A lot of people from the US seem to forget that they're excluding the majority of customers by asking you to enter a zipcode that will only work in the US.
It's incredibly annoying if you're part of that majority.
With that said - good luck :-)
It's incredibly annoying if you're part of that majority.
With that said - good luck :-)
1) It's a new service. It's reasonable to restrict your audience at first. Making it more international requires more work (shipping, billing, etc) which might end up being useless. It makes sense to test with domestic users first.
2) You should take a lot of care before shipping seeds internationally. Some countries (well, all countries I have flown to) have strict regulations on importing seeds and plants.
Bigger companies have pulled this off so many times, restricting their customers to the US for seemingly no reason, that we get irked by it now.
If there was a message saying how it's super complicated to send seeds abroad, then we'd understand and all would be well.
I do care about non-us folk. One of the main reasons why I built the software the way I did (using weather data to calculate planting dates) is that I can theoretically extend the site to anywhere that I can get weather data for.
My other post below explains things a little, but support for other countries is definitely planned.
It's non-trivial to scale this to 'planet wide' so until the home market is established and the concept tested there is no really good reason to scale it beyond the US, there are substantial costs associated with doing that.
Just the shipping alone for a biological product would drive you nuts.
This looks like an awesome idea. I would absolutely be interested if I was in the US! (no chance of it coming to Belgium, is there, huh? :( )
I guess you could do something with lat,long from GeoKit (on Rails) to avoid asking for zip code specifically.