Show HN: mmerch.com (Solo Founder, ~2 years in development) | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: mmerch.com (Solo Founder, ~2 years in development)

12 pointsdoctorosdeck15 comments

I've been building mmerch.com alone for roughly the past two years part time. I'm really hoping I can get some reviews/critiques on it.

Thanks!

mmerch.com

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First, well done. It's hard doing this kind of thing in a vacuum, and this is a great start.

From my perspective, the inventory management piece needs some work. Think about it this way - you get a half dozen boxes in with four different styles of shirts in three colors and four sizes. What's the fastest way to get this information into inventory? Example: the long-sleeve shirt with piping arrives in two colors - in green you receive 1xs, 2s, 4m, 4l, 2xl, and in blue you receive 2xs, 3s, 3m, 3L, 1xl. Styles are rarely available for more than a season, so this is a process that is repeated again and again and again. Customers will also want to be able to track product cost, associate products with a vendor, and enter the vendor's sku. Otherwise, it's "We need to reorder those pink shirts. Where did we get those?"

I'd ditch the customer photo. It looks nice in the demo, but I don't really follow why an ecommerce customer would provide a photo. It also makes the rows on the Customers page really tall, which means that you get many fewer customers on a page. The same goes for the products page in the control panel - I'd keep the photos, but reduce the thumbnail size.

On the Products page, I'd want to be able to sort by sales for a given time period. I'd want to know which products are selling well, and which aren't.

Finally, I didn't see any shipping settings (apologies if I missed them)? You'll need to be able to calculate shipping cost for a given shipping provider (FedEx, UPS, USPS, etc) from the point of origin to the customer. Shipping costs are pretty much what makes or breaks an online retail company. Ideally, you'd allow for more than one carrier, since small/light items are usually much cheaper to ship via USPS.

Seriously, that's some of the best feedback I've gotten from anyone. Thank you. I'll definitely look into implementing those changes.

You can get to the shipping settings from the general settings page. Right now you create shipping rules which are based on price and weight that you can assign to specific countries. There is no integration with FedEx, UPS, or USPS yet but in previous versions I had spent some time integrating their shipping rate and shipping label api's which I plan on adding back soon.

Glad to help. I co-founded an online retail company in the early 00s and (foolishly?) decided that the off-the-shelf stuff available at the time didn't solve our problems, so I ended up writing a lot of code to handle our specific inventory management and shipping issues.

I tried out your site and have some feedback for you:

a) In general, I like your design, though I'm not a big fan of the flicker when you use Javascript to change the font. I'm using Chromium on Ubuntu though, so this may not show up on Windows/OS X.

b) Check out this scenario. Enter your live demo site and go to the settings page. Attempt to change a value on that page and then click 'save'. When I save the settings, I end up on an unstyled page that says, "{"success": "Store Settings Successfully Saved"}". I suspect that would scare customers away!

c) The 'add a product' page needs some work. I found the whole process quite difficult and found myself constantly asking myself what information I really need. This is problematic because I suspect I have more eCommerce experience than your target customer. The first thing I'd do is move the 'add photos' function higher. Second, I'd consider walking people through the process (ie - through a series of smaller forms rather than one long form)...

Thanks for the feedback, I'll definitely fix the store settings issue.

Good point on the add product page. I'm going to try simplifying that. Moving the photos up sounds like a good idea as well

https://mmerch.com

It shows that it has been a labour of love. Kudos!

My 2 cents: I would like to have a "View store as customer" link, which shows a preview of the store. I created a single dummy product and tried accessing it at https://memememe.mymmerch.com/ which threw an internal error. Also, the Add Product page is a tad long and would be better if broken up into 2-3 pages.

Again, great work! Good luck.

You have to go to the settings page to find this, but apparently, you can access the demo at https://demo.mymmerch.com.

Edit - I just tried that link and it throws an internal error as well. Sorry!

Murphy and his stupid laws :)

Hmm, I haven't had that issue before, but i'm certianly seeing it now, I'll check that out tonight. Thanks alot for the feed back

You should probably raise your prices on all of the plans. You're going to attract customers you don't want to deal with at $10 a month.

How would you go about marketing this? I don't know much about the e-commerce site creator market, but what separates you from the competition?

Right now we're focused on smaller shops, price wise we offer a lot more features, multiple payment gateways, complete custom themeing and also marketplaces that you can showcase your products in for no additional cost. VNTGE.net is the first marketplace that's been built for vintage and antique goods.

*First as in first mmerch marketplace, not first ever.

Have you tested that landing page?

No, I haven't done any A/B testing yet. But I know it probably needs some re-work

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