this and would be interested in beta testing for a small store that I'm involved with. Online sales is something we've wanted to do, but never had a good enough store front.
In general:
* ebay - big, bloated, complicated, high shipping costs
* craigslist - too scammy/spammy
* shopify - considered it, but seems overly complex for non-geeks
It is not clear if this is for individuals trying to rid of used things, for smallish retailers or for whoever else. Different types of sellers would expect and need different things from the step that follows adding items to the cart.
Basically, the mention of paypal email address is what throws me off. It implies that this is not just a listing site, but something more, with a payment processing attached to it. This leads to another can of worms - is it an escrow service, what about refunds, returns, etc...
Who are your target users, people using Etsy or eBay? Are you competing with other services like those on ease of use alone? For people looking to buy things, will you provide some search across all users or are you just giving your sellers a link they can promote?
At first, to overcome the chicken and egg problem, it will be "bring your own traffic". As we grow, there will be global directory with search, with emphasis on your local shops.
This is beautiful. I signed up for the purpose of receiving updates from you - I have many friends who will adore this and cannot build their own sites. Do you have plans to do more with this? How are you monetizing? Ok, I just went to publish and it tells me.
* When I click on "checkout", a few things are not clear: how much is shipping (seems to be free?), how long will shipping take, etc.
* I put something with an "&" in the title into my shopping cart. On the PayPal landing page, it turns into &. Also, the item description is "shopid: x, itemid: y", which is not very helpful, especially if it's two months from now and I'm trying to remember what I purchased.
* The list of item in the shopping cart should be links, not text.
* It's an MVP, so I'm sure this is on your "next steps" list, but it would be nice to delete specific items from the cart instead of having to clear the whole cart.
* There's a Login/Signup link at the top, but it's not clear what the benefits of Signup would be. Clicking on the link doesn't reveal the benefits either.
Cheers for the feedback, these are all things we need to think about and your suggestions for the cart are spot on.
In terms of shipping, we stripped it down in the seller config to just postage is included in prices, with a dropdown to specify where you shipping to. We'll sort out options for postage prices by item/ by order later on.
Please do! At the moment it seems only possible to offer different shipping rates by duplicating the product. So Fender guitar for US, Fender guitar for EU, etc. This is a bit of a blocker, other than that I'd love to get something up and running.
We're working on adding (minimal) inventory control. You'll be able to put +Quantity on a line, ie +5 if you have five to sell. The site will then track stock level, and you can edit the quantity in the list at any time.
I think you have something interesting here. Elegance and simplicity are far more important than previously thought. Clearly this is part of the legacy left by Steve Jobs. Fantastically engineered products wrapped in beautiful design. Elegance and simplicity...it just works.
So now Steve Jobs gets credit for everything well-done? :)
Instead, I will give credit to the two guys who made such an easy-to-use service. Good job on this!
No, not credit...but the fact that elegance and simplicity is clearly a trend where complex and expansive functionality was the trend in the past (think MS)
Love it. The "just email me" option is very appealing — no hassle.
To some extent, though, you are going after the Craigslist market by focusing on one-time sales by individuals. Not easy. I wonder at which point an online store becomes more sensible to users than the classifieds model?
Any thoughts about where precisely in the e-commerce sphere you see yourself fitting in?
We see ourselves as a good fit for small shops or market traders who find selling online through existing options intimidating or unwieldy.
We think there's also a gap in the market for one person companies who want customers to visit them in person. List could help them sell to existing customers, who are most likely to buy something else.
Brilliant. Needs a mobile app that lets me take a pic then post it as a listing. Then I'd spend an afternoon clicking pictures of everything in my attic.
Thanks. It's definitely way less effort (and I speak as an Objective C coder) but doesn't have the ease or slickness of taking the photo then starting to sell.
This is fantastic. Nice and simple, and it does exactly what I want it to as a seller. Great job!!!!!
Be careful about feature creep. The reason why Craiglist works is because it doesn't try to do too much. I think this can definitely have a similar sort of success given how freaking easy it is to use!
I use craigslist when I want to sell something, because that's where the buyers are, not because of its simplicity (or lack of futures). And ditto for ebay.
If I were a serious seller, I would want a shopping site with bells and whistles (a detailed admin area, user accounts, reviews, discussions, etc) that might contribute to the selling part.
This site would be a fantastic tool if it worked with craigslist/ebay.
This is an MVP. As such I think it works marvelously. Bells and whistles can be added later and if they're added with the same ideology of simplicity first then this could be a real winner of a product.
If you click Config there's a small payments panel. So far you can enter a paypal address to receive your payements and it will integrate with the cart, or you can simply accept your orders via email. We'll integrate with further providers later on, too.
You should pre-populate the images with stock photos found on google images. Removes one more barrier if I'm going to use stock photos anyway. (Obviously clearly mark it as "stock photo", still make it easy to upload my own). This is really cool by the way.
I think the text inviting them to upload a photo is fine. It's simple and obvious (though as I mentioned elsewhere they might want to offer an affordance for drag and drop).
A stock photo might introduce more problems than it solves. The user might not realize that they can easily change it, it might be slightly irritating if the image is 'wrong', and they'd have to find a set of images that are free/cheap and safe for commercial use.
That's useful as a tool for a manual search, but you can't trust it by itself, since sites can tag any image as CC. In fact, you can find very well known -and definitively not CC licensed- photos on that search, like World Press Photo winners or Leibovitz's.
115 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 171 ms ] threadHum, I don't think adding a Change your background function should be included in a minimal site.
My main feedback is that I don't know which step to take next. I see 6 links in the yellow bar ... be a little more deliberate/forceful in directing me on what to do next.
Not that you asked, but here's some wacky/random ideas off the top of my head:
- Do Stripe checkout in addition to PayPal (ask for Stripe API key & secret over SSL)
- Provision a Twilio phone number for each list after registration. Use it as a temporary way for sellers to call the buyer, for notifications, and to add/remove items via SMS
- For quick mobile integration, use MailGun to post incoming email messages to your app and turn them into listings. That way people can add items & pictures from their smartphone. I've done this and you can literally get it going in < 1 hour.
- Allow me to sell a digital file. If I add a [d] to a line item in my list, prompt me to upload a .zip file or high-res JPG. BOOM, instant store for selling stock photography, ebooks, or WordPress themes.
We're keen to add Stripe, but we're based in the UK and it's not available over here yet.
Excellent recommendations of Twilio and MailGun. We'll check them out.
We'd allow digital file upload by choosing a file instead of an image. Then list would alter it's behaviour to suit.
I agree with this one. There's already a "Now Click Here" button at the start. I'd suggest extending that concept to successive pages until the seller has filled in whatever info you think most pages should have. Sidebar and config come to mind as two that most people will want to fill out.
And perhaps during that first time there should be a stronger visual emphasis on the top buttons so that customers are more likely to link them to the options they're seeing.
On the whole, though, it looks great. Nice MVP.
In general:
* ebay - big, bloated, complicated, high shipping costs
* craigslist - too scammy/spammy
* shopify - considered it, but seems overly complex for non-geeks
* etsy - what we were going to try next
Basically, the mention of paypal email address is what throws me off. It implies that this is not just a listing site, but something more, with a payment processing attached to it. This leads to another can of worms - is it an escrow service, what about refunds, returns, etc...
I'd see this text field becoming more and more intelligent over time with other functions!
+quantity for multiple item sales, ie +5 #tags for categorising, ie #electronics
further ideas welcomed
Who are your target users, people using Etsy or eBay? Are you competing with other services like those on ease of use alone? For people looking to buy things, will you provide some search across all users or are you just giving your sellers a link they can promote?
Some small comments:
* When I click on "checkout", a few things are not clear: how much is shipping (seems to be free?), how long will shipping take, etc.
* I put something with an "&" in the title into my shopping cart. On the PayPal landing page, it turns into &. Also, the item description is "shopid: x, itemid: y", which is not very helpful, especially if it's two months from now and I'm trying to remember what I purchased.
* The list of item in the shopping cart should be links, not text.
* It's an MVP, so I'm sure this is on your "next steps" list, but it would be nice to delete specific items from the cart instead of having to clear the whole cart.
* There's a Login/Signup link at the top, but it's not clear what the benefits of Signup would be. Clicking on the link doesn't reveal the benefits either.
Again, this is awesome.
Really great effort!
To some extent, though, you are going after the Craigslist market by focusing on one-time sales by individuals. Not easy. I wonder at which point an online store becomes more sensible to users than the classifieds model?
Any thoughts about where precisely in the e-commerce sphere you see yourself fitting in?
We think there's also a gap in the market for one person companies who want customers to visit them in person. List could help them sell to existing customers, who are most likely to buy something else.
Be careful about feature creep. The reason why Craiglist works is because it doesn't try to do too much. I think this can definitely have a similar sort of success given how freaking easy it is to use!
If I were a serious seller, I would want a shopping site with bells and whistles (a detailed admin area, user accounts, reviews, discussions, etc) that might contribute to the selling part.
This site would be a fantastic tool if it worked with craigslist/ebay.
Invite them to upload an image or click to suggest one from a catalog of images (maybe search Flickr for cc/commercial use images).
A stock photo might introduce more problems than it solves. The user might not realize that they can easily change it, it might be slightly irritating if the image is 'wrong', and they'd have to find a set of images that are free/cheap and safe for commercial use.
That said, you also make some good points why stock photos are bad for both.
That's copyright infringement. Just because they're available on Google Images doesn't mean you can use them on your own site.
I wouldn't be so sure: http://news.cnet.com/2100-1030_3-6145744.html
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You might want to mention that users can drag and drop images as well... that was a nice surprise.