Low-code online store builder | Hacker News Reader

Low-code online store builder

selldone.com

62 pointsgraderjs73 comments

Nice animations, you probably worked a lot on them :)

I just went through a month-long process of creating a front-page animation for my Lunar app (https://lunar.fyi) and wanted to share some drawbacks that users will be experiencing:

  1. A lot of CPU usage because of constantly re-rendering the DOM
  2. Choppy animations on Safari and older computers because main thread is blocked often
  3. Battery drain and device heating up because of #1
  4. Distraction from the text content because of too many moving things on some scenes

I can’t figure out what animation library you used, but I started with anime.js, animating an SVG. Then because of the above issues, I ended up rendering the animation to a compressed video and using that as the background of the website.

Rendering a video is efficient and more battery friendly than re-computing fast DOM changes, mostly because of the hardware decoding capabilities of modern devices. But not all animations can be recorded, and there are other things to consider as well (encoder, size, fps, compression quality etc.)

I also tried using the WebAnimations API which shouldn't block the main thread, but Safari is lagging behind on this one. You can especially notice how “not smooth” the animations on this site are: https://motion.dev/guides/quick-start#animatable-values

Hey Alin, Thanks for sharing your experience with animation. We will consider to update when it comes to the Safari users.

Thanks a lot :)

Yes, All animation on the site is designed from scratch by fundamental DOM animations. But I think it will be slow in Safari and old versions of browsers. So I disabled autoplay right now.

Awesome, the website already feels much lighter and snappier!

You're going to put off UK customers having language icons, with English with a USA flag and Welsh with a UK flag. Many people who speak Welsh would probably rather associate Welsh with the Welsh flag. Likewise it's confusing or sometimes annoying to see English listed with the USA flag. I would honestly recommend not having flags for languages because this probably isn't the only such issue. Languages are not countries.

Hey Veltas, Thanks for the feedback. Since this is our first launch with a wide range of languages, the only way to improve it, is hearing and implementing.

Same for Dutch (which has the Belgian flag) and Frisian (which has the Dutch flag). I'm not offended by it, just a good laugh. I would suggest to skip Frisian, and give the Dutch and Belgian their own flag back. ;)

Edit: nevermind, this has been said before, I see now. By the way, your homepage loaded quickly for me and I like the style and animations. Good luck!

Btw, in macOS Monetery 12.4 Apple also removed country flags for keyboard input.

I disagree with the first part, flags English (UK), Spanish (Spain), etc. are actually really helpful when there's more than 2-3 languages. Saying English is from England/UK is as offensive as calling it "Engl-ish", a non-issue AFAIK.

That said, your second part of Welsh is totally right, Spanish should be "Español" and not "Española" (since "lenguaje" in Spanish is male), and def Basque should not have the Spanish flag, and Catalan should not have the Andorra flag (even if it's the only country that has it as the official language), instead they should have their local Basque Country and Catalonian flags:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basques#Culture

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalonia

The UK flag can be a somewhat loaded symbol for native English speakers from England's former colonies (like Ireland, where I'm from). I'd rather not have to use it to select my language preference, but I'm not going to waste energy jumping up and down shouting on the internet about it either. A minor annoyance I guess.

Also Irish, agree 100%.

Every time I have to click on the UK flag to select my language preference I have a quiet "ugh" moment, then click on the damn flag and move on with my life.

Agree this is a strange oversight of i18n language selection UI in general. We have English ({US, Australia, Canada, United Kingdom}) as relatively standard language choices why not add Scotland, Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland and Wales. I think there's probably even more...

We also have Chinese ({Hong Kong, China, Taiwan}) as fairly standard choices for somewhat similar reasons.

I think country variations for Arabic also exist.

The lack of completeness in general (not this site specifically) is inexcusable.

Yeah as I said the best thing is to remove the flag, because languages aren't flags. As someone else said, just put the language name in its own language. I'm not jumping up and down annoyed, I'm not even really annoyed, I just wanted to share this cultural insight that IMO was indicative of a larger issue of having flags at all.

We do respect to the cultures. The guys here are right about not using flags.

Saying English is from England/UK is as offensive as calling it "Engl-ish", a non-issue AFAIK.

Huh?

English is from England.

That's what I meant, sorry if I didn't explain it properly. If someone is offended by the UK flag, why/shouldn't they be the same offended if you call the language English? Like, the language denotes the country of origin, and the flag denotes the country of origin of the language, nothing more nothing less.

I see what you mean. I think it's a bit more loaded than you realize when you start putting flags next to it.

It's confusing because I was talking about English having an American flag.

Flags are problematic and just shouldn’t be used to represent languages, ever. Fortunately, there’s a uniformly superior alternative: the name of the language, in itself rather than English. On average, people will recognise their language name faster than their flag, in part because that’s the way the mind works and in part because so many flags are so similar.

Speaking more generally, icons perform surprisingly badly, given how widely they’re used: among even basically literate people, text without icon practically always outperforms icon without text. (Perhaps surprisingly, even among illiterate people text tends to perform quite well, once they know what the corresponding function is. Icons are often lousy enough that both of these often devolve to memorisation and pattern matching, and words often have more varying shapes, which make them easier to remember.)

The real problem on this site is that its language selector dropdown is very poor: it’s unreasonably tiny, showing only 6 items at a time, out of its 99, with a lot of scrolling and even lazy rendering of those scrolling options, and the first 18 items are in no particular order, before the remainder are mostly in English name alphabetical order (though there are several that look to be out of order and/or mislabelled, e.g. Kannada is labelled Javanese, and Kanuri Kinyarwanda); and that it’s searchable by typing may not be obvious, and functionally broken in only matching the string displayed (e.g. “বাংলা” but not “Bengali” or ideally also “bn” and “ben” for the ISO 639 codes). It should instead show all of the options at once in a two-dimensional grid on larger displays, and have a little scrolling on mobile platforms, but certainly no fewer than 24 options visible at once on even comparatively small devices. It’s a case of using the wrong widget for the job. Just because it’s readily available doesn’t mean you should use it.

What a comprehensive comment. Thanks for sharing your feedback. Same page, we will be improving the structure as well as design of this crucial section. I think the best is getting feedback from local merchants specially when it comes to the businesses daily usages.

I'm not saying they should say English is from the UK, although as a matter of fact it is, and I don't know why that would offend anyone. I'm not offended either way. I'm just identifying a cultural issue they've overlooked. Your suggestion is to ignore it, that's fine but the problem still exists. You can't please everyone.

http://www.flagsarenotlanguages.com/

Thanks for providing the link.

I love the design recommended on this page. Straightforward and intuitive!

In some languages like Japanese they literally are, the name of the language is said as the name of the country + 語 (language), so Spanish is スペイン語, or "Spain Language" so to speak.

It seems to auto-translate based on the flag you click. I got this (translated back):

> Make your online store through deny code and deny expert needed solution.

The home button gets translated to "at home". There's actually a ton of badly translated text. It might seem only a bit silly, but it's really a bad low-code demo.

Yeah at this point, if English isn't your first language you probably know how to auto translate a website if you need to. Shouldn't offer other languages if they aren't manually translated.

OMG guys, It's a controversial topic! I totally removed flags from languages to save everyone. +++thanks!

100% True point.

Feedback:

The website, and idea seems interesting caught my attention, but I would say:

1. Like many have iterated, the website looks very busy.

2. The website layout and brand is good, but there is too much animations, and also UI is sometimes inconsistent.

3. Selldone as a name is not that interesting, but BusinessOS is very on point.

4. After going to the blog there was so much generic information that I didnt want to click on anywhere.

5. Pricing lists too many features, rather compress features into categories.

6. The animations are annoying, especially the navigation animations.

7. Cutting down on your customer target is better in the long-run. Focus on one or max two customer target, than focusing on everyone. You can't solve everyones problems, especially if you have not solved yours.

Also another thing.

If you want to target corporate customers, try not to post memes. If you want to target mom pop shop, then you maybe can do it, but don't over do it.

Hey buddy thanks for the feedback you've provided. We will be updating and expanding our business based on the feedback of experts like you. This is a long cool journey.

Yeah, the site is really overwhelming and slow. The animations are not subtle at all, they take attention away instead of guiding it, and they made my computer's fan to spin up.

Hey Guy,

Thanks for your helpful feedback.I updated the site and removed or minimalized animations and layouts in these two days. (Add more spaces and remove navigation -scrolling animations)

Selldone = Sell + Done (Also has convenient pronunciation in middle-east and eastern-Asia)

+++ About the blog, can you give me any suggested topics?

About the pricing page, it's correct; we have a plan for it. +++ It's our a demo targeted landing page : https://selldone.com/business-ideas/kids-clothes

We have targeted sellers on social media and selldone fits for them (Instagram, Telegram, Facebook,...)

Disclaimer: I work for a similar SaaS that targets a specific industry and integrates hundreds of APIs, and I previously worked for a similar company.

I see that you are targeting 18 industries but how are you going to disrupt online sales for each of them?

Imo Shopify (and the software that is typically used along with it) are dominant enough that your best chance at building a VC-backed store builder is targeting some niche (market segmentation).

The reason is that, for each industry, you are going to get clients who are already consuming some SaaS that solves online sales, and are looking for something that integrates it with a cherry on top - dashboards, insightful reports, notifications, task automation, etc.

Good luck!

All true.

But want to point out, the ecomm market is similar to the soft drink market. That is, even a sliver of marketshare can be significant. Plus, the ecomm market is still growing. Not sure if it's at a rate that tickles VCs but you should be able to bootstrap quite a bit.

Hey pal. I agree with you. Selldone in our #5 startup and all of them bootstrap :) Not looking for VCs currently.

On my bad internet, the site took around 3 seconds from blank screen to loading screen, then loaded another 3-5 seconds with your loading animation.

The site itself is quite busy, I think a more unified design (am on mobile), with one or two central themes, would be good. Right now, there is so much going on that I thought I had to click something, or that I was supposed to do something.

Im sure your product is great, but please, visit your site on a low end device with below average internet speed, and really test it. And also, show it to someone and watch them navigate your site live - that helps usually to see how intuitive it is.

Also I visited on my mobile and immediately got a full page prompt for push notifications... Does anyone ever click yes for notifications on a marketing website?

When I closed that I had another mostly full page prompt and left the site before even viewing the content.

Guys, Alireza here, another cofounder of Selldone. Thanks for your valuable feedback. According to the demands from our merchants, we just added languages( beta mode ) and are still working on them to become closer to the language that local persons speak and write. The flag issue you mentioned will be resolved ASAP. Once again thank you for the guide.

Please feel free to drop your comments here. Selldone can show its real values once the customers are happy, not unhappy.

Quick feedback:

German translations are pretty bad and sound like they are done by Google translate 5 years ago :-\

Same for the dutch translations. It's horrific.

Spanish translation is also bad. I suggest to remove all the translated versions.

Same for the italian translation

Hi, Yes, actually it was translated by Google Translate API last week :|. But It is just a start; Germany is the priority to human review ASAP. We hope our community helps us in this way. We put Lang-files on GitHub.

After looking at this page in Safari and it glitching and being very slow in general I can not imagine clicking through some wizard for an hour to set up some online store.

The first time I loaded the page, it was extremely glitchy. I forgot to take a screenshot. After reloading it two or three times, now it looks fine.

This is Mehrdad, the Co-Founder of Selldone (Selldone = Sell + Done!)

In 1900 starting a business was easy and affordable. But today, thanks to digital transformation, it's costly and time-consuming. It shouldn't be! That's why we have built Selldone.

In short, Selldone is a Business OS where entrepreneurs can create ecommerce stores for selling online and offline. Whether you build hand-made products or provide pet care services, sell coaching courses or gift cards, Selldone suits all your needs to visually set up, manage, and scale your business!

Story behind our startup:

My colleague Alireza and I have been friends for 16 years + 12 years of partnership in our startups. The most tedious work in all of them was setting up and managing an ecommerce (Login, install a bunch of plugins, templates that were always broken after a while, waking up at 2 AM site were down and ...)! In 2018, we started building a dedicated ecommerce for our previous company, something that is impossible to ruin! ...2019...2020... We met guys who had the same problem! We demoed our shopping management panel to them, and they loved it. They needed "An online shop that always works like a Swiss watch! Simple to work, fast, and scalable!" That was the seed of our next startup.

Is Selldone another ecommerce platform?

No. We follow a fresh approach; no plugins and no template install are needed. All you require are pre-integrated in Selldone, such as Stripe for Payment, Shippo for Shipping, and many more features exclusively by Selldone. We have provided a wide range of tools to help you set up, sell and manage your business, from Selldone POS for in-store selling to page designer for building catchy pages.

Sorry I don't have more helpful feedback than this, but I wanted to call out that Spanish in Spanish is español, not española.

Good luck with this!

another thing to point out when visiting the site from UK I am met with option of languages, welsh (UK flag) and English (US Flag). :| Wales has its own flag and and english you can use the UK or England flag if you wanted to distinguish regions

Using flags for languages is not recommended. I made the same mistake in the past: http://expectedly.org/inclusivetech/avoid-using-flags-to-des...

> welsh (UK flag)

Presumably to distinguish UK Welsh from Patagonian Welsh (Argentine flag): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patagonian_Welsh

This looks like a pretty cool product (I say that, having built something similar back in 2007 or so). I would strongly suggest getting a professional copywriter to fine tune the site content. Or at least a native English speaker. It would be a shame to lose out on business simply because the content looks a bit unprofessional.

I would second this – looks interesting, but the copy is a bit clunky and unclear.

I can only second this. I was asked if I want to do business in German or English and clicked on German. The automated translation was so bad it was out of anything I would consider business worthy.

If I were to recommend such a thing to my clients they would laugh at me. And with every right to do so.

It might be a cool product. I didn't pass the language hurdle to evaluate, though.

Instant bounce for me.

Edit: Typo

Yes, I agree with you. I put a notice to inform which languages have been translated by machine. Human translation is a time-consuming task and is being done over time. Also, Our community is helping us with some language translation.

+Text on the home page has a context, so its machine translation is horrible :-/ The translation problem will be fixed in the next few weeks.

Yes, it's all about brand trust at this stage so best to just get hold of a native English speaker.

> No. We follow a fresh approach; no plugins and no template install are needed. All you require are pre-integrated in Selldone, such as Stripe for Payment, Shippo for Shipping, and many more features exclusively by Selldone. We have provided a wide range of tools to help you set up, sell and manage your business, from Selldone POS for in-store selling to page designer for building catchy pages.

You can't just say something like that on Hacker News of all places. Wasn't this exactly the description of ViaWeb?

Hi,

Can you explain more about it? I tried to find thing related to it and just found a blog post by Paul Graham about ViaWeb 1995. All ecommerce platforms and website builders offer templates and plugins as a feature of their services, we totally remove the needs of those, so it's the difference between selldone and others that I highlighted.

Hint: when Graham and Morris developed Viaweb, there were no such things as templates and plugins.

This isn't to say your site isn't cool; and an all-in-one approach is maybe a good idea in 2022. But claiming it's a "fresh approach" with "no plugins and no template install" on Hacker News is a bit ironic given its founders.

- Modal - Push notification request - Login to google popup - Chat with us notification

How does something that looks so much like spam go live?

Absolutely not :))

We have zero ads, and also, we never run any ads and no ads-plugins on selldone. Check it by Wappalyzer. It happened just because of miss arrangement of things for new visitors. I'll fix it ASAP.

Hey the idea seems great, congrats!. But I would like to make two small observation.

In my opinion the landing page looks a little overwhelming. I see a lot of things moving around and changing.

My native language is Spanish, and some of the translations are a bit too literal.

Best of luck and keep up the good work!

Yes, 100% correct. I added some changes to the home page to determine which languages are machine was translated. We hope that our customers help us to have a fluent and native translation by participating here: https://github.com/selldone/translate

Can I export my website's content and styling if I need to switch Online Store Providers?

Hey pal. You migrate from other platforms with uploading hundreds of products by excel. To transfer the content like product description or articles, you can use word files while you are uploading to Selldone. Selldone will fetch the information from the word precisely.

One more point on technical matters of the website: you can’t depend on icon fonts. The font file may fail to load (networks are not reliable), or the user may just have disallowed pages from choosing their own fonts, for accessibility reasons or just because it makes the web surprisingly much nicer.

Yes, they’re convenient, but iBack to this page as experienced: if I just saw a bunch of squares instead I might hold my peace, but you’re using Material Icons, and Material Icons is the worst. Its ligation technique means that if the font doesn’t load, you get a value that’s much larger than intended, which has a habit of rendering interfaces unusable.con fonts are a technique that you just can’t rely on, even when you’ve taken care of the screen reader accessibility angle. I say it’s best to just avoid icon fonts altogether. They’re seldom sufficient anyway, so if you’re going to use other techniques for parts of the document, you might as well just use other techniques everywhere.

Back to this page as experienced: if I just saw a bunch of squares instead I might hold my peace, but you’re using Material Icons, and Material Icons is the worst. Its ligation technique means that if the font doesn’t load, you get a value that’s much larger than intended, which has a habit of rendering interfaces unusable.

Here’s a preview of what the top of the page looks like for me: https://temp.chrismorgan.info/2022-05-28-selldone-sans-mater...

Want to try it out in full? You could edit the document in the dev tools to remove Material Icons, but to get the authentic experience, in Firefox, settings → Fonts → Advanced → untick “Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selections above”. (I decided to try forcing my own fonts for a week a few months ago, was delighted with the result, and have no intention of going back; it just does marvels for readability. And here is a complete record of the actual breakage I’ve seen: Material Icons on a number of Google properties, most notably Translate and everything in developers.google.com, often quite ruining the page; Material Icons on I think four other sites now, negligible in all cases but this where it really does a number on some parts of the page; a minor unimportant icon font on DuckDuckGo, but they selected decent code points so the fallback glyph is mostly just as good; and one other nonessential icon font yesterday. That’s all. Reflecting now, I’d have expected some breakage from Font Awesome; it looks like Firefox may be special-casing those fonts and permitting them on at least the Font Awesome website, not sure about others.)

(I’ve gone into the detail I have as I think others may find it interesting. It is certainly a tangent.)

Thank you, interesting. We fast move forward, and by testing selldone by more people, a better image will be formed for us.

Just seen that you've used the Zimbabwe flag for ZAR (South Africa) within the currency drop-down.

I think this website built with some online no-code website builder. Very slow right now and bad UX.

Maybe it will be slow on some devices. Can you please provide me with some information about your device and browser? Loading did slow or functionality of it?

About coding :

Absolutely not. As you can see, it's totally PWA, Vue.js, (because needs fast functionality in countries with low-speed internet.) I realized that it works slowly in Safari because of DOM animation. So I disabled autoplay.

The site is probably machine translated. The texts in Czech and Slovak don't make much sense.

To me, this screams shortcuts and falsehood. I immediately start to question what features are really there. Just my 2c.

Yes, The home page language is auto-translated by Google translation API.

I realized that this is abnormal for communicators, so I just updated it to let users know which languages have not yet been translated by humans.

I would like you to work more with selldone and I'm eager to know your opinion about how it works for u.

site is struggling. gl!

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