Ask HN: Review our public beta for DoLeaf.com | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Review our public beta for DoLeaf.com

Direct Link: http://doleaf.com

Hey HN,

My site, DoLeaf, just launched into public beta, and I'd love some feedback.

DoLeaf is a marketplace for gardeners where you can find and buy plants from specialty nurseries and independent garden centers. We help them set up storefronts and handle all the backend tech-junk, leaving the nursery owners to do what they do best: grow plants!

So, it's not really a techy site, but I love plants and web development, so it's a good mix for me.

Come check it out, perhaps buy a plant from our one-and-only (for now) seller, and post any ideas you can think of about how we can make it better (besides getting more plants, of course).

Cheers!

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A more robust search would be welcome. I live in the desert southwest, so most of those plants wouldn't survive here. I assume someone living in Maine would have similar problems.

It would be nice to be able to search by all the categories you have listed on each plant (growth rate, growing zone, sun preference).

I would also really like the ability to search for sellers nearer to me. If I can get something from in state I'd prefer that than having a plant shipped to me from across the country.

The local aspect is high on our list. We want to be nationwide, but with results weighted to display stuff from nearby. Plants from a nearby nursery will be better acclimated and have a shorter shipping distance. There are also inter-state live plant shipping laws that can be avoided by shipping from inside the same state.

But yeah, all good feedback. Thanks!

I agree with the locality part. I'm just starting to plan for landscaping my yard, and I'd love to be able to put in my area so I could browse plants that grow well here.

I know next to nothing about this stuff, except that to have someone else do it is expensive, so it would be great to have a site to make DIY easy, along with the option to go ahead and order my plants without having to visit the nursery (of which, there are strangely very many within 2 miles of me).

There are strangely many all over the country. Once I started looking, I noticed them everywhere whenever I drove outside the city.

As to DIY, one thing that worked well for me was printing out a photo of the area and bringing it to a local nursery. They helped us put together a nice little layout, which we of course bought right there. Then, a day of digging and you're done!

I agree - it would be very intuitive to go to a "growth rate" category by clicking on one of the little black icons.

Nice, Clean app. So the feedback.

Help link doesn't work

The info overlay on the photos are excellent. But I would prefer it to be more visual than the black-white - eg: Full Sun - Yellow Bright sun, indoor - a green house?, for the growth- something that stands out - may be a creeper(of course colored)... you get the idea.

Just a thought(for my eyes), I felt that the grey menu on the left seemed bit bland, given that you have green and white as your colors. just curious - is this a rails app? what db?

Thanks for the tip on the help link. I forgot about that one.

We experimented with color overlays, but decided to go with b&w because the color ones were very distracting, especially when displayed all over the page. I'm not really the designer, just the backend coder, so I leave most of that stuff up to the rest of the team.

We also have some ideas for the left menu, as far as nice little things on mouse over, but yeah, it looks bland to me as well.

Good feedback, thanks :)

I think the design is simple and clean. The icons may work better with a description on rollover, with a possible "yellow sun green house etc" but overall the design is cohesive!

Looks like a pretty clean, well designed app. I personally like the big footer.

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Sure, I'll give it a try. Thanks :)

As I was looking over the site I was thinking - I know you're just getting started but there is a real lack of plants. And then I got to thinking why can't I sell my plants on DoLeaf? Just my two cents - but what about making a "sell your plants" section?

edit: I found your "Sell With Us" link. But I guess I was thinking more of - any could sell a plant - that might help you get a larger selection. But I guess there are issues with that model.

We're going with professional growers only. The any-seller model seems like there would be too many issues with quality. Plus, there are live-plant shipping laws that someone could easily run afowl of without knowing.

We're working on recruiting more sellers, so if you know of anyone who might be interested, send them our way.

I like the look and feel. I was confused. I went to buy Lungswort (http://doleaf.com/listings/11-lungswort) and it costs $6. What do I get for $6? Clearly too expensive to be seeds so it's a plant. Do I need my own pots? How will it be shipped?

Those were a bunch of questions in my mind

Hmm, that's actually bug. The lungswort shouldn't even be showing up. That's one of our test plants and shouldn't be displayed.

Thanks for the note, I'll make sure it's removed.

Most of the plants actually describe how they're shipped and what you'll receive. In most cases, it will be either a small bare root (for trees and other "woody" plants) or a small pot.

I think it'd be sweet to have some kind of wishlist feature. Not like the Amazon wishlist where you link to items that are for sale, but where buyers can declare what they are looking for with the hopes that sellers will fulfill it. Nothing fancy, just maybe something that sellers could access when working on submitting their inventory.

I agree. I didn't see Chrysalidocarpus lutescens (Areca Palm), Sansevieria trifasciata (Mother-in-law's Tongue), or Epipremnum aureum (Money Plant) but I'd love to be notified when I can buy them.

Hmm, good to know. We are hoping to capitalize on special, hard-to-find plants that you won't find at Home Depot or Lowes, so having a wish list definitely might help.

Also, the nurseries don't necessarily list their entire stock, so if they saw a wish list with something they sell but hadn't listed, it might provide a strong incentive to get it up there.

I'll talk it over with the team. Thanks :)

Great idea.

I'd work on the left hand navigation some more. Coming to your site without the background you give here, I don't know what "categories" means. Additionally, it's disappointing to click around and have some categories without any plants. I'd just drop these from the navigation until you have plants that fit within them.

Yeah, I hate empty categories too. We want them there to give an idea of how we plan to organize things, but maybe that's jumping the gun. Maybe build the inventory first, then decide how to organize it.

Thanks!

Link:http://doleaf.com

Where do you get your Saguaro cacti!? You know about everyone running out into the desert, poaching them, and pretty much leaving the desert lifeless? Everyone wants them for their McMansion's in San Diego, and especially the central coast.

On a side note, do you have any Lophophora Williamsii for sale?

Oh, and on your call to action, I like the site!

Is there a legend in regard to those icons in the items pictures? Like, the icons of the roots, are there different variations if they were taproots vs runners? You may want to make mouse-overs on each profile picture of the item.

Well, we're just a marketplace, so I'm not sure where the seller (Becky) gets her cacti. I believe she has a stock that she propagates asexually, but I could be wrong about that. As she lives in Ohio, I doubt she makes midnight raids into the desert.

As for other plants, if you don't see it, we don't have it :( We're working on getting more sellers with more plants, so check back in a couple months.

Don't plants and areas have "climate zones"? You should be able to search for that.

http://www.garden.org/zipzone/

Yeah, we're working on the USDA zone stuff. If you mouse over the temperature overlay icons, you'll see that they correspond to the USDA zone.

We want to get some nice Google-maps integration with the USDA zones, perhaps a cool overlay, but the maps aren't encoded into a digital data format yet. The last map was made in the mid 90s, I believe, and they're just getting around to updating it. The new, fully data-driven one is due any day now.

By the way, this is a great idea.

your footer is HUGE

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