Show HN: mmerch.com (Solo Founder, ~2 years in development) I've been building mmerch.com alone for roughly the past two years part time.
I'm really hoping I can get some reviews/critiques on it. Thanks! mmerch.com |
Show HN: mmerch.com (Solo Founder, ~2 years in development) I've been building mmerch.com alone for roughly the past two years part time.
I'm really hoping I can get some reviews/critiques on it. Thanks! mmerch.com |
From my perspective, the inventory management piece needs some work. Think about it this way - you get a half dozen boxes in with four different styles of shirts in three colors and four sizes. What's the fastest way to get this information into inventory? Example: the long-sleeve shirt with piping arrives in two colors - in green you receive 1xs, 2s, 4m, 4l, 2xl, and in blue you receive 2xs, 3s, 3m, 3L, 1xl. Styles are rarely available for more than a season, so this is a process that is repeated again and again and again. Customers will also want to be able to track product cost, associate products with a vendor, and enter the vendor's sku. Otherwise, it's "We need to reorder those pink shirts. Where did we get those?"
I'd ditch the customer photo. It looks nice in the demo, but I don't really follow why an ecommerce customer would provide a photo. It also makes the rows on the Customers page really tall, which means that you get many fewer customers on a page. The same goes for the products page in the control panel - I'd keep the photos, but reduce the thumbnail size.
On the Products page, I'd want to be able to sort by sales for a given time period. I'd want to know which products are selling well, and which aren't.
Finally, I didn't see any shipping settings (apologies if I missed them)? You'll need to be able to calculate shipping cost for a given shipping provider (FedEx, UPS, USPS, etc) from the point of origin to the customer. Shipping costs are pretty much what makes or breaks an online retail company. Ideally, you'd allow for more than one carrier, since small/light items are usually much cheaper to ship via USPS.
You can get to the shipping settings from the general settings page. Right now you create shipping rules which are based on price and weight that you can assign to specific countries. There is no integration with FedEx, UPS, or USPS yet but in previous versions I had spent some time integrating their shipping rate and shipping label api's which I plan on adding back soon.
a) In general, I like your design, though I'm not a big fan of the flicker when you use Javascript to change the font. I'm using Chromium on Ubuntu though, so this may not show up on Windows/OS X.
b) Check out this scenario. Enter your live demo site and go to the settings page. Attempt to change a value on that page and then click 'save'. When I save the settings, I end up on an unstyled page that says, "{"success": "Store Settings Successfully Saved"}". I suspect that would scare customers away!
c) The 'add a product' page needs some work. I found the whole process quite difficult and found myself constantly asking myself what information I really need. This is problematic because I suspect I have more eCommerce experience than your target customer. The first thing I'd do is move the 'add photos' function higher. Second, I'd consider walking people through the process (ie - through a series of smaller forms rather than one long form)...
Good point on the add product page. I'm going to try simplifying that. Moving the photos up sounds like a good idea as well
My 2 cents: I would like to have a "View store as customer" link, which shows a preview of the store. I created a single dummy product and tried accessing it at https://memememe.mymmerch.com/ which threw an internal error. Also, the Add Product page is a tad long and would be better if broken up into 2-3 pages.
Again, great work! Good luck.
Edit - I just tried that link and it throws an internal error as well. Sorry!
*First as in first mmerch marketplace, not first ever.