Signed copy of PG's "On Lisp" (out of print) - for charity
listia.com
listia.com
(I saw it in the previous announcement, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=743881)
Ed: Also PG could clarify what he scribbled on there.. http://c0139491.cdn.cloudfiles.rackspacecloud.com/photos/231... I deciphered only 8 first characters from the first line (Happy ha*); also, G in PG looks exactly like my handwritten &, which is lovely, but nobody will believe me I haven't forged that.
But don't bother, see above.
My advice would be really short and simple:
stop.
You can launch exactly once. It doesn't matter if you are feature complete. But it does matter if you're consistent.
You are building an e-commerce site of sorts, so reputation is really your only real currency. The site right now is confusing.
Fix it! Now. Don't promote it any further than it has gone already, repair those things, make it clear and consistent and then make your push.
Also, you should probably yank all the dummy auctions (or at least the stuff that looks like a dummy auction) (a poorly drawn giraffe ? a floppy disk ?) because they degrade the profile of your site.
I realize you guys are of good intentions but you are making a poor first impression. You only get one chance at a first impression.
Let me know when you're done I'll give you a boost, email is in the 'about' bit.
I've been hard enough on you ;)
Well, if this is your site you are about to have an unsatisfied customer.
I thought of helping your auction along a bit, so I signed up and made a $100 deposit in 'credits' on the off chance that I would be winning the bid.
Only AFTER going through all that (10 minutes of form filling, credit card hunting and so on) and making my bid I'm being told that I'm already outbid, because the highest bid shown is not the highest bid.
This sucks.
If the bid shown is not the highest bid you should say so loud and clear before accepting payments or bids. Not afterwards, that's just plain scammy. Sorry for the harsh words, but that is my opinion about this.
Now we'll get to see how well your return policy works.
Not impressed.
The refund option is somewhat hidden, care to point the way ?
EDIT: REFUND RECEIVED.
That's pretty good customer service, I'll give you that much.
But I can see how it is annoying that you have to pay first before you know whether you win an item. They should change that some how. Maybe auctioning is not the right format for a psuedo-virtual currency.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_bid
In a normal situation that would not matter because you would hold on to your money. In a pre-pay system this is total nonsense because you are paying first to pre-pay for your account (on the one item that you may be interested in) and afterwards you bid using your credits. Because of the two stage nature of the process there is now a ratchet, you've already paid your money, now you find that it was useless.
Major design flaw.
The bidding is normally decoupled from the actual payment, by moving the payment up-front the whole thing breaks.
Simply do a pre-auth on the card for the amount and charge when the buyer wins the auction ? Customer satisfaction guaranteed, 0 refunds and a lot less people like me that will get confused and / or pissed off.
That's exactly how ebay works, so I didn't find it all that shocking, but my honest expectation was that it would show my full bid.
Anyway, I suspect there's a lot of returns coming in the next week (for all but one of us... :) )
Right now the only wording that would be acceptable before signing up or at least before paying for credits should be:
"Beware, the highest bid you have seen on the item that you are interested in may be an arbitrary amount over the bid displayed"
and
"Second highest bid" on the item page, or a big fat disclaimer that in spite of the two-stage payment process you are using a proxy bidding system, which means that the chance is very large that your bid will not be the winning bid after you place it, and that you'll just end up buying a bunch of credits, which you can only spend on 'poorly drawn giraffes' and other stuff of that nature.
Or some way to test if your bid would be the highest bid before you commit to buying the credits (that would defeat some of the advantages of a proxy bid though, because it would allow people to figure out the real high bid).
Also, it is good practice to make it as easy to do a refund as it is to sign up.
I know ebay does proxy bidding, I've bought plenty of stuff on ebay, but I pay after winning the bid. My obligation to pay starts with the bid, but I'm not required to pay until winning the auction, my card is not charged until after the auction closes.
The scenario to go through is the one where a new user of your system buys enough credits to pay for the item that he/she is interested in. Only to find after going through all that that the amount is not high enough and that you need to buy still more credits (but not how many) in order to place a successful bid. You can't really do that imho, it feels like you're being taken for a ride.
That request for a refund should be in your inbox.
Enter the bid amount... OK. Buy points... OOK. Enter credit card... OOOOK. You're about to bid... OMG OMG OMG! Are you sure you want to bid?... Yes! Yes! Yes! Oh, sorry, you've been outbid. Granted, this made me run for the PayPal link ;)
I think a wording change should be enough for people who don't know how proxy bidding works. Instead of saying "Current bid", say "Second highest bid [?]" (with the [?] being a link). When someone clicks on it, explain how proxy style auctions work in very plain terms. Ditto for the "Your max bid" - say "Maximum you're willing to bid [?]".
I'd also suggest a slight UX change: maybe slow down the process a little so that you can see "You've bid 200 points! Comparing bids... you've been outbid.
I looked at that suit and thought "700! Jeez, who buys clothes that cost 700 bucks?" And then only later did I see, 1 point = 10 cents and your first 500 points are free, so really 700 points = $20.
It's silly and psychological but I bet most of your users don't actually figure out what your "points" mean. Why not just make points equal to dollars.
Only 3 hours left!
Really crappy that I can't edit this. The title says 512MB chip (which it is), I pasted from the wrong notepad into the description which says 2gb (which its not). But I cant edit it, or delist or anything.. Sorry (2 days ago by suedehed)
You are like the last person in my mind who would ever consider capitalizing on his/her status as a celebrity, but given it's for charity I guess how you doing it (donating to charity) doesn't really matter.