Show HN: What do you think of my new startup ProductChart.com? | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: What do you think of my new startup ProductChart.com?

productchart.com

79 pointsmg38 comments

Some of you might remember the individual charts. This has been brewing as a side project since March last year when I first did the chart of the 200 most popular flash drives. Called it "The tourist map of flashdrives" at that time. Added more products and the interactive filters later in the year. Every time it got good responses here on Hacker News and even some press outlets picked it up.

So I decided to turn this into a full fledged project on its own this year. Got a proper domain name and made a homepage for it. So here it is. ProductChart.com!

Mission statement: For every product type, provide a nice overview of what is available in the market, plus the filters to choose the perfect product.

I like the clean, uncluttered UI.

I have a few questions:

1. Where are you getting the specs for the products?

2. How current are the prices?

3. Could you add an 'LTE' filter for smartphones?

Also a few suggestions:

1. Have an option to view the list as a table, sortable by any parameter

2. Add the filters to the url, so you can bookmark it

3. Email users when a new product which meets the filters hits the market

4. Show the Amazon price history for a product (like camelcamelcamel), and email them when it hits a new low price.

Great work otherwise, I can see myself using it in future.

Happy to hear you like it!

The specs are partly from Amazon and partly from the manufacturers websites.

The date of the price is always written next to it. Never older then 24h.

Yup, will add an LTE filter.

Thanks for the suggestions! I will prioritize all feature requests based on the feedback I get.

Great! One thing, and I don't know how you'd necessarily resolve this, but specifications aren't the be-all and end-all of buying a gadget: a lot of it is taking the time to read reviews on build quality, issues like drivers and overheating, etc. It'd be great to see a way of incorporating that - even initially something as simple as adding Amazon ratings to each item.

This. I suspect that far fewer people buy phones/laptops/gadgets based purely on specs and price, which is all that's on display here. For pure commodities this makes total sense (the SSD and flash drives charts are awesome), but consumer gadgets are much harder to differentiate in such a rigidly quantifiable way.

It's true, that besides specs one usually will wants to take into account opinions. At the moment, the site is more about giving you an overview of what is available then to help you with the final decision. Because that is what I feel is missing on the market. There already are a lot of review and rating sites out there.

If I come up with an interesting idea for ratings or opinions, I will add it to the site.

I think narrowing down based on the specs you want is great. Then you can go more in depth when you have a sample of which ones you want.

I think this has potential, but there are so many usability issues that it's quite difficult to use effectively.

A few examples (only talking about laptops):

-Labels on the sliders are unclear. If I select 4GB of RAM, are the results showing only those laptops with 4GB of RAM? or those that are >= 4GB?

-No distinction between configuration options & laptop models. On first load, it appears that there are 100+ models to choose from, when in reality it's probably much less with several configuration options.

-Possibly Bad assumptions that will affect data integrity. Amazon is not a reliable source for laptop specs or models because many products are fulfilled by 3rd parties that sloppily input specs and are inconsistent on where details are located. For example, the model number might be in the title, details, technical specifications, or Q&A.

-Odd defaults. Why do I start out looking for laptops with 1GB of RAM & 16GB HDDs ?

I'll check back periodically and keep an eye on this. My first thought is to take the best pieces from newegg.com and emulate those as they got filtering right in many ways.

My $.02 is focus on getting the experience / specs reliable and THEN add pricing. You might be spreading yourself too thin trying to tackle pricing as well.

Nice site. A big problem I see is that it only uses Amazon for pricing. This results in the Nexus 6 being listed as 70% more expensive than the Google Play Store. Kind of defeats the whole purpose of price comparison.

Being able to compare laptops' processor speed (or at least displaying it) is pretty important, especially since Intel's model numbers are meaningless and are completely divorced from their specifications.

The design is a bit underwhelming, and I'm not 100% sure the highlight/dismiss thing works all that well. It feels to me like you ought to be able to click a product to highlight it, but instead you get spirited away to Amazon with, of course, an affiliate link (a natural and excellent way to monetise this!). It wasn't immediately obvious to me what "dismiss" would do when I clicked it, and then I didn't know how to "undismiss" something until I saw "reset settings", which presumably has that effect.

Also, the tiny icons on the chart showing the products themselves aren't actually very useful - you can't really determine much of value from them without hovering over them to get the popup; to me, at least, it might actually be more useful to see a brand logo.

Overall, though, I think it's a terrific idea, and a genuinely useful way of visualising multiple purchase criteria.

Interesting idea ... might be useful to be able to invert the cost measures. For example on the SSD page seeing $/GB instead of GB/$. Seeing the price per GB go down is more intuitive to me than seeing the GB per $ go up ... not sure why!

I love this, it's a great way to look at all products at the same time and just hover over them to get details. I would be nice if you included a link to a product review, + a link to a place where I can but it. Good luck!

It would be great if you could add Amazon rating. (E.g. as a circle color.)

Nice idea, not so good execution.

I like geizhals.at for such things. The design is old school, but it lets me filter for things I care.

Smartphones example: Battery capacity, standby time, OS version.

Very pretty! I've discovered it's very important to have "buying criteria" over time, which is what reviews are great for. You learn about things you didn't realize you needed to care about which are often times quite important and explain why one product is pricier than the next.

Very nice! But things like PPI are meaningless to me so you will lose a lot of people with that. Also it doesn't work very well on an iPhone 6, the sliders were incredibly sensitive. For example I moved the slider for laptop hard drives and it went to 183 gb but I could t move it back.

    things like PPI are meaningless to me so you will lose a lot of people with that

Interesting. I'm curious to hear more about the causality behind that!

    doesn't work very well on an iPhone 6

Yes, sorry about the dismal experience on small devices. It's not yet optimized for mobile at all. I will do that soon.

On PPI ... I don't think you'll lose users, but they might get a little lost. For PPI you could have some mouseover-activated points of reference.

I had trouble with memory and RAM for smartphones. Lots of marketing mixes them together so for an average customer, it might be more confusing than helpful.

I guess I would say: see if you can research what the most common distinguishing factors for a purchase are, stick to those.

It's a great tool. I can see using it for laptops. Harder for phones etc.

Doesn't seem to hurt Intel.

Perhaps it's different for Intel, because they have the advantages of brand recognition and being the market leader, but most of the information about their processors seem to be purposefully obfuscated. It's hard to get a straight answer about the differences between i5 and i7. Once you've dialed down to an i7, its even more muddled. An i7-4702EC sounds like it would be better than an i7-4700EC, right? Wrong.

http://ark.intel.com/compare/75555,75556

I'm an electrical engineer, and I don't know what a third of those specifications mean. How is the average consumer supposed to make heads of tails of it?

For laptops, I think it would be a good idea to be able to filter by actual screen resolution, rather than PPI.

Comparing the performance of the CPU, would be more interesting that the model/brand.

Also, adding an option to show the weight in kilograms would be useful for those among us who don't live in Liberia.

I like the simplicity of the site. If you don't mind asking: where do you get the specs information?

This is a great idea, buyers really love side by side comparisons... my main concern is how are products being populated? I'd like to know that I'm not potentially missing something by doing my product research on your site.

Im including the most popular products available on Amazon.com. Depending on product type between 100 and 300 products. Maybe I should show the same number of products in each section. I just have not settled on what is the best number yet.

I like it. But the specs displayed on your website do not always match the specs from Amazon. Example: Dell Inspiron i5547-15001sLV 15.6-Inch listed with 16GB on your website, 8GB at Amazon

What I see on the Amazon page is that it has 2x8GB. So 16GB should be the correct value.

Would it be possible to add a "Battery Life" slider? That is, for me, one of the biggest factors for buying a device.

Even without that feature, this is one AMAZING tool! I wish you the best!

(your Google Nexus 6 price is all wrong; http://www.productchart.com/smartphones/)

Making money off the affiliate links, smart. I like the layout and what not as well.

I would prefer a side-by-side when comparing say 2 or 3 different devices.

nice visualization! I remember it but I can't recall where I saw it, did you posted it already? Anyway it's good to see different way of presenting information for ecommerce.

Yes, I posted the individual charts here when I made them. See my first post in this thread.

to me it looks like it's too many options that will eventually confuse normal buyers

I would think most people will want 3-6 choices like economy, business, first etc

Really interesting way of looking at gadgets for buy

This is a startup? Because it feels like a website.

Yes, it does feel like yet another comparison web site. Perhaps the man mistook his wife for a hat, too.

interface is eye catching , quite an interesting layout of simple and easy knowledge .great work!

Liking the website :) Good job!

Very nice implementation.

That's not a startup, that's a website.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com