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Comment by nkrisc | Hacker News Reader

I mean this in a completely good-natured way, but after looking at their site I’m not surprised that someone who would write “<Business I’ve never heard of> selling for $<N>bn” has never heard of them. You don’t strike me as their target audience.

That said, neither am I. Looks like you can’t even view any merchandise on the website, it’s basically an app-only experience it seems. That’s a huge turn-off for me.

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It's actually one of the reasons I left the company. On paper I was hired (back in 2015) to build the website, but spent most of my tenure building internal tools. When I finally did get to build it, thankfully I had another web developer working with me by then, but it was also clear there was no interest from the rest of the business in making the website anything more than a lead generator for app downloads.

This was probably a good business decision given their key demographic, but it didn't make me feel good about what my role was, especially as (according to the soon-to-be-CTO) I was one of their stronger engineers. It felt weird to have expertise and constantly feel side-lined. There were definitely some challenging years in the middle, but they seem to have turned it around.

Depop is hugely popular. Every 20s girl knows about Depop. HN is just not the demographic.

4m buyers and 2m sellers according to the FT.

Try signing up/signing in on web and you'll get a whole new experience.

Anonymous browsing/guest checkout might be an avenue that we take another look at in the future; but yes - historically we have been focussed on our mobile apps as first-class citizens.

Yes you can, just scroll down

After clicking on "Vintage t-shirts", I got no products available.

After scrolling a bit more down, I've noticed I can click on what I'm assuming is individual sellers, but that returns 500 internal server error.

And this thing is being sold for a billion dollars.

Ok boomer. Nobody uses websites anymore. For the proper shopping experience you must install the app. Your precise browsing history and phone location will be used to tailor a bespoke peer-to-peer shopping experience. Don't like a shopping app running 24/7 in your pocket? You just don't get modern fashion.

But I was born in 2002 and I still don't get this crap. It is like people are begging to be psychologically controlled for max financial extraction...

Pretty sure they were being sarcastic.

>> people are begging to be psychologically controlled for max financial extraction

"Shut up and take my money!" Futurama s06e03 - Attack of the Killer App (2010)

"This thing" is a hugely popular marketplace for second hand clothing. Probably the first platform to finally crack second hand clothing online, lots of billion dollars being spent on clothes.

The disdain some people have for what is not their niche is crazy. Not everything needs to be a SAAS. It's pretty clear this is meant to be used as an app and it looks like you did your best to ignore it.

You do have to admire them for being as popular as they are, and not actually being good.

Their app can't even properly show me clothes based on my preferences: https://twitter.com/dmitriid/status/1400084936372199429

It only goes to show how horrendously bad the original market was.

> It's pretty clear this is meant to be used as an app and it looks like you did your best to ignore it.

Not clear at all. I looked up the company, opened the website, and there are some "get the app" buttons, but the website does not indicate that the product is an app-first experience at all.

The submitted article even mentions it as a "shopping site", not an app. And looking at play store reviews, it doesn't look like the app is any better. It's filled with various technical issues and 1 or 2 star reviews.

So excuse me for having this crazy assumption that if something is being sold for over a billion dollars, it should at least somewhat work.

If I were Etsy, I would probably buy it for the community and marketing talent, fire every single dev and start from scratch.

I did, I didn't see anything that looks like the start of an ecommerce sales funnel. Maybe I missed it, I was just expecting something obvious. I expected the main menu (on mobile) to have some kind of inventory taxonomy. I'm well aware I'm not the target audience and it shows.

The website works fine for me - searching e.g. Céline shows 126 products.

Very HN way of calling someone a fellow nerd, I love it.

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