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Show HN: A storebuilder contained in a single text area

listofthingsforsale.com

389 pointsmatthias113 comments

This is fantastic. Nice and simple, and it does exactly what I want it to as a seller. Great job!!!!!

Be careful about feature creep. The reason why Craiglist works is because it doesn't try to do too much. I think this can definitely have a similar sort of success given how freaking easy it is to use!

Spot on! We made this after reading 37s' Rework and very much admire the "how can we do less" mindset.

I use craigslist when I want to sell something, because that's where the buyers are, not because of its simplicity (or lack of futures). And ditto for ebay.

If I were a serious seller, I would want a shopping site with bells and whistles (a detailed admin area, user accounts, reviews, discussions, etc) that might contribute to the selling part.

This site would be a fantastic tool if it worked with craigslist/ebay.

This is an MVP. As such I think it works marvelously. Bells and whistles can be added later and if they're added with the same ideology of simplicity first then this could be a real winner of a product.

MVP for YC'12 application. We've been heads down on this for a month now so it seemed like the right time to gather some feedback!

i dig.

This is the first time I've deployed on Heroku so any advice would be brilliant. If you get any errors, please email us on support@listofthingsforsale.com.

It's a cool concept and you could go a lot of directions with it.

My main feedback is that I don't know which step to take next. I see 6 links in the yellow bar ... be a little more deliberate/forceful in directing me on what to do next.

Not that you asked, but here's some wacky/random ideas off the top of my head:

- Do Stripe checkout in addition to PayPal (ask for Stripe API key & secret over SSL)

- Provision a Twilio phone number for each list after registration. Use it as a temporary way for sellers to call the buyer, for notifications, and to add/remove items via SMS

- For quick mobile integration, use MailGun to post incoming email messages to your app and turn them into listings. That way people can add items & pictures from their smartphone. I've done this and you can literally get it going in < 1 hour.

- Allow me to sell a digital file. If I add a [d] to a line item in my list, prompt me to upload a .zip file or high-res JPG. BOOM, instant store for selling stock photography, ebooks, or WordPress themes.

Nice feedback. Thanks.

We're keen to add Stripe, but we're based in the UK and it's not available over here yet.

Excellent recommendations of Twilio and MailGun. We'll check them out.

We'd allow digital file upload by choosing a file instead of an image. Then list would alter it's behaviour to suit.

My main feedback is that I don't know which step to take next. I see 6 links in the yellow bar ... be a little more deliberate/forceful in directing me on what to do next.

I agree with this one. There's already a "Now Click Here" button at the start. I'd suggest extending that concept to successive pages until the seller has filled in whatever info you think most pages should have. Sidebar and config come to mind as two that most people will want to fill out.

And perhaps during that first time there should be a stronger visual emphasis on the top buttons so that customers are more likely to link them to the options they're seeing.

On the whole, though, it looks great. Nice MVP.

Thanks, this is a great point and is borne out by the stats. Last night we saw 83% hitting the "Now Click Here" button but far far less taking it beyond that. We're talking about a consistent "what to do next" element now.

That was the easiest and most intuitive app I've seen, well since ifttt.com, but a lot mor useful.

wow - I really like this and would be interested in beta testing for a small store that I'm involved with. Online sales is something we've wanted to do, but never had a good enough store front.

In general:

* ebay - big, bloated, complicated, high shipping costs

* craigslist - too scammy/spammy

* shopify - considered it, but seems overly complex for non-geeks

* etsy - what we were going to try next

Allow me to remove one item at a time from the cart instead of emptying whole cart at once. Great job!

Good point, we'll sort that. Thanks

It is not clear if this is for individuals trying to rid of used things, for smallish retailers or for whoever else. Different types of sellers would expect and need different things from the step that follows adding items to the cart.

Basically, the mention of paypal email address is what throws me off. It implies that this is not just a listing site, but something more, with a payment processing attached to it. This leads to another can of worms - is it an escrow service, what about refunds, returns, etc...

This is terrific.

Some small comments:

* When I click on "checkout", a few things are not clear: how much is shipping (seems to be free?), how long will shipping take, etc.

* I put something with an "&" in the title into my shopping cart. On the PayPal landing page, it turns into &. Also, the item description is "shopid: x, itemid: y", which is not very helpful, especially if it's two months from now and I'm trying to remember what I purchased.

* The list of item in the shopping cart should be links, not text.

* It's an MVP, so I'm sure this is on your "next steps" list, but it would be nice to delete specific items from the cart instead of having to clear the whole cart.

* There's a Login/Signup link at the top, but it's not clear what the benefits of Signup would be. Clicking on the link doesn't reveal the benefits either.

Again, this is awesome.

Cheers for the feedback, these are all things we need to think about and your suggestions for the cart are spot on. In terms of shipping, we stripped it down in the seller config to just postage is included in prices, with a dropdown to specify where you shipping to. We'll sort out options for postage prices by item/ by order later on.

Please do! At the moment it seems only possible to offer different shipping rates by duplicating the product. So Fender guitar for US, Fender guitar for EU, etc. This is a bit of a blocker, other than that I'd love to get something up and running.

Really great effort!

I find this quite brilliant. I'm a fan of simplicity and minimalism, and this is a good example of implementing the bare-minimum and getting something useful out of it. I'm actually a bit jealous I didn't think of it first. Good work, and good luck to you!

> minimalism > bare-minimum

Hum, I don't think adding a Change your background function should be included in a minimal site.

well you've caught us on that point! but a little frivolity is ok too, right? "A little madness now and then, is relished by the wisest men" - Mr Willy Wonka.

I did not say I did not like the fact that one could change the background (in fact I like it because it doesn't go in the way), I just noted that the use of "minimalist" repeated twice in parent (now GGP) was not proper.

A plus for minimalism, but I don't see who this is for and why they would use it?

What's your market?

It's not ebay or craigslist. You'll never get enough buyers and sellers together; then there is the fraud/scam issue.

I don't think it's existing merchants with websites.

So who is it?

How about a small merchant with a bricks and mortar store that wants the most friction less way possible to list goods online? Business people are busy. If it takes 30 sec to set up a store that's a big win.

To me this seems to hit the same market as Etsy. People who spend their time creating things, selling one-off items, are just going online so that they can put it on a business card, ect would use something like this. I showed this to a girl who I was just talking to about putting her stuff on Etsy, she likes this FAR more, but the only thing she wanted was to use her own domain.

Thanks for the feedback. We'll be having some kind of setup where people can use their own domain for their site for sure.

Yes, this would be key. I have a few friends I'll recommend this service too as soon as this is implemented. Also, how much of a cut of sales do you guys take? Or are you thinking a monthly subscription model?

Cool. We're thinking a monthly subscription. We're still working out final pricing.

Really nice interface. Kudos there.

Who are your target users, people using Etsy or eBay? Are you competing with other services like those on ease of use alone? For people looking to buy things, will you provide some search across all users or are you just giving your sellers a link they can promote?

This is what I'm wondering, too--- does everyone have to do self promotion or will there be a global directory/search capability?

At first, to overcome the chicken and egg problem, it will be "bring your own traffic". As we grow, there will be global directory with search, with emphasis on your local shops.

Wow! That is so simplistic and minimal; it just works like you would imagine! Great idea, great work and great result.

I'd see this text field becoming more and more intelligent over time with other functions!

thanks! so far we're working on the following for the text field:

+quantity for multiple item sales, ie +5 #tags for categorising, ie #electronics

further ideas welcomed

I know you know this, but just adding my voice to say please don't feature bloat it. The value is in its very simplicity.

Love the idea. The execution is perfect. Really caught my attention because I'm developing my own store builder.

Works magnificently well for techies because we are all familiar with store admin areas, publishing a site etc. Great if techies are your target market.

For an average Joe it might be a bit confusing. People may not even realise they are building a store, and instead think... 'Why can anyone just add a listing to this page?'

To help with this a guided tutorial may be useful.

All the best.

Thanks for the feedback. Excellent points. We're going to be doing plenty of user testing with shop keepers and market stall holders in the coming months.

Love this!

A few notes:

- When I click on an item thumbnail on your sample list page, it takes me directly to the image hosted on S3. Having the image appear in a lightbox would ensure that users are kept on the page.

- The title tag for every page reads "List of Things for Sale". I would populate the title tag with the name of the user (e.g. "Matthias McGregor's List of Things for Sale")

- Add FB/Twitter/Email to Friend links, which would provide three one-click marketing channels for users to share their for-sale items with their immediate network.

- Populate the page with Facebook Open Graph metadata. That way if users want to post a link to their store on Facebook, they'll get a nice link description and thumbnail automatically.

- I like the single-page experience, but I can't help wondering if it would be better if the app would generate discrete pages for each item users are selling. This might make it easier for users to share each item discretely, instead of just point people towards a single store page.

Really nice work!

Thanks for all the nice comments!

- We've debated the pros and cons of lightboxes for a while now. We don't like them and prefer to see the image without chrome, but our users may feel differently. We'll soon see!

- Excellent point. I'm really looking forward to making loads of little tweaks like this.

- Yep, totally agree - it's coming.

- Thanks for the tip. It will be done!

- Item pages are on our list of things to do, although it's another tension between minimalism and e-commerce.

this is very cool! i love it. Suggested feature: Automatically find a suitable image for the item via google and have it uploaded by default.

Or a compromise,

Invite them to upload an image or click to suggest one from a catalog of images (maybe search Flickr for cc/commercial use images).

Love it. The "just email me" option is very appealing — no hassle.

To some extent, though, you are going after the Craigslist market by focusing on one-time sales by individuals. Not easy. I wonder at which point an online store becomes more sensible to users than the classifieds model?

Any thoughts about where precisely in the e-commerce sphere you see yourself fitting in?

We see ourselves as a good fit for small shops or market traders who find selling online through existing options intimidating or unwieldy.

We think there's also a gap in the market for one person companies who want customers to visit them in person. List could help them sell to existing customers, who are most likely to buy something else.

How about letting the user change language? If you have some interface or something I could help with Swedish. I really can't wait for this to be more complete (+Quantity is what I am referring to)

Also I have a bug. If I write "iPhone 3GS $70" it does not show. If I add a description it shows.

Thanks for the offer, that would be superb! There's not contact details in your profile, so if you fancy droping me a message at matthias@listofthingsforsale.com we could talk more about this. Additional languages and currencies will be great for this site - we can geo-locate users when possible switch to the right one. Really looking forward to hearing from you. Cheers for the bug report too, we'll get that sorted.

This is beautiful. I signed up for the purpose of receiving updates from you - I have many friends who will adore this and cannot build their own sites. Do you have plans to do more with this? How are you monetizing? Ok, I just went to publish and it tells me.

You should pre-populate the images with stock photos found on google images. Removes one more barrier if I'm going to use stock photos anyway. (Obviously clearly mark it as "stock photo", still make it easy to upload my own). This is really cool by the way.

I think the text inviting them to upload a photo is fine. It's simple and obvious (though as I mentioned elsewhere they might want to offer an affordance for drag and drop).

A stock photo might introduce more problems than it solves. The user might not realize that they can easily change it, it might be slightly irritating if the image is 'wrong', and they'd have to find a set of images that are free/cheap and safe for commercial use.

Stock photos is a feature that exposes a tension in our product - what's good for sellers isn't always good for buyers.

That said, you also make some good points why stock photos are bad for both.

You should pre-populate the images with stock photos found on google images.

That's copyright infringement. Just because they're available on Google Images doesn't mean you can use them on your own site.

"found on <some service>" then.

You can ping Google images for images filtered by licenses.

That's useful as a tool for a manual search, but you can't trust it by itself, since sites can tag any image as CC. In fact, you can find very well known -and definitively not CC licensed- photos on that search, like World Press Photo winners or Leibovitz's.

You can just link to the image on the original site. No distribution means no copyright infringement. Rude yes, illegal no.

Illegal no

I wouldn't be so sure: http://news.cnet.com/2100-1030_3-6145744.html

You might consider using the placeholder tag for the textarea so I don't have to remove the text to enter my own (or at least a graceful fallback version). On click, you could simply put the same text in a notice below the textarea for usage reference.

Thanks for the nice words and the feedback. We just ran out of time on this. We'll be spending a lot more time on making this text area easier and nicer to use.

What a fantastic idea. I would/will use this.

Brilliant. Needs a mobile app that lets me take a pic then post it as a listing. Then I'd spend an afternoon clicking pictures of everything in my attic.

Thanks. I'm really excited about building a native iOS app for our site and it's one of our important milestones.

TBH i think the email method mentioned up-thread is more awesome, but wtf do i know. you could do that more quickly, it would seem to me.

Thanks. It's definitely way less effort (and I speak as an Objective C coder) but doesn't have the ease or slickness of taking the photo then starting to sell.

Don't want to steal any thunder from this amazing project but check out SimplyListed. They are a YC company doing exactly what you describe.

I don't know what your pricing model will be, but might I suggest a way for users to create a one-off online store.

I have a lot of books I'd want to sell to my friends/networks, because they'll pay me more than Amazon or EBay. While a monthly subscription wouldn't be feasible for a user like me, I'd gladly fork over $10-20 to set up a one-time-use online store.

I really, really like it. Excellent work.

Thanks Jason, that's an interesting idea. We've talked about payment models that charge incrementally for actual usage, like Tarsnap does - which would be a good fit for alot of different use cases. I think the issue though is that a flat rate per month is much more easy for people to understand.

Really well executed. Simple, clean, elegant. This was a lot of fun to set up the first time! I know it's the mvp but I wanted quantity support on listings & adding to cart, and I immediately missed the ability to define a per-item shipping cost separately from the price of the item (keeps perceived pricing lower). Great first pass, and with a little polish could be a pretty excellent tool.

Ahhhhh this makes me sad because I've had something very close to this idea months ago and have been slowly picking away at it. Great job though.

You should still do it This is a big world, and there is lots of space for people to take different whacks at similar ideas.

I really like this! Great work. The best part is your 'listing' on your own store never expires or gets buried by other listings.

This is really great - I love the simplicity of the ui. One suggestion: a link that says a bit about your company/who built it.

I clicked on "Now click here!" and it gave me the shopping cart, then I click on "List" to edit it, and it showed the text box again. Once I click "Save", then it doesn't show the iPhone. If I click on "List again to edit it, it still does show it.

It is very cool though, I am loving the interface of it.

Thanks for the the nice comments and the bug report. The text area is currently very buggy, something I'll be fixing very soon.

Fantastic!

You might want to mention that users can drag and drop images as well... that was a nice surprise.

How are you going to track stock levels?

We're working on adding (minimal) inventory control. You'll be able to put +Quantity on a line, ie +5 if you have five to sell. The site will then track stock level, and you can edit the quantity in the list at any time.

I found a glitch while creating my store.

I couldn't add more than one item, even when I copied and pasted your code from the front page (sample) directly.

http://listofthingsforsale.com/pleasereturnme

Thanks for letting us know, looking into it now.

This is really cool, but what's the benefit of using a textarea instead of a list of small forms?

Love the concept of this app. I'm assuming it will eventually let me sell things in £'s or €'s?

Indeed it will. And longer term, many other currencies too. :)

Cute, I like it.

One thought: although the text area is cool for us geeks, what value does it add for the typical user over a more structured data entry approach? I think the text area leaves too many ways for the user to make mistakes.

This might be the case. We're going to do lots of user testing to see what issues typical users have with it.

If we detect the user is making a lot of mistakes, we'll fall back to showing them a traditional form with fields.

Maybe you could use an excel like table as well if the textarea makes a lot trouble. (I like it though..) Nice job!

Thanks. That's a nice idea. Long term, we're going to format the text area so people can copy any paste any list format from almost any source - word, excel, csv, tab delimited etc.

there's a lot of value. A chunk of text is in many ways much easier to deal with then a bunch of fields in a form.

Changing the order of items is trivial, you can copy and paste stuff, it's easy to email the whole thing to someone for review (say, before publishing)... That's for the typical user. For geeks there's more: it's easy to keep archives of old versions, easy to see what's changed, trivial to backup... text IS powerful.

Great stuff, only problem: I couldn't figure out how I GET money from customers

BYO money-system? PayPal, local transaction, whatever?

If you click Config there's a small payments panel. So far you can enter a paypal address to receive your payements and it will integrate with the cart, or you can simply accept your orders via email. We'll integrate with further providers later on, too.

This is slick. My mom could figure this out in less than a minute. Amazing.

YC Application Video: http://listy.posterous.com/74768699-97655 1 minute long / we talk about purpose and target market.

Nice job, but it needs error handling for price entries. Invalid entries are skipped with no notification. $0.99 works, but $.99 doesn't. Only handles $ prices (e.g., no euro).

Thanks for the nice words. The text entry area is pretty buggy right now. But we do store invalid entries so people can go back and edit them.

We'll have warnings showing to users when a line can't be parsed.

Really nice job. Have you considered auto-posting to craigslist?

Very well done! This is awesome.We have an inventory management system (bizelo) and we'd love to work with you. Drop me a line!

I wish it would crawl images.google.com to automatically add pictures of the things in my list .. that would make it terrific.

Matthias. This is pretty badass. How do you envision implementation? Props on the build.

How are you going to deal with fraud? (And you will have fraud)

Can I pass also an image url in the single text area for each item?

Thanks Federico, that's an interesting idea - we'll have a think about it. We're keen to keep a good balance between adding options to the text area and keeping it lightweight. Your input is much appreciated.

Thanks. Mostly I take photos with my phone, and those are synchronized with the cloud, so my images are already in the internet and I would not have to download and re-upload those again.

Very nice work Matthias.

Wicked. Could your regex include £ as well as $? :]

Yep, additional currencies are a high priority for us. And we live in Glasgow, so £'s will come next.

How about costumizeable row/column-sizes?

There is an interesting balance between keeping the interface very simple and giving pro users the flexibility they require. Possibly in the future we could find a way to make it skinnable (ie upload custom css) without losing simplicity, but we'd be very wary of overcomplicating things.

Awesome work. Love the simplicity.

awesome love the concept, but breaks if you use £ instead of $ :(

We switched it from £ to $ just before we posted onto Hacker News. The text area breaks very easily right now, which we'll be fixing in the coming days. Thanks for the catch.

Application Error

An error occurred in the application and your page could not be served. Please try again in a few moments.

If you are the application owner, check your logs for details.

Thanks for the catch. I'll check the logs and find out why it's doing this.

I think you have something interesting here. Elegance and simplicity are far more important than previously thought. Clearly this is part of the legacy left by Steve Jobs. Fantastically engineered products wrapped in beautiful design. Elegance and simplicity...it just works.

So now Steve Jobs gets credit for everything well-done? :) Instead, I will give credit to the two guys who made such an easy-to-use service. Good job on this!

No, not credit...but the fact that elegance and simplicity is clearly a trend where complex and expansive functionality was the trend in the past (think MS)

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