Roast My Idea

[arulkumar]

Hey!

Existing e-commerce solutions are complicated and expensive for small businesses. At DotWorks, we want to simplify online store management. We want to leverage Google Sheets and Google Drive to manage your products and images. Accept money through Stripe, Paypal, and Razorpay.

Please visit our site https://dotworks.io/?utm_source=hackernews&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=beta-invite and roast our idea.

Any feedback is appreciated and invaluable to us.

[iamben]

Just a tip - might be worth putting "Show HN" in the title, and explaining the idea a bit better. I'd also get a demo on the site, it's hard to judge something you can't see.

Whilst I hope this is a success for you, I'd also argue that Shopify is neither complicated or expensive.

[arulkumar]

Thank you for your feedback.

[135792468]

Didn’t look at your site but Having handles 100s (honestly) ecom sites, simplicity is rarely a pain point.

Adding to that, if woo or Shopify isn’t easy enough for a person, they sure as hell won’t be savvy enough to manage a site through a spreadsheet.

You pain point and your solution don’t match. Spreadsheet based things will be more accepted by the web savvy, if it hits a particular pain point. Simplicity isn’t that.

[sevilo]

I’d argue Shopify is simple and pretty cost effective for small businesses. The most complicated part comes from initial technical setups like pointing to the right domain name and setting up payment gateways which not everyone knows how to do. Can your platform make it easy enough so that someone that’s not tech savvy won’t need any developer help?

[arulkumar]

Noted. Thanks for your valuable input.

[davidajackson]

Might be good to compare against Shopify on your site, show why/if you're better. Also do a show hn

[arulkumar]

Noted. Will add a section on how we compare against our competitors.

[brudgers]

Is platform simpler than eBay?

On eBay I can take a picture of merchandise within the app, get an auto generated description, buy postage, and get paid via Paypal.

[arulkumar]

Oh. I never knew that. Thanks for the info. Will look into it.

[XCSme]

WooCommerce and Shopify are pretty affordable and easy to use. Why is your platform better? Who is your target audience?

[gavribirnbaum]

bro utm source on a HackerNews "roast my idea" feels super dishonest tbh.

plus if you're at the idea stage I doubt you need Analytics.

[arulkumar]

Hi, We have posted on a couple of sites looking for feedback. We intend to analyze the source of our visitors and their feedbacks. We can filter the sites where we get valuable feedback and ignore the rest in the future.