

Paul Graham: The 10 Secrets of Selling Online (1997) - jackchristopher
http://web.archive.org/web/20010612215925/store.yahoo.com/secrets.html

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richcollins
How ironic.

When we interviewed at YC, we were told that "selling products online is
depressingly orthogonal to good design".

We gave a competitor's site (<http://bit.ly/15mzF>) as an example to compare
with our site (<http://stylous.com/>).

We were told that "they probably understand things about user behavior that
you guys don't"

I guess "High Production Values" (<http://bit.ly/oC5Y8>) and "Make Your Site
Easy" (<http://bit.ly/YYfr>) don't apply anymore.

(To be fair, there were other reasons we weren't accepted.)

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johnrob
I have to mouse over the picture of the shoe in order to see the price. That
is extremely inefficient, and requires the user to have stellar short term
memory.

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richcollins
We created the site with the assumption that the design of the products is
more important to users than their specific prices (within a specific price
range). So far, our users have validated this assumption.

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mixmax
Price is almost always the most important piece of data, and the potential
customer wants to see it right away.

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mrtron
I would for sure do research before putting prices up first.

In a store, people look around for items they like and then check the price.
Sure, many other stores have prices listed there, but that doesn't make it the
best thing for you to do.

The current workflow is more like window shopping, which could definitely
serve a large audience. This isn't selling computer parts - you want the users
to become attached to items before trying to sell it to them.

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twoz
Why post the archive.org version when <http://store.yahoo.com/secrets.html> is
still up?

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kubrick
One reason: they've pulled some of the links out of the current page. The
wayback machine has the original links to the other archived sites.

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parenthesis
Dupe: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=320852>

But I'm glad it's got some attention this time.

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alexitosrv
I would really appreciate if the title gets changed to put [2001]...

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jpwagner
for example: CDNOW

