4 ms·

Ask HN: Please review my project "ShowSpace"

8 points by manume 15y ago

Hey everybody, 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! http://showspaceapp.com 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: http://rosadinge.de/ (German) http://inherzform.de/ (German) http://kramnalle.se/ (Swedish) http://maskeradgarderoben.se/ (Swedish) http://heartshapedproducts.com/ (US) I would especially like to get feedback on the storefront design and usability and possible pricing structure! Cheers, Manuel

kposehn 15y ago
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 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 15y ago
  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 15y ago
    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.
- manume 15y ago
  Hi kposehn, Thanks for your detailed feedback! 1. What exactly do you mean by "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."? Do you mean those "get rich overnight" scams? I haven't really found any (non-datafeed-driven) system to create decent looking niche stores... 2. Absolutely! I also see the issue of too little content per page to be the biggest challenge. I will encourage my users to write texts for the tag pages (page that shows products for a specific tag) and thought about putting part of the product descriptions on the index page. Any more suggestions on how to spice up the pages with more content are welcome! 3. Interesting. I didn't know Skimlinks (and Viglink probably as well) were widely used. Yes, reviews could add a lot of content and value to the sites. It's difficult though, because the products are often long-tail and the transaction is made somewhere else, so user's will probably not come back to the ShowSpace storefront to write a review. Thanks for your evaluation. It's pretty much the first honest feedback I got from an affiliate and it's what I need right now to get on the right track. :)
dholowiski 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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. :)
chris_dcosta 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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!

8 points by manume 15y ago

kposehn 15y ago

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 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 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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.
manume 15y ago
Hi kposehn, Thanks for your detailed feedback! 1. What exactly do you mean by "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."? Do you mean those "get rich overnight" scams? I haven't really found any (non-datafeed-driven) system to create decent looking niche stores... 2. Absolutely! I also see the issue of too little content per page to be the biggest challenge. I will encourage my users to write texts for the tag pages (page that shows products for a specific tag) and thought about putting part of the product descriptions on the index page. Any more suggestions on how to spice up the pages with more content are welcome! 3. Interesting. I didn't know Skimlinks (and Viglink probably as well) were widely used. Yes, reviews could add a lot of content and value to the sites. It's difficult though, because the products are often long-tail and the transaction is made somewhere else, so user's will probably not come back to the ShowSpace storefront to write a review. Thanks for your evaluation. It's pretty much the first honest feedback I got from an affiliate and it's what I need right now to get on the right track. :)

dholowiski 15y ago

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 15y ago
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. :)

chris_dcosta 15y ago

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 15y ago
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!