Ask HN: Review my startup, boutiqueforge.com

9 points by cdragos 11 years ago | 2 comments

We think we can make coding websites that sell stuff online a better experience for developers, so we created boutiqueforge.com. BoutiqueForge is an ecommerce platform built around Git and Jinja2.

We host git repositories for all projects, deploy happens on every push, you code your website using Jinja2 templates and payment is done based on the resources you consume - network, storage, products, orders.

We also created a command line tool in python that you can use to run the website on your local computer while you are developing. It knows how to sync all the data of your project so you can actually see the website locally as it will look like once deployed. ( pip install boutique )

We’d love to hear your thoughts on the project :) Any feedback is greatly appreciated!

https://boutiqueforge.com

allendoerfer 11 years ago |

I think the concept is "MC" (of MVC) as a service, you should make this more clear. This is difficult, because the people who need this the most are also the people how know the least about structural design patterns.

It is unclear to me, how the products are inserted and how payment processing works. From a technical innovators perspective this is not the main feature, to the end-user it is. You should show the developer how his customers can insert products.

I am not sure if your target audience (someone who knows Python and Jinja2) is a good fit. Seems like someone who nows HTML+CSS and a bit of PHP would need the service more. I would therefore use terms these people would understand and offer technologies they understand (drop the command-line fu, offer FTP-Upload or even Web-based Upload etc).

The pricing is unclear. I imagine Boutique + Pricing + Storage add up to the Basic Price. You should drop the prices in the second table and use a syntax like "first x GB included (additional cost x GB cost x $)".

cdragos 11 years ago | |

Yes, we can definitely do a better job at explaining the concept and how templates work in conjunction with product data. The mechanism is pretty standard for this type of service - all the data that you introduce through the admin is available as template variables. Adding products, categories, vendors, checkout options is simply done through a UI interface. We will add some screenshots of the admin pages to showcase what is available.

Actually the target audience does not need to know any python. Jinja2 is a template engine written in python, however you do not need to write any python code to make the templates work. HTML, CSS and some understanding of how to use the Jinja2 templates to output variables is enough. We should definitely communicate this better!

Web based editing is something that is on the roadmap. FTP and Web Based uploading is available in a lot of competitor’s products and we really wanted to do something different here. Git allows you to have multiple branches, you can work on a new version of the website and showcase that to clients while still not modifying production and have it all integrated in the version control system.

On the pricing - noted! We’ll think of a more compact way of presenting the info.

Thanks a lot for taking the time to review our product! The info is really valuable to us! If you are interested in trying out the full version, send us an email and we will give you the first 3 months free of charge.