Show HN: A Comic Book Marketplace (with a few twists) | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A Comic Book Marketplace (with a few twists)

3 pointszxlk21e3 comments

I've just launched my comic book marketplace into public beta.

At first glance, it's a fairly standard marketplace. Now, those twists I mentioned:

First, we aim to create liquidity in markets that traditionally do not have it. Our users can add an item to a "wantlist", which when a particular item reaches a significant amount of wants a feed is sent to a list of dealers. They compete to claim the 'bounty' of the item based on how many wants it has. Additionally, our transaction platform is decoupled from the site listings... users need not go through our site to track a transaction using our platform and feedback tools. External transactions can be brought in (from forums, blogs, craigslist, whatever) for free.

This is my first startup (man, the hours!) and any and all feedback is greatly appreciated!

For tech: the site was built with Laravel 4 (my first project with Laravel).

Link: http://comicswap.com/

Found this submission because you mentioned Laravel, good choice. Am learning it right now and are really happy with it.

From the website:

> Did we mention it's 100% free? ... Because it is.

How do you make money? What's the business model?

From your post here:

> First, we aim to create liquidity in markets that traditionally do not have it. Our users can add an item to a "wantlist", which when a particular item reaches a significant amount of wants a feed is sent to a list of dealers. They compete to claim the 'bounty' of the item based on how many wants it has.

You lost me at "liquidity in markets". What? What's "a feed"? What's the bounty? How does this competition work?

> Additionally, our transaction platform is decoupled from the site listings... users need not go through our site to track a transaction using our platform and feedback tools. External transactions can be brought in (from forums, blogs, craigslist, whatever) for free.

Is this still in the planning stage? Couldn't find it on the page.

Site feedback:

- "Publisher" in the blue bubble looks like a button, or at least clickable tag.

- The wording of "how this works" seems suboptimal. The focus should be more on what exactly I do and what my benefits are

- "Wantlist" isn't explained on the comic page, best add ad (?) behind it that opens help

- Facebook login should work really good for your customers

- Help and support section would probably improve customer trust (and conversion). See ebay and other big names for inspiration, but keep it small, personal and fun

And because this looks and reads quite negative now: Awesome site. I love it, good luck!

Excellent feedback. Even after having hundreds of emails of correspondence with users... this is still better :)

1. Business model - in the future the $ comes from dealers and additional functionality (stores/featured auctions) not present on the site.

2. Traditionally the collectibles markets are tough because while you can supposedly sell something for $xyz, you'll need to actually find a buyer willing to pay that. Many items are worth a lot of cash but end up selling for next to nothing because collectors are very specific. What we're doing is basically a reverse-marketplace on the back end. Users say what they want and then dealers get a feed of the most "wantlisted" items and compete for the bounty of filling those wants. All marketplaces have to solve the chicken and the egg problem (as you went on to note re: buyers and sellers both needed) -- this is our attempt at overcoming it for both sides. There is incentive for sellers, as they'll get a near instant sale. There is incentive for buyers to stick around as they just add something to their wantlist and get a near instant offer. At least that's how it works in theory :)

3. You can use the transaction system without the site right now, yes. It's just not well documented. I suck at the documentation :)

4. Agree on all. The help and support section is brilliant, will be working on that right now. Facebook login is a step in the "user start" page that lists a few tasks for them to complete in order to gain trust in the marketplace. That's a big push for us, trust building.

Great that it helps!

re 1) Ok, makes sense. Will be tough though. Margins will be very small.

re 2) I get the wantlist and how you wand to 'collect' demand, so the suppliers then will follow. But I'm not really convinced the users will actually follow through. As long it's just one of many features, that's fine. But make sure you don't build your business model on that.

re 3) Change that. Otherwise it won't be used :p

re 4) Don't know if I misunderstood, but what I meant with Facebook is not only as a trustbuilding method but to just replace this page: http://comicswap.com/login Completely. (Yeah not really, there are still people not using FB or not trusting you with their login, but I think it would make sense to make FB the default, and then under a ---- or ---- offer the normal forms). Then you even don't have to make them connect to FB for trust-verification-reasons as they already are.

Just a thought I got while writing: Thought about offering (parts of) your platform as a whitelabel shop for local comic stores? So they don't need to create their own web shop, but can just use your, specialized platform?

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