Ask HN: Review my Startup - http://Cardnap.com | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Review my Startup - http://Cardnap.com

62 pointslachyg38 comments

Check it out: http://cardnap.com/

In short, Cardnap helps you find the most heavily discounted gift cards for your favourite stores. We do this by aggregating the cards from all the various sellers out there, we've got plans to add the likes of Craigslist and eBay so we'll have nearly every marketplace out there. Although, this is just the beginning for us!

Would love your feedback on the idea, execution, and its direction! Bear in mind, this is just our MVP and we've got a long way to go from here.

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I suggest aggregating multiple identical listings into one line item. I decided to just sort all cards by % discount to see if there were any cards I'd actually use that were heavily discounted. After 3 pages of $25 Fandango cards, I gave up and left.

Edit: I decided to go back to see how bad it is. Pages 2-27 are Fandango cards. From my cursory scan, it looks like those 26 pages only list two different card values. I really, really think you should consolidate those listings.

Argh! Yeah. This is the #1 most requested thing, we're working on it, trust me :-)

Clickable: http://cardnap.com/

Thanks :-)

Woo! So launch is going well! Just got on LifeHacker: http://lifehacker.com/#!5791193/cardnap-is-an-ebay-for-gift-... and Twitter is going crazy! http://twitter.com/#!/search/cardnap

Nice! Here's my 10 seconds experience: in the search results page I got the sentence "Showing 125 cards worth between $10 and $200 discounted from 0% to 50% for ITunes." But the actual results have discounts between 8 and 10. In fact I clicked on "from 0% to 50%" and tried the range 45-50 but got no results; incidentally this distracted me from realising I could have clicked the column header and sorted in the first place. Perhaps the the sortable headers functionality should be more prominent by design. Great idea anyway!

Ah, we'll make that more clear in the design / text. Cheers

Love the design. Lachy, you always come up with beautiful designs. Loved http://paggstack.com too!

Thanks Paras, I really view design as a very important part of a startup or new site. Gotta focus on making things as easy to use as possible, can be a great competitive advantage :-)

I agree. It's clean, simple, organized and I know exactly what the site is about in about 2 seconds. Great job.

I'm learning the ropes of design myself for an upcoming project and I'm curious about why you used the multicolor strip at the very top of the page. I've noticed this feature as a mini-trend in Web design and I'd love to know if there is an intentional thought behind it, besides "it looks pretty."

Is it supposed to liven up an otherwise somewhat dull page?

It seems like a lot of people advise sticking to no more than 3 or 4 colors, so I'm really intrigued by the breaking of that convention in this case.

Everyone has already addressed the duplicate card issue, so the only beef I actually have is not being able to hit the arrow keys to select the stores that turn up in a search.

For example, I type "Amazon" and I see "Amazon.com" in the drop down, so I tap the down arrow to select it but I can't seem to.

Other than that, love the site and its design. Good luck!

Thanks for the compliments on the design. We'll fix those two issues.

Love the design and the idea (the company I work for could have used this, as they just bought a ton of giftcards). It seems like there are many similar results for the same seller, which I didnt fully understand (seeing as they link to the same thing: http://cl.ly/1s3P1I3T2v3c0I3N1Z28). Will come back to this site when I need to buy come giftcards again!

Thanks Frank, much appreciated feedback too. I'm Lachy's co-founder (and designer) on this one, very excited to have it up and running.

Yeah, that's the highest priority bug on our list at the moment. We'll merge them all and add a number available count.

I typed in amazon and pressed submit and got a 404.I think I pressed 'submit' before the ajax could return a reply (I'm on a slow cellular connection). I clicked the 'buy' button on the homepage and it couldn't find the host for "http://www.anrdoezrs.net, which I guess is a referral program?

Cool idea though. Work out some of these kinks and add vendors!

I love the idea. A few small comments:

- On the front page, the little arrow-in-a-circle image rotates on mouseover, and rotates back on mouseout. This occurs whether or not the display is down. I think it makes more sense only to rotate when the item is actually expanded (if you want to indicate it's clickable, maybe you could use the color change thing for that purpose).

- After doing a search for amazon, it found nothing, but... (\) there was still a horizontal list of letters A-Z, and I have no idea what that's supposed to do, (\) the most prominent link on the page is the "back to top", even though I'm at the top already, and (\*) there's no obvious way to re-search other than to click on the search bar at the top. I would think that, if nothing was found, you should have a "search again" box with the cursor already in it.

I absolutely love the sliders for the amount of discount. Very nice.

Thanks, we'll fix those.

Pretty cool idea. Nice design! I may be nitpicking but on the about us page you have "Shopping's fun, but it could be funner.."

Technically "funner" isnt a word. But since the branding of your product seems to play towards younger people you can probably get away with it.

Yeah, my co-founder and I had a bit of a debate about this and I won, hah. We let it go because it sort of fit our audience.

Awesome idea, great looking site, great usability.

The first thing i wanted to do was get a list of cards sorted by highest discount. It's almost like showing me where I can save the most.

I'm not sure how you're deciding on the original set on your homepage, seems quite random. If you showed me the highest savings, it promotes your site as a great way to get deals.

Now, it seems more like a place to get gift-cards with 'some' savings, often less than 10%.

Looks good. Couple of issues:

When I search for Best Buy cards and sort by Discount (descending), the top result says a card value of $25 with a price of $24 is an 8% discount. It should be a %4 discount.

When I click the buy button for that Best Buy card (the seller is Cardpool), there isn't an option to buy the $25 gift card. Only $50 and $100 options are available.

Site looks good overall. Nice work.

Looks amazing!

On the Rock Melt browser the search function on #filter-store disappears if I hover in the input field. Just a heads up. :)

Nice design, although the text seems to spill out of the buy/sell/about boxes. May have to do with my system using large fonts, but I'd expect the divs to stretch anyway.

Is there any guarantee for the buyer that the cards will be valid and not used already? I wouldn't want to deal with multiple entities if a bum card came through.

Each of the sites we support provide guarantees, yeah.

Less important of an issue, but about the main image with the text "Cardnap finds the cheapest gift cards for your favourite stores".

I'm probably being pedantic, but the text slightly clashes with the background... I thought a 3-4px white stroke would make it clearer.

Otherwise, the design is great

One thing I noticed immediately is the duplication of cards. I wanted to sort by the biggest percent discount and basically the whole first page is the same 1-800-flowers.com cards.

The execution is very tight from what time I spent with it.

Thanks -- someone else noted this. we'll fix it asap.

Prepaid mobile phone refill cards might be a good addition too. Not sure if there are existing sites to scrape for those like the gift cards. I usually go to ebay and expect to get 10-15% off refill cards.

If I press "submit" without typing anything, I get a big fat nice 404. Might want to change that, maybe have it automatically search for iTunes, as is described in the example?

Woooooooops! Will fix that.

This also happens with "submit" after any entry whatsoever if there's no JavaScript around. Basic search forms should ideally not require such things.

We'll fix that as well as keyboard shortcuts on the autosuggest. cheers

Am I understanding 'Balance Checker' functionality right? Currently, it shows me the same results as finding discounted gift cards.

Well done Lachy! Good start, and a great MVP. Looking forward to watching it develop..

I remember you showing this to me last year I believe when it was still being designed, nice to see it live!

cool idea. What did you build it in?

Kohana / PHP

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