I am trying to make a minimalist e-commerce website at www.tradespring.net. It may take up to 30 seconds to load as it is hosted on heroku and I am only using 1 dyno. Let me know if you can't even tell what it does/what you are supposed to do.
It's an interesting concept and I like where you're headed w/ the design. This could be interesting if you could build it out in a highly concentrated area such as NYC. Can you add Google Maps and make it location based?
Another thing you can work on is pictures. If someone is "Selling a Wacom Bamboo usb tablet for 40 bucks", I'd like to see what it looks like beforehand. Once you have traction, maybe you could create a partnership w/ Bit.ly. How about seller ratings and history?
Interesting concept and with the right execution, I think you can make it work.
The reason why heroku is so slow when you have only 1 dyno is that it idles after a couple of minutes of inactivity on your site.
The trick is to use new relic on heroku.
New relic shows your performance of your site (for free) and pings your server every minute ... that should prevent it to idle
Hmm, it's not an attractive site - if you need/want to go minimal and not show pictures of the items I'd look at a more elegant black and white layout like http://www.net-a-porter.com/ or http://www.thegridsystem.org/ even. The most compelling point of difference to me is the 'make an offer' so i'd include that more prominently.
I was trying to accent the difference between purchases and sales with both the left/right division and the blue/green color difference. Do you think that this is clear enough without the color difference?
Another thing you can work on is pictures. If someone is "Selling a Wacom Bamboo usb tablet for 40 bucks", I'd like to see what it looks like beforehand. Once you have traction, maybe you could create a partnership w/ Bit.ly. How about seller ratings and history?
Interesting concept and with the right execution, I think you can make it work.