Show HN: A storebuilder contained in a single text area

This is fantastic. Nice and simple, and it does exactly what I want it to as a seller. Great job!!!!!<p>Be careful about feature creep. The reason why Craiglist works is because it doesn't try to do too much. I think this can definitely have a similar sort of success given how freaking easy it is to use!

MVP for YC'12 application. We've been heads down on this for a month now so it seemed like the right time to gather some feedback!

This is <i>terrific</i>.<p>Some small comments:<p>* When I click on "checkout", a few things are not clear: how much is shipping (seems to be free?), how long will shipping take, etc.<p>* I put something with an "&#38;" in the title into my shopping cart. On the PayPal landing page, it turns into &#38;amp;. Also, the item description is "shopid: x, itemid: y", which is not very helpful, especially if it's two months from now and I'm trying to remember what I purchased.<p>* The list of item in the shopping cart should be links, not text.<p>* It's an MVP, so I'm sure this is on your "next steps" list, but it would be nice to delete specific items from the cart instead of having to clear the whole cart.<p>* There's a Login/Signup link at the top, but it's not clear what the benefits of Signup would be. Clicking on the link doesn't reveal the benefits either.<p>Again, this is awesome.

I find this quite brilliant. I'm a fan of simplicity and minimalism, and this is a good example of implementing the bare-minimum and getting something useful out of it. I'm actually a bit jealous I didn't think of it first. Good work, and good luck to you!

A plus for minimalism, but I don't see who this is for and why they would use it?<p>What's your market?<p>It's not ebay or craigslist. You'll never get enough buyers and sellers together; then there is the fraud/scam issue.<p>I don't think it's existing merchants with websites.<p>So who is it?

To me this seems to hit the same market as Etsy. People who spend their time creating things, selling one-off items, are just going online so that they can put it on a business card, ect would use something like this. I showed this to a girl who I was just talking to about putting her stuff on Etsy, she likes this FAR more, but the only thing she wanted was to use her own domain.

Really nice interface. Kudos there.<p>Who are your target users, people using Etsy or eBay? Are you competing with other services like those on ease of use alone? For people looking to buy things, will you provide some search across all users or are you just giving your sellers a link they can promote?

Wow! That is so simplistic and minimal; it just works like you would imagine! Great idea, great work and great result.<p>I'd see this text field becoming more and more intelligent over time with other functions!

Love the idea. The execution is perfect. Really caught my attention because I'm developing my own store builder.<p>Works magnificently well for techies because we are all familiar with store admin areas, publishing a site etc. Great if techies are your target market.<p>For an average Joe it might be a bit confusing. People may not even realise they are building a store, and instead think... 'Why can anyone just add a listing to this page?'<p>To help with this a guided tutorial may be useful.<p>All the best.

Love this!<p>A few notes:<p>- When I click on an item thumbnail on your sample list page, it takes me directly to the image hosted on S3. Having the image appear in a lightbox would ensure that users are kept on the page.<p>- The title tag for every page reads "List of Things for Sale". I would populate the title tag with the name of the user (e.g. "Matthias McGregor's List of Things for Sale")<p>- Add FB/Twitter/Email to Friend links, which would provide three one-click marketing channels for users to share their for-sale items with their immediate network.<p>- Populate the page with Facebook Open Graph metadata. That way if users want to post a link to their store on Facebook, they'll get a nice link description and thumbnail automatically.<p>- I like the single-page experience, but I can't help wondering if it would be better if the app would generate discrete pages for each item users are selling. This might make it easier for users to share each item discretely, instead of just point people towards a single store page.<p>Really nice work!

this is very cool! i love it. Suggested feature: Automatically find a suitable image for the item via google and have it uploaded by default.

Love it. The "just email me" option is very appealing — no hassle.<p>To some extent, though, you are going after the Craigslist market by focusing on one-time sales by individuals. Not easy. I wonder at which point an online store becomes more sensible to users than the classifieds model?<p>Any thoughts about where precisely in the e-commerce sphere you see yourself fitting in?

How about letting the user change language? If you have some interface or something I could help with Swedish. I really can't wait for this to be more complete (+Quantity is what I am referring to)<p>Also I have a bug. If I write "iPhone 3GS $70" it does not show. If I add a description it shows.

This is beautiful. I signed up for the purpose of receiving updates from you - I have many friends who will adore this and cannot build their own sites. Do you have plans to do more with this? How are you monetizing? <i>Ok, I just went to publish and it tells me.</i>

You should pre-populate the images with stock photos found on google images. Removes one more barrier if I'm going to use stock photos anyway. (Obviously clearly mark it as "stock photo", still make it easy to upload my own). This is really cool by the way.

You might consider using the placeholder tag for the textarea so I don't have to remove the text to enter my own (or at least a graceful fallback version). On click, you could simply put the same text in a notice below the textarea for usage reference.

What a fantastic idea. I would/will use this.

Brilliant. Needs a mobile app that lets me take a pic then post it as a listing. Then I'd spend an afternoon clicking pictures of everything in my attic.

I don't know what your pricing model will be, but might I suggest a way for users to create a one-off online store.<p>I have a lot of books I'd want to sell to my friends/networks, because they'll pay me more than Amazon or EBay. While a monthly subscription wouldn't be feasible for a user like me, I'd gladly fork over $10-20 to set up a one-time-use online store.<p>I really, really like it. Excellent work.

Really well executed. Simple, clean, elegant. This was a lot of fun to set up the first time! I know it's the mvp but I wanted quantity support on listings &#38; adding to cart, and I immediately missed the ability to define a per-item shipping cost separately from the price of the item (keeps perceived pricing lower). Great first pass, and with a little polish could be a pretty excellent tool.

Ahhhhh this makes me sad because I've had something very close to this idea months ago and have been slowly picking away at it. Great job though.

I really like this! Great work. The best part is your 'listing' on your own store never expires or gets buried by other listings.

This is really great - I love the simplicity of the ui. One suggestion: a link that says a bit about your company/who built it.

I clicked on "Now click here!" and it gave me the shopping cart, then I click on "List" to edit it, and it showed the text box again. Once I click "Save", then it doesn't show the iPhone. If I click on "List again to edit it, it still does show it.<p>It is very cool though, I am loving the interface of it.

Fantastic!<p>You might want to mention that users can drag and drop images as well... that was a nice surprise.

How are you going to track stock levels?

I found a glitch while creating my store.<p>I couldn't add more than one item, even when I copied and pasted your code from the front page (sample) directly.<p><a href="http://listofthingsforsale.com/pleasereturnme" rel="nofollow">http://listofthingsforsale.com/pleasereturnme</a>

This is really cool, but what's the benefit of using a textarea instead of a list of small forms?

Love the concept of this app. I'm assuming it will eventually let me sell things in £'s or €'s?

Cute, I like it.<p>One thought: although the text area is cool for us geeks, what value does it add for the typical user over a more structured data entry approach? I think the text area leaves too many ways for the user to make mistakes.

Great stuff, only problem: I couldn't figure out how I GET money from customers

This is slick. My mom could figure this out in less than a minute. Amazing.

YC Application Video: <a href="http://listy.posterous.com/74768699-97655" rel="nofollow">http://listy.posterous.com/74768699-97655</a> 1 minute long / we talk about purpose and target market.

Nice job, but it needs error handling for price entries. Invalid entries are skipped with no notification. $0.99 works, but $.99 doesn't. Only handles $ prices (e.g., no euro).

Really nice job. Have you considered auto-posting to craigslist?

Very well done! This is awesome.We have an inventory management system (bizelo) and we'd love to work with you. Drop me a line!

I wish it would crawl images.google.com to automatically add pictures of the things in my list .. that would make it terrific.

Matthias. This is pretty badass. How do you envision implementation? Props on the build.

How are you going to deal with fraud? (And you <i>will</i> have fraud)

Can I pass also an image url in the single text area for each item?

Very nice work Matthias.

Wicked. Could your regex include £ as well as $? :]

How about costumizeable row/column-sizes?

Awesome work. Love the simplicity.

awesome love the concept, but breaks if you use £ instead of $ :(

Application Error<p>An error occurred in the application and your page could not be served. Please try again in a few moments.<p>If you are the application owner, check your logs for details.

I think you have something interesting here. Elegance and simplicity are far more important than previously thought. Clearly this is part of the legacy left by Steve Jobs. Fantastically engineered products wrapped in beautiful design. Elegance and simplicity...it just works.