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Paul Graham: The 10 Secrets of Selling Online (1997)
- twoz 18y agoWhy post the archive.org version when http://store.yahoo.com/secrets.html http://store.yahoo.com/secrets.html is still up?
- kubrick 18y agoOne 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.
- alexitosrv 18y agoI would really appreciate if the title gets changed to put [2001]...
- jpwagner 18y agofor example: CDNOW
- richcollins 18y agoHow 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 http://bit.ly/15mzF) as an example to compare with our site (http://stylous.com/ 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 http://bit.ly/oC5Y8) and "Make Your Site Easy" (http://bit.ly/YYfr http://bit.ly/YYfr) don't apply anymore. (To be fair, there were other reasons we weren't accepted.)
- webwright 18y ago"Good design" can mean a lot of things. In this case, I'm sure PG meant pretty design. Your site is pretty-- but it fails a lot of design tests if your goal is to sell stuff (IMO). Selling stuff online isn't an artistic exercise-- it's an analytics and psychology exercise. To be fair, that PG article is pretty ancient and commerce was a different beast back then (i.e. you might have needed high production values to overcome people's fear of online purchasing where you don't today). "Make your site easy" obviously still holds true. Are you contending that your site is easier than the competitors? It'd be interesting to write down a few use cases and then time user success on your site versus your competitor. Related: part of good commerce design is SEO. A huge huge part. http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Astylous.com http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Astylous.com
- stevedekorte 18y ago"Selling stuff online isn't an artistic exercise-- it's an analytics and psychology exercise." Does these imply Apple does sell much online? I do like the idea of setting up some tests and doing some measurements. The tricky thing is testing for the right thing. Guys typically think of shopping as: I want X, I search for X, I buy X. But when it comes to women and fashion it's about window shopping - not knowing what you quite want until you see it. How does one measure a UI for such a use case? Browsed items per minute? Number of items of interest found per until time?
- bullseye 18y agoI wasn't sure if you were soliciting feedback on your site, but since that seems to be the current direction of the posts... Overall, I like this concept. I think the "browsing items" effect is pretty cool. As others have suggested, it would be nice to display prices at some point. At the very least, make it contextual. In other words, if someone is going to select one of the price filters, this should be an indication that price is something they are now interested in seeing. The site looks nice in FF, and obviously has issues in IE. The fact that "iesucks" shows up in the Internet Explorer URL history actually made me smile, but pretty much invalidated my opinion of your site as a serious consumer service.
- richcollins 18y agoHeh oops didn't realize that would appear in the browser history. Will have to change that.
- rjurney 18y agoPretty sure I'm gonna bail on hacker news until all the YC admission related posts die down.
- richcollins 18y agoThis was last year. Sorry, but I couldn't resist given the irony.
- jpwagner 18y agoThese certainly do apply. The competitor's website is clear (and loads quickly.) Keep working though, looks pretty good.
- DTrejo 18y agoI had some trouble navigating your site. You guys should observe users navigating (look over their shoulders). Give them a few tasks, e.g. find a watch you like, find a shoe you like. Your UI is simple, but not always intuitive. Also, I kept thinking that if I scrolled down I would see more shoes on the shoes page (there isn't enough space between the bottom row of shoes and the border of the browser).
- richcollins 18y agoWe do use the typical complement of in person user testing (headed out to do some today) and obsessing over Google Analytics data. Right now our biggest issue is IE performance, but we also have some other UI elements that confuse people that we are trying to resolve (often think clicking on a product will add it to their favorites list). I'd love to hear more about your navigation issues. If you are so inclined, please email me (rich@stylous.com) some more information about the issues you faced.
- bigbang 18y ago"We were told that "they probably understand things about user behavior that you guys don't"" Your site has good approach to design, but personally I feel lacks usability. One of the first things Im(and I guess any user) interested is price and brand. You don't show both. If I click thru some image and see its beyond what I want to pay for, Im disappointed. Instead have proper filters(price/brand/size/small description) still goes a long way(atleast for me). EDIT: On second look, looks like you had a filter by brand/price in ur homepage, missed that.
- johnrob 18y agoI 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.
- richcollins 18y agoWe 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.
- teej 18y ago> So far, our users have validated this assumption. Then who cares what PG says on the issue?
- mixmax 18y agoPrice is
- mixmax 18y agoPrice is almost always the most important piece of data, and the potential customer wants to see it right away.
- mrtron 18y agoI 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.
- patio11 18y agoWhen you're selling high-end handbags the distinction between $895 and $1,100 is not really the first thing on the mind of the client.
- chops 18y agoA few thoughts: Your page feels extremely sluggish. On your site, you have to hover over things to see the prices. That's not good design. On your competitor's site, you're able to quickly scan the page (and use the mouse scrolly to get more items instantly). I see the scrolly does work on your horizontal scrollbar, but it's slow, and counterintuitive. I didn't even think to use the scrolly to move back and forth. Intuitively, the scrolly is a vertical thing. Key phrase: Form follows function. I would almost certainly not want to buy something from your site because it takes the whole point of ecommerce (find and buy quickly) and replaces it with the brick and morter approach (find something, check the price, set it down, check something else), and does so sluggishly (clicking left and right, or using the little js scrollbar takes like 5-10 seconds to load - way to slow). Your site looks nice and clean, but that's about it. I wouldn't call it usable at all. Make it usable, make finding something fast. Addendum: I think the biggest problem with the usability of your site is the excessive reliance on js animation. My machine isn't exactly old (core2duo, 4gig ram), and it feels like playing a modern FPS game on a netbook. What's wrong with just using a div with overflow:auto, rather than over-designing it. Another thought: perhaps allow the bottom part to stretch fill the whole page, so that you can see more items at a time. Perhaps some scale-option to decrease or increase the scale of the pictures allowing more detail and less items perpage, or less detail and more images?
- richcollins 18y agoSorry about the performance issues. The site is implemented in pure javascript. We are still working out the kinks in slow browsers.
- pclark 18y agohttp://stylous.com http://stylous.com is a really great design -- good job.
- YuriNiyazov 18y agoYou approached the interview incorrectly. At the interview, the YC partners will play devil's advocate without prefacing what they are saying with "You know, I am just playing devil's advocate here". There are multiple ways to respond - you can defend your idea to the death, you can respond with reasons why you either think they are wrong, or you can indicate that you are willing to change your idea substantially. I am willing to bet that you guys just folded.
- richcollins 18y agoActually, we were rejected because we held to our idea too strongly. PG thought that our feelings on the matter were too strong given our level of experience. I don't hold that against him at all, I just couldn't resist responding to his claim that good design and success at online retailing were somehow at odds.
- lionheart 18y agoSadly, I'd have to say from personal experience that this is true. But then, I also think that "good design" or more like "stylish design" is orthogonal to "Make Your Site Easy" quite often.
- CalmQuiet 18y agoYour site is gorgeous (FF/Mac). But maybe others tried it in Safari/Mac (w/JS turned off as I keep my Safari) - and got a blank home page (what I get right now)? Maybe some safe-degrade when javascript off is appropropriate. At least a screen alert saying, 'please turn on javascript'. I see that a fair bit.
- run4yourlives 18y agoTo be fair to you, I think the "bad" design that you're commenting on is much more conducive to actually creating a sale to your nifty page. Usability and familiarity go hand in hand.
- daleharvey 18y agoseen suspicious serif fonts, inspected some text and seen font-family:'Arial'; any chance of catering for those of us without arial font-family:Arial, sans-serif; :)
- richcollins 18y agoIt should default to sans. Thanks for pointing that out.
- rimantas 18y agoOne guy named Steve Jobs once said, that design is not how it looks but how it works. He had a point.
- TheSOB88 18y agoAs opposed to everyone else, I liked the menus a lot. However, the actual product selection was completely counterintuitive.
- hs 18y agoi have sites with hovering ajax and yes the performance can be slow (it's the ajax) i don't like 'loading' message on every ajax call so what did i do? i pre-load every js and combine few images into one (not sprites due to dynamic nature) to reduce http request in your case, it could be: sprite the shoe.jpg to watch.jpg to top.jpg sprite the pumps.jpg ... evening.jpg to middle-shoe.jpg sprite the first 6 shoes into down-shoe.jpg so for these sprites: 1 + 4 + (10 + 6 + 6 + 4) = 31 files or you can combine into one big file the point is not to make user wait for the 'first impression' when (for example) s/he clicks handbags > baby if s/he wants to click next after seeing the first items, then ajax call can be used (make it one file instead of six) but pre-load the prices into js (or <bad> put price into the file-name like shoe-2-59-49-99-29-39-79.jpg and parse -, map the prices </bad>) so you only need to call 1 instead of 2 or 6 or more http
- andreyf 18y agoI hate to break it to you, but with your product line, it looks like your main competitor isn't become.com, but Amazon's www.endless.com ... let me say that again: you're competing at online retailing with an Amazon.com subsidiary. Good luck.
- richcollins 18y agoNo, we get 15% when someone buys anything on endless.com ;-)
- andreyf 18y agoRight, but don't you think Amazon has more resources/experience in layout/design which gets people to buy things? Or are you looking to target a niche of people who prefer a minimalist design?
- richcollins 18y agoYes, the same niche that buys iPods and iPhones. Minimalism is about usability, not lack of functionality.
- parenthesis 18y agoDupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=320852 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=320852 But I'm glad it's got some attention this time.