

Ask HN: Is my UX too complex, even for early adopters? - relaunched

My startup, Browsemob.com, allows shoppers to name-their-own-price on whatever they want to buy, on any website that is signed up with us. E-tailers review the offers, and if accepted, send the shopper a unique coupon code, specific to the item and price.<p>Currently, we have a single website setup to work with us, beautychoice.com. It seems like with one customer, in a vertical like beauty, is enough to get going and start understanding our customer behavior and conversion, however organic users are very slowly dripping in and not getting all the way through to naming their own price.  So, I'm reaching out to get some help from you all.<p>Is our UX too complicated, even for early adopters?  Should we try harder to find the overlap between early adopter and beauty product consumer? Any thoughts where those people might be?<p>If you want to try it out, go to browsemob.com/signup and signup using invite code BMPRIBETA.
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aggronn
I don't think the UX is too complicated. Its smart, though somewhat
troublesome because its not something your users would be familiar with
(bookmarklets?). To be clear, its unfamiliar, not complicated.

If you're getting the users to install the bookmarklet, they've done the
hardest part as far as your implementation goes.

IMO, the hard part of the UX is picking a price that you'd pay for it. I love
the idea of this app, but that particular aspect can be taxing for those
people of us who who are less ambitious/frugal than others. I would put an
emphasis on suggesting how to decide on a fair price. Many people don't have
any sense of price or negotiation, and could get 'bored' because they don't
want to take a second to think about what something is really worth to them--
or conversely, they get bored when they start over-thinking about what its
really worth to them.

On a side note, have you considered adding some sort of price-check input for
bidders to report other outlets that offer lower prices? For instance, a
seller be more inclined to give a discount if the user can report a lower
price elsewhere. This shared information makes both parties better off.

this is sort of off topic, so you can disregard it, but i was curious what
your thoughts were about the potential for arbitrage, where users of this tool
get discounts and resell on somewhere like amazon or ebay.

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relaunched
It would be an awesome day, considering where we are now, when we have to put
in safeguards against arbitrage. But, when that day comes, we can install time
/ ip type restrictions and make it more difficult to gain significantly from
arbitrage.

Price checks is an interesting idea. If you look at our video, you'll see text
that pops up after the user inputs a bid. It's our guide, that uses lossy
bounds and simple terms to shape guidance related to where to bid. Turns out,
from tests we've run previously, there is a good overlap of bids offered to
prices willing to be accepted by the e-tailer.

If you are interested in the details, feel free to reach out directly at
'matt' at the domain name for the website.

Thanks.

