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Ask HN: Please review my site about learning how to open and grow a store
1 points by openastorenow 4575 days ago
Hey HN,

Thanks for anyone taking the time to view this post. I recently launched a "niche" site that will focus solely on helping people learn how to open and grow a store; either online or offline. The site is: http://openastorenow.com

Since the site only went up about a week ago, content is quite limited, but a lot of work is going in to provide tons of information, guides, resources, case-studies, motivational information, and much more.

I'd love to hear from the community: 1) Any feedback about the concept. 2) Any feedback about the site itself, design, layout, material, etc. 3) What topics would you like us to cover or questions to answer? 4) What resources/applications would you like us to review? 5) Do you have any stories or case-studies you want us to publish? (We'll make a post here in a few days asking for store-owners to share their stories).

A little background on the site: I've had some experience in the past running small online stores and have always had a passion about eCommerce. I'm also currently working closely with someone in the middle of launching a fashion store online, which will also soon be opening a retail space. During the process, we've both learned a lot and would love to share. This site was created because we found it nearly impossible to find the information we needed (especially in one single place or website). Since people are opening stores left and right, we thought we could help a lot of people by creating a great resource like this.

Disclosure: The site monetized through affiliate partnerships with (most of) the products and services discussed on the site.

Thanks for your time!

Link: http://openastorenow.com

3 comments

I don't know too much about opening stores so I can't comment on the content but I really don't like the layout. Too much stuff and too little that is actually useful. The sidebar takes half page, leaving very little page to the actual content that is what interests the user. This is definitely a nono for me.
Thanks for the feedback. I do agree with everything you said (if you see my comment below about the same thing). The entire theme/design needs a lot of refactoring and it will be done once we get the content really rolling in.
It's an interesting concept but right now I think it's too cluttered, there are too many things on the screen. Also, I think marketing guides would be appreciated. I think the Shopify/hosting part of getting a store up is the easy part. But maybe that's just the techie in me. Anyway, good luck!
Absolutely agree about marketing. We just got started about a week ago so the content will really start to flow in now. There's actually quite a large post about email marketing getting wrapped up right now. We plan to do in-depth guides about marketing, legal, insurance, technology, and everything in between. If there's anything specific you'd like to see covered, just let us know and we'll do the research.

I do agree about the design. I'm not crazy about it and do think the home page especially is a little over-the-top. I wanted to change it drastically but wanted to just get online asap. We'll certainly take your feedback into consideration when we start to refactor the UI.

Thanks!

Clickable link: http://openastorenow.com