

Show HN: mmerch.com (Solo Founder, ~2 years in development) - doctorosdeck

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.<p>Thanks!<p>mmerch.com
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PonyGumbo
First, well done. It's hard doing this kind of thing in a vacuum, and this is
a great start.

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.

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doctorosdeck
Seriously, that's some of the best feedback I've gotten from anyone. Thank
you. I'll definitely look into implementing those changes.

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.

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PonyGumbo
Glad to help. I co-founded an online retail company in the early 00s and
(foolishly?) decided that the off-the-shelf stuff available at the time didn't
solve our problems, so I ended up writing a lot of code to handle our specific
inventory management and shipping issues.

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hluska
I tried out your site and have some feedback for you:

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)...

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doctorosdeck
Thanks for the feedback, I'll definitely fix the store settings issue.

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

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doctorosdeck
<https://mmerch.com>

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jaipilot747
It shows that it has been a labour of love. Kudos!

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.

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hluska
You have to go to the settings page to find this, but apparently, you can
access the demo at <https://demo.mymmerch.com>.

Edit - I just tried that link and it throws an internal error as well. Sorry!

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jaipilot747
Murphy and his stupid laws :)

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147
You should probably raise your prices on all of the plans. You're going to
attract customers you don't want to deal with at $10 a month.

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jaipilot747
How would you go about marketing this? I don't know much about the e-commerce
site creator market, but what separates you from the competition?

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doctorosdeck
Right now we're focused on smaller shops, price wise we offer a lot more
features, multiple payment gateways, complete custom themeing and also
marketplaces that you can showcase your products in for no additional cost.
VNTGE.net is the first marketplace that's been built for vintage and antique
goods.

*First as in first mmerch marketplace, not first ever.

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orangethirty
Have you tested that landing page?

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doctorosdeck
No, I haven't done any A/B testing yet. But I know it probably needs some re-
work

