Ask HN: Can you guys tell me your initial impressions?

Your purpose is too scattered. Narrow it down. Ebay sucks alright - so your mission is to make it easier for someone to get signed up as a merchant because they have a .edu account.

Otherwise you're just duplicating craigslist and a thousand other craigslist duplicates.

My first impression is that it's ugly and confusing.

1) The logo is way too small and out of the way. 2) The search and list an item buttons are different sizes, different corners, different text styles (capitalised and non) and garish colours. 3) The birds in the banner overlap with the white letters 4) The orange-bordered box with the info is in a weird place, too small, down in the bottom, the border looks weird, etc. 5) The banner doesn't really explain the concept to me. Why is a .edu address relevant.

http://theboxngo.com/users - the design here is much nicer.

i dont like your color pallete. i think a good free resource about this is Sacha Greif's Colory Theory ebook. the "buy.sell.trade" banner is uglu, too big and useless. it seems that you've adopted a flat design style, but in the product page the "cash/trade" button is 3d. i love that it has keyboard shortcuts. but i cant figure out why you have such selection of shortcut. for example why search is #? i think / is more appripriate. or why list an item is D? shouldn't it be L? the same thing for categories. and the simplicity is awesome.

The main problem I see with the design is the orange border on the box below the categories and the blue banner, other thing is after selecting a category I had to go back to the main page to select another one...