Review our startup: Shoply.com - the easiest way to sell online

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1615206

by liad • 16 years ago

11 14 16 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Opening a shop and selling online is a monumental pain in the ass - it's complicated, time-consuming and expensive. We wanted to tear down these barriers and make opening a shop quick, free and easy.

We've developed simple shopping software which anyone can use to be up and running selling physical and digital products online in minutes. The software is completely decentralised and customisable so sellers can theme their shops as they please and have them on their own domains. The software is also socially integrated so you can push your shop to a tab on Facebook/easily leverage twitter to get the word out about it.

During the customer development stage it was made clear to us that apart from the tech side of things, driving traffic and generating sellers was an equally important problem which first time/small sellers had to deal with - to solve this we've networked all the shops together creating a centralised marketplace.

Buyers can quickly and easily search across all shops in our network. The marketplace helps buyers find products and helps sellers generate traffic.

To make buying from a shoply seller even easier we've networked buyers shopping carts together across all shops. Buyers can hop from shop to shop across different domains adding products as they go - when they're ready then can checkout in one quick transaction. All the sellers then get their share of the sale in real-time directly to their paypal account.

Our software is built using django and we've utilised Paypal's new Adaptive payment API to facilitate one-to-many real-time transactions.

For sellers we are software providers and traffic generators. For buyers we are a discovery engine and marketplace curator.

We're not looking to compete with the advanced self-hosted shopping cart companies. We are looking to help first time sellers, individuals and small businesses, get started. Think Tumblr for ecommerce. In terms of disruptive innovation we want to be a new market and low-end disruption.

Would love to know what you think.

If you have something to sell - why not open your own shop!

http://shoply.com

mrbird• 16 years ago

My first reaction from just looking at the site for 30 seconds:

Make the 'Tour' page the home page, instead of the 'Register' page. Seeing that huge form first (without knowing what it does) makes me want to leave.

pinksoda• 16 years ago

I didn't feel that way. I thought, "just a couple fields to fill out and I'm done!" - the creation of my store took just a few seconds and didn't require e-mail verification. It couldn't have been easier.

tmorton• 16 years ago

What's your advantage against shopify - http://www.shopify.com/ ?

liad3• 16 years ago

much simpler to use and quicker to setup. free plans with no monthly fees, socially integrated (sell on facebook etc) and we help with traffic and sales through our marketplace and networked checkout.

Shopify is a great solution - but we want to help more casual/hobby sellers - and they find shopify a little complicated

Detrus2• 16 years ago

It's interesting. First thing I wanted to see was the tour, not the signup page. Tour has screenshots of stores.

liad3• 16 years ago

as a seller thats right - the tour page is a great landing page, but we also need to appeal to buyers so are caught in a place where the homepage needs to talk to 2 different markets at the same time

Detrus2• 16 years ago

seems like other HNers are saying the same thing as me. You could try an A/B test, see if you get more signups if you show tour or signup first.

Or you could make the tour much shorter, 600px high, then have the signup form right below that.

amccloud• 16 years ago

"impressive, isn't it!", what? You haven't shown me anything, why would I be impressed? I'm not sold on why I would want to open a shop on shoply. What do your shops even offer, e.g. can I customize? You should add a quick tour or bullet point list of important features on the front page.

liad3• 16 years ago

we thought that was kinda cool - but i hear your point

AmberShah• 16 years ago

Ouch. Should definitely think more about "showing it" than "telling it".

ryankelly• 16 years ago

I agree with @mrbird - make the /tour page your landing page, and add a few bullets as well. Maybe even a comparison chart showing you vs Shopify?

owkaye• 16 years ago

Using the term "kick-ass service" once is probably too much, but you use it several times and it sounds very immature and unprofessional to me. Here are some other phrases I have a problem with:

"It's super simple"

"We look after you big-time don't we!"

"Servers are yucky"

"Things couldn't be easier!"

It all sounds very childish, but that's just the tip of the iceberg ...

Where do you address the issues of discounts based on time or quantity or shipping or percent of the price, local and state taxes, shipping, and all the other issues REAL online store owners have to deal with and decide upon?

On the one hand you keep repeating the mantra "Things couldn't be easier!" because apparently you want people to think you've taken care of all these issues, but then you're apparently leaving all the difficult issues in selling online -- but in reality you're leaving it all up to the sellers themselves -- which makes your platform anything but "simple".

Personally I would not want to sign up before learning how you handle these issues if I actually had something to sell, yet I cannot find any facts or substance to show me how (or if) you're going to do anything to help me with these issues.

Perhaps the most important issue is that you seem to be dictating the "rules" by which the shop owners must run their online stores ("In accordance with the Shop Owners Agreement you agree to ship all orders within 7 days of receipt") ... but if you stick your nose into your store owner's businesses too much the regulators and tax authorities are going to determine that YOU are the merchant -- not the suppliers that you're referring to as store owners. Then you'll not only be paying all the taxes that your suppliers are not paying, but you will also inherit liability for things you probably didn't want or expect.

I think you have a lot to re-think and reconsider before getting into this business the way you've described it here. I've been in eCommerce for nearly two decades and it disturbs me the way you're going about this, because I'm concerned about the legal and technical issues you don't seem to be addressing.

jeffepp• 16 years ago

Looks awesome! Any plan on integrating plugins or add-ons? Would love to chat..

iaskwhy• 16 years ago

Something I never understood about some online shops, the drop-down with only one option, usually "standard". What is "standard" doing there? What does this field mean?

Example: http://alexstore.shoply.com/product/lava-lamp/

Review our startup: Shoply.com - the easiest way to sell online

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