Ask HN: Review my app / startup: Yobiz | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Review my app / startup: Yobiz

30 pointsrexreed12 comments

Hi all - I posted this a week or so back, but it fell off the radar before I got responses. So, not sure what the protocol is here, but thought I'd resubmit -- I hope that's the right thing to do!

We are just launching a new application focused on solving some of the lingering problems in e-Commerce inventory management.

Specifically, if you are selling products on multiple online stores (as I was) or are selling products online and offline, then managing inventory is a real pain in the asymptote.

Yobiz eRetail Inventory, Pick-and-Pack, and Ship are for small to medium size online / e-Retailers that want to centralize inventory in one place that is then sync'd with a number of online e-commerce platforms and Quickbooks.

It also provides some insight into actual packing and shipping costs so you know the true profitability of your shipments and allows to you track your packing supplies so you don't run low at the last minute.

Right now, we're offering a trial/alpha but haven't launched the app yet as we're still looking to have conversations with more online retailers so that we make sure to build the right things in the right ways. We are more concerned about building too MUCH stuff than too little.

Feedback, comments, criticism, guidance, suggestions, questions encouraged --

You can find the app at http://eretail.yobiz.com/ips (www.yobiz.com redirects there, for now)

I like the page, very clean and tells me what you're trying to solve. The video was a nice intro and looked very professional; I really like when product landing pages have a video as it really embraces the "don't make me think" paradigm. My only nitpick is with "pick & pack." Is that an industry phrase? If so, I'd capitalize it: "Inventory, Pick & Pack, and Ship without the hassle or the cost. Otherwise, I'd just say "pack" as the "pick & pack" thing made me thing there were multiple products, one for Inventory and another for Pick & Pack.

Just out of curiousity, how many guys are working on this app? It looks fairly polished for just entering alpha.

Thanks! We appreciate the feedback. Yes, Pick-and-Pack is a term, but it might be too industry wonkish -- we are experimenting with other headers.

This might be hard to believe, but it's just two very experienced developers / SaaS people working on this plus a contractor or two as needed. But just 2 for now. We'll need to expand soon when this takes off (notice I didn't say if).

Some variation of the phrase is standard for the fulfillment industry.

Though I just thought this, OP -- It may sound better if you changed "Pick & Pack, and Ship" to "Pick, Pack, and Ship" or "Pack, Pick, and Ship".

I'm not really sure what this product does, even after watching the video. At first, I thought it was a place I could send all my items from different sites to a central location.. and then, everything would be ship at once. But, then, I was able to view all my inventory, see stats about different things, compare prices...? I'm a bit puzzled.

Everything looks quite clean and is very easy to navigate.

You might want to take a look at how dropbox does it. Even thought there are lots of features, they show mainly the most important ones in the first video.

Thanks -- good feedback. I guess we need to do a better job identifying the target customer. This is for online retailers (not their customers) to manage their inventory. It's particularly tough if they are selling in multiple places and have limited inventory. This adds functionality that their ordinary e-commerce apps don't have. We'll make sure that the site clearly identifies that this is for the retailers, not the customers.

I think it looks great, but I'd test if it converts better with the Free Trial button above the fold (most likely by removing or shrinking the header).

Clickable: http://eretail.yobiz.com/ips/index.php

Thanks - not sure why it didn't resolve to a clickable link above.

URLs in submissions don't get parsed into links. From the FAQ:

  Don't abuse the text field in the submission form to add commentary to links. The text field is for starting discussions. If you're submitting a link, put it in the url field. If you want to add initial commentary on the link, write a blog post about it and submit that instead.

great landing page. video is very well done. I think there might be a small css bug, the "Join us on facebook" link is on a new line http://i.imgur.com/MG6Y7.png edit: i'm on chrome (mac)

On Safari 5(mac) the Facebook link is not visible. http://imgur.com/VkMdm.png

Thanks for pointing that out! We just fixed that - hopefully should be visible on Mac Safari and also Chrome

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