Show HN: 1dollarthings.com – an internet dollar store | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: 1dollarthings.com – an internet dollar store

1dollarthings.com

54 pointsleeseibert44 comments

I can't check your site because it's throwing an application error, but Ali Express has many sub-1USD things, even with postage, and also has an affiliate scheme.

A propos nothing, the cheapest thing I've found, ordered, had delivered and found useful was a Raspberry Pi camera mount for 0.19GBP (~0.27USD) shipped. Astonishing and a bit shameful.

http://www.aliexpress.com

Did you look for each one? Or is there a filter for that.

I've written a blog post on that very subject. Turns out you can have a $0.03 item mailed to you, including shipping, from China!

http://romain.goyet.com/articles/free_shipping_from_china/

China subsidizes the postal service to keep up their exports.

Wonder how long that'll keep up given their current issues...

But you do have a have a lot of patience. It seems to be getting a lot slower. I just hit a new record: An item shipped on November 25th arrived last week to Canada.

I had package of green tea I ordered show up 7 months after I ordered it.

I've had both, between a week and 2 months. About 2-3 things never arrived, but ali (better said the seller) gave the money back each time.

AliExpress is out of this world!

"Application Error"

Okay, maybe your web hosting shouldn't have been a 1 dollar thing too?

(I'm kidding. I'll bookmark this and come back later when the traffic dies down. Seems like a neat idea!)

I'll buy that for a dollar

Site is down but based on the domain and your description, I like where your head is at.

Limiting it to $1 items might be too low IMO. One place I enjoy browsing is this subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/amazonunder5

Pretty cool thing to exist, but I'm going stay away in effort to keep my life clutter free and junk drawer somewhat empty.

It's junk drawers (plural) in our home

It's too hidden I know but if you open the hamburger menu at the bottom, you can choose $1, $2, $5, $10, or $25

I created this app out of frustration with how hard it is to find low priced items online. You usually have to drill way down before you can filter by price. Do you think this is a useful service?

I worked on a similar side project a little while ago that focused on items that were below ten dollars. Like 1 Dollar Things, I used your typical affiliate data feeds. It was an interesting development exercise, but I failed to get any steady traffic/interest in the site.

I think the idea has some merit, but my execution wasn't good enough. Good luck with 1 Dollar Things!

What do you mean by "affiliate data feeds"? I am using live API calls. Is that what you mean?

I consumed product data feeds from companies that ran affiliate programs through companies like Commission Junction, filtered/stored the product data offline, indexed it, and displayed it in any number of ways through the web.

In retrospect, I should have spent more time marketing the site and getting feedback from users instead of focusing on the technical infrastructure :-)

Yeah, but where's the fun in that!

The fun in that is gone, it has trickled into your wallet.

I'm getting an "Application Error" when I try to visit.

Uh Oh. Looks like I have some work to do. It's up again.

It's down again :)

I think the idea has some merit, and the domain is pretty solid. Though you'll want to eventually snag "onedollarthings.com" as well. The pinterest style tile layout is pretty exhausting at this point though. I think you'd fair better with a tidy listing, and filtering. The ability to have a "watch list" for types of items would be very handy as well.

Why did you choose a Pinterest-style list rather than a sequences of rectangle boxes and pagination? Sometimes the Javascript breaks when scrolling down (I assume because the server returns a 500 on the response). A refresh would fix it, but since it doesn't know what "page" I'm on, I'm brought back to the top. It's also really slow on my mobile device and old-ish computer, while it's just a handful of images and text.

It looks like you have some things counting as less than one dollar when they are really $undefined -- specifically, video streaming shows from Walmart. Here is the HTML of one of them:

    <div class="item"><a href="http://c.affil.walmart.com/t/api02?l=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.walmart.com%2Fip%2F23794924%3Faffp1%3D_29G0tM6Kd9jCNF-ZaPzGqT3dPWZDueGbMk7hOeZY0E%26affilsrc%3Dapi%26veh%3Daff%26wmlspartner%3Dreadonlyapi" target="_blank"></a><a href="http://c.affil.walmart.com/t/api02?l=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.walmart.com%2Fip%2F23794924%3Faffp1%3D_29G0tM6Kd9jCNF-ZaPzGqT3dPWZDueGbMk7hOeZY0E%26affilsrc%3Dapi%26veh%3Daff%26wmlspartner%3Dreadonlyapi" target="_blank"><img src="http://i.walmartimages.com/i/p/01/13/02/46/71/0113024671371_100X100.jpg"><h3>Doctor Who: Season 7, Part 2 (2013)</h3></a><div>Price: $undefined</div><img src="walmart.png" style="float: right; width: 30%; height: 30%;"></div>

Nice catch! Thanks

nice, but you need a server for more than one dollar for this website

I have been thinking of building an online marketplace called "unplaningobsolescence.com" that would only sell products with 10yr+ warranties but I haven't had the time.

P.S. yes I know that would be a terrible url for a online store but I like it.

Did you mean "unplaning"?

Or perhaps unplanning. I wanted it to be a play the phrase "planned obsolescence" but its like I said in my post its not a good url. Combining a word that doesn't exist with a word that is difficult to spell probably breaks a lot of the guidance given for good urls. I am open to suggestion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence

How about noobsolence or nobsolence?

snobsolence.com

Brainstorm: golong, plannedlongevity, lifeplus, longestlife, lastslong, vital, tenplus, 10tolife, keepers, ...

I like plannedlongevity

My dream is to be part of a cooperative that sells cheap everyday goods that aren't purposefully crippled.

Like paint rollers that have the extra 1p worth of plastic in the handle so they don't break after 2 uses; shoes where original replacement soles are available; tin-openers where you can replace the cutting disc; kettles without the over complicated carefully thinned plastic components in the lid release; swing bins with the couple of pence of metal in the lid hinge to make them last for decades instead of years; washing up liquid that has a dosing pump delivering a carefully calibrated dose to avoid wastage.

Very simple cheap goods where the engineering objective isn't profit but instead the goods are designed for longevity balanced with matching market prices as close as possible. Making the goods that companies don't want to make because they would cut in to future sales.

All items sold would be "open source" (schematics available) and bug report systems for feedback from users would be in place to aid in improvements. New designs would change only the parts that were deficient, MTBFs would be used to keep production capacity to meet anticipated parts failures.

Basically attempting to push the value of longevity on to the market. The aim would be to match the prices of low cost goods but make them last longer. The idea is to force companies to match for longevity, and then push again to continually match the base prices as close as possible but always with significant improvement on product engineering.

Not financially doable, far too economical for Western financially systems I suspect ...

The APIs I have encountered don't usually have warranty info but they should

Awesome site. Ever since I saw fivestar.io I've been wanting to do an Amazon affiliate site. He gave an update a couple of months after launch and said he was making a nice ~$300/month.

For those outside the US would something like this work in your country? Do you have the equivalent of a dollar store there?

Heroku error on the page - I suppose paying for expensive hosting like Heroku is a bit difficult when everything being sold is $1 :D

One issue that I have here, and I can't view it because the site is down, is that shipping will probably make any of these things not worth buying. Most $1 things aren't worth shipping. Unless you filter for only free shipping?

Yeah I have thought about that. With Amazon Prime users don't think about shipping and with Walmart you can ship to store. But I hear what you're saying.

down again

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