Show Posts
Here are my thoughts on how to improve the site. This is from the perspective of a buyer. Please don't take these as fatal criticisms; rather these are honest observations that show how you can improve your service.
1) Do away with the requests for unneeded info. e.g., lose the address fields. (You already said you plan to do this.) Streamline the process. Ask the user to fill in one of two fields, either how many dollars they want to spend, or how many BTC they want to buy. The drop-downs are confusing, which leads me into ...
2) Your purchasing system is meaningless. If I hadn't seen this thread, I would have assumed that I could buy unlimited bitcoins at $10/BTC. On its face, that's exactly what your site promises. You need to clarify that the buyer is specifying how much money in dollars they wish to spend, NOT how many bitcoins they're buying. You also need to integrate the MtGox APIs to quote the buyer the price of each BTC, and calculate how many BTC they will get for their purchase. All this has to be shown upfront, and locked in either at time of ordering or at time of consummation. In turn, that opens up door #3 ...
3) You have to have some way of resolving what happens to orders when the price of currency fluctuates. e.g., I placed an order today at $100/BTC, but no BTC were available. Tomorrow the price crashes to $10/BTC, and for whatever reason someone lists some for sale. What rate do I pay? Conversely, if the price rises to $200/BTC, what happens then? This needs to be clearly spelled out for both the buyer and seller.
4) Right now, you use two separate systems, which require two registrations. This is unneeded friction for your users. I understand the allure of using a hosted ticketing platform, but you have to either find a way to integrate the logins so that one registration works for both, or else toss out the hosted platform and integrate a ticket module of some sort directly into your main Web site. (As a side note, the emails from your ticketing system were disturbingly slow. It took more than a half hour for the registration mails to show up in my inbox.)
5) I haven't tried the seller interface, so this may already be there. You have to have some kind of price limit system. Again, using the example from #3, if I list my BTC for sale when the price is $100, maybe I don't want to sell them any more if the price drops to $10. I'd be all kinds of pissed off if I found my coins sold for a fraction of their value without my consent.
6) How do you handle odd-sized orders? Say you have two sellers, each listing 3BTC. A buyer comes along and orders 5 BTC worth. Does the buyer have to make two deposits in two separate accounts? What if you get 30 buyers each wanting 0.1BTC? (about $10 each at current rates, so one "unit" that you're advertising.) Does the seller have to verify 30 individual deposits of $10 each? I can only see two solutions, though hopefully you can think of others. Either ask the seller to fix the order size and lock that in, or you have to collate the BTC into a single account, accept the buyer's payment into your own bank account, and distribute the funds appropriately to the sellers. The first option breaks your flexibility paradigm, and the second turns your into a middleman instead of a matchmaker, which has legal consequences.
1) Do away with the requests for unneeded info. e.g., lose the address fields. (You already said you plan to do this.) Streamline the process. Ask the user to fill in one of two fields, either how many dollars they want to spend, or how many BTC they want to buy. The drop-downs are confusing, which leads me into ...
2) Your purchasing system is meaningless. If I hadn't seen this thread, I would have assumed that I could buy unlimited bitcoins at $10/BTC. On its face, that's exactly what your site promises. You need to clarify that the buyer is specifying how much money in dollars they wish to spend, NOT how many bitcoins they're buying. You also need to integrate the MtGox APIs to quote the buyer the price of each BTC, and calculate how many BTC they will get for their purchase. All this has to be shown upfront, and locked in either at time of ordering or at time of consummation. In turn, that opens up door #3 ...
3) You have to have some way of resolving what happens to orders when the price of currency fluctuates. e.g., I placed an order today at $100/BTC, but no BTC were available. Tomorrow the price crashes to $10/BTC, and for whatever reason someone lists some for sale. What rate do I pay? Conversely, if the price rises to $200/BTC, what happens then? This needs to be clearly spelled out for both the buyer and seller.
4) Right now, you use two separate systems, which require two registrations. This is unneeded friction for your users. I understand the allure of using a hosted ticketing platform, but you have to either find a way to integrate the logins so that one registration works for both, or else toss out the hosted platform and integrate a ticket module of some sort directly into your main Web site. (As a side note, the emails from your ticketing system were disturbingly slow. It took more than a half hour for the registration mails to show up in my inbox.)
5) I haven't tried the seller interface, so this may already be there. You have to have some kind of price limit system. Again, using the example from #3, if I list my BTC for sale when the price is $100, maybe I don't want to sell them any more if the price drops to $10. I'd be all kinds of pissed off if I found my coins sold for a fraction of their value without my consent.
6) How do you handle odd-sized orders? Say you have two sellers, each listing 3BTC. A buyer comes along and orders 5 BTC worth. Does the buyer have to make two deposits in two separate accounts? What if you get 30 buyers each wanting 0.1BTC? (about $10 each at current rates, so one "unit" that you're advertising.) Does the seller have to verify 30 individual deposits of $10 each? I can only see two solutions, though hopefully you can think of others. Either ask the seller to fix the order size and lock that in, or you have to collate the BTC into a single account, accept the buyer's payment into your own bank account, and distribute the funds appropriately to the sellers. The first option breaks your flexibility paradigm, and the second turns your into a middleman instead of a matchmaker, which has legal consequences.
You have given me a lot to think about. I appreciate the comments, and I know that the way the website is set up right now is not perfect, and there is room for improvement. What I want to do before anything else is to simply grow accustomed to the day to day activities of the business. Creating policies and procedures, macros for the helpdesk, responding to customer inquiries and such. These things need to take priority over anything else. Ensuring these things are perfected first will translate into a better experience for the end user.
The website is a week old. It will improve with time.
