How do you guys estimate prices? Is it possible to input a # of cards to get better estimates?
I can also see some interesting business uses for this (it's what I'd use this for), so just curious.
@ay_o Great question! We currently pull a base price through the affiliate programs, and then (with some magic) estimate the cost for around 50 cards (the typical household order).
We then layer on the most recent coupon codes. We're working on creating rough pricing models for larger orders (like your own). You'd input quantity, and we'd estimate price. Is there anything else you'd need for business?
@brandonjcarl i know @hal2001 was just telling me you had a couple crazy pivots. can you tell us about them? it might help makers building stuff to have hope when something goes awry :)
@eriktorenberg@hal2001 Sure thing!
So it goes...the main product my company offers revolves around automating wedding planning. We still haven't officially launched to the public, but we've had tens of thousands of guests entered. You can (unofficially) find out a lot more at http://www.hellowedding.com/free.
Our (wedding) users love how easy we make it to enter names and collect addresses. So as a bit of a side project, we adapted this to holiday cards a few weeks ago (a bigger market in many ways). After launching into beta, we found out that people buy holiday cards *before* they know how many they need, and collect addresses later. So over the course of a few days we ripped out the holiday card "store". Great Holiday Cards is the result! Next year we should be able to offer a more complete suite of services.
This is awesome, I always procrastinate buying holiday cards... but my friends (and investors / business contacts) really do love receiving them. @brandonjcarl what inspired you to build this?
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This is a great idea! I love the highly specialized nature of this product. Is the selection curated or a direct feed from the vendors? Either way the design is sleek and the interaction snappy.
@sjbroe Thanks Sam!
The vendors are curated, and the initial order of the feed is curated (some of my favorites). The remainder of the cards are shuffled. I wanted to make sure that the initial landing experience was strong while not overlaying too much of my own personal bias on the rest.
@estherpark Thanks Esther! So glad you like it. If you think of any features, let me know!
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Would be nice to see a larger list of sellers. Some kind of Shopify integration would really open this site up to the vast number of Indie greeting card sellers.
@ShloimeFlg That's a great idea! I know that Zazzle and others work with Indie designers, while providing the printing and distribution. With your comment, would you imagine that we basically handle interface, while leaving printing and distribution to the Indie providers?
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@brandonjcarl Exactly right. Many Indie designers have their own greeting card shops on Shopify and use companies like Printful to print and fulfill. A friend of mine, for example, has uglynotes.com up on Shopify, and I'm sure your site would benefit from niche collections like his.
Thanks @hal2001! Ironically, we haven't ordered our cards either. Too busy building the site :)
I created Great Holiday Cards last week because I wanted to be able to browse cards from my favorite vendors in one place (including coupons!). I found that there were so many specials that it was hard to keep them straight. I was inspired @ScottBelsky’s Medium post on Interface Layer (http://bit.ly/interfacelayer), it's well worth a read!.
The challenge was to allow you to filter some 2,000 cards in real-time, while being totally responsive, and coming in at about 40K gzipped (everything but pictures of the cards). Was a fun little challenge in material design and vanilla javascript. Happy to answer any other q’s!
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