

Ask HN: Please review my project "ShowSpace" - manume

Hey everybody,<p>This is (almost) the first time I've posted here, but I hang around and read on Hacker News almost daily.
After several months of work I've launched my project ShowSpace today in private beta today and I would value your feedback!<p>http://showspaceapp.com<p>ShowSpace is a system that lets users easily create niche affiliate storefronts, which are basically websites showing off products from a specific niche.
It is targeted at affiliate marketers and the goal of the system is to remove all clutter and technical hurdles from creating such storefronts so that affiliates can focus on what they do best: come up with a niche, find great products, add unique product descriptions and promote the storefront!
Some examples of storefronts a friend and I have created to test the system:<p>http://rosadinge.de/ (German)
http://inherzform.de/ (German)
http://kramnalle.se/ (Swedish)
http://maskeradgarderoben.se/ (Swedish)
http://heartshapedproducts.com/ (US)<p>I would especially like to get feedback on the storefront design and usability and possible pricing structure!<p>Cheers,
Manuel
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kposehn
Hi Manuel,

Speaking as a long-time affiliate (for better or worse), I'm glad to see you
release this in the wild!

So, with that in mind, here's my thoughts:

1\. Overall, I like your concept of making a powerful turnkey storefront for
affiliates. I especially like your outsource-ready concept. However, there are
tons of others across the world, and many of them are working the work-from-
home-churn-and-burn scam and have a hell of a lot of money to burn.

2\. A big difficulty is going to be content and keeping the storefronts
valuable. You see, with SEO and PPC, you generally need to have a fairly
unique site with some different content. Google will heavily penalize sites
that are recycled data or affiliate links with little to no information in
them. A good example is this HN post:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3099875>

Matt Cutts weighed in on this and his feedback was quite clear to that
affiliate: "You have an autogenerated web site that consists of practically
nothing other than affiliate links to Amazon. You can make an infinite number
of autogenerated pages on your site and each autogenerated page consists of
literally hundreds of affiliate links stuffed with keywords for unrelated
products."

Remember that for search and PPC, the lifeblood of 99% of affiliates out
there, content is king. You need to provide many ways for them to do this and
site maps, tags and clean code don't go that far.

3\. You're going to face serious competition from the very established combo
of Wordpress.com + Skimlinks. It is very easy to make a content-heavy
affiliate site using that combo, as blogging is fairly simple and Skimlinks
makes the monetization almost instant. If you want to hit those guys, really
work on some content tools for affiliates. Writing product descriptions really
isn't enough and reviews have to be really verbose to get ranked, so the more
tools you provide for that, the better.

With all this in mind, do you have a winner here? Not yet, but you _are_ on to
something. Really refine your product and add some core tools. I think you'd
be best served by making a solution akin to WP+Skimlinks, but look more at
what your users want because it is only my opinion :)

~~~
kposehn
As another note, your pricing structure should be free. Be an affiliate for
every merchant under the sun through CJ/LinkShare/ShareaSale/GAN/etc. and then
have them be sub-affiliates. Keep about 20-30% of each commission, ala
Skimlinks.

~~~
manume
I'm not a big fan of "free" I have to say. :)

I think a low monthly fee could keep away most of the "bad" affiliates who
maybe just got into the game and think they will get rich overnight without
doing any work.

I haven't decided at all on this point, though, and will talk to a lot more
ShowSpace beta users and affiliates in general before making a decision.

------
chris_dcosta
I guess this is a kind of Shopify with affiliates' data.

I think you're going to have to do a lot more with the designs, by which I
mean you need a lot of good templates.

You could try to encourage designers to submit designs, you might have to
curate them yourselves for quality, but some form of template structure would
be required. It's going to be some "off topic" work to set that up, and you'll
have to somehow provide an incentive for the designers to do something though.

Polyvore springs to mind, because actually it gives college fashion students a
great way to experiment with colours, layout and design, I'm sure there's a
complex engine behind that though. (Those guys are ex-Yahoo.) The point being,
that students can be a great source of content, if you give them the right
tools/incentive

~~~
manume
Shopify for affiliates... I like it! :)

Yes, creating a template library would definitely be one option. As you said,
it would involve quite a lot of maintenance, though. Maybe creating 3-4 base
themes and making it possible to style and adjust them in the backend would be
a good start.

Thanks for your feedback!

------
dholowiski
If you're not aware of it already, make sure to show this off over at
www.warriorforum.com I suspect they will go crazy for this kind of thing.

~~~
manume
Hehe, yeah, I am aware of WF. I think I will wait until ShowSpace is ready for
prime time, though, WF strikes me more as the place to get loads of users than
loads of good feedback. :)

