@eriktorenberg Today music merch is nearly untouched by technology and as we looked deeper realized this was an area that tech could not only help fans have a better experience but support artists, labels and merch companies.
#fistbumponpodcast
Hey Product Hunters!
I'm Ed Aten, the founder of Merchbar. We are launching our first product today - an iPhone app to help you discover and buy music from your favorite bands and artists.
We have a huge selection of official merchandise from over 3,000 bands like Led Zeppelin, Jay Z, Britney Spears, Katy Perry, The Misfits, 5SOS and The Beatles. Every day we create featured collections of cool merch (like playing cards, lithographs, hot new vinyl, hoodies, etc) and also have a chart and personalized recommendations.
Productwise tried to make the commerce side incredibly light weight - one thing you won't see until after your first purchase is Double Tap To Buy. Double tap any item and we will bring up a purchase card prefilled with your sizing, shipping and secure credit card information.
AMA! :)
Ed @Aten
Love the app. Congrats @aten! Just ordered a very Brooklyn looking Foo Fighters shirt that I can proudly wear in Williamsburg.
http://www.merchbar.com/merch/26...
I'd love to be able to filter merch by genre, I'm sure it's on the roadmap.
@xBora Yes! Thank you. :)
The Foo Fighter's merch game is so good (This jacket is awesomeeee http://www.merchbar.com/merch/26...)
Genre is super interesting from a data perspective. Knowing you are a nerd, who have you seen doing it well? :)
@aten Oh wow! So cheap too... Yeah, hard to do good genre filtering I guess. We're not that great at it either tbh. Just that I couldn't think of band names I wanted to search for, off the top of my head, so I had to browse to see what I'd want but I didn't want to see the Lady Gaga stuff - at that point I thought maybe if I could just select something like "indie-dance" so I could see merch from people like Cut Copy, Van She, Bag Raiders, Empire of The Sun etc...
@xBora Thats great feedback. We can really easily pull together genre-based collections of great merch in the featured tab for a short term fix. Thanks @producthunt!
@deekay We are working on a bunch of things in this area that I can't discuss publicly, BUT I can say that reception from artists has been great. They know how difficult the purchase experience can be - especially in venue.
Report
@aten How did you build personalization into the Merchbar experience?
@abatalion When we first tried personalization we started by matching merch to the artists in the users library, but what we found was that didn't give us any indicator of merch quality - and when you have 100k items some artists return 3000 items!
So we took a new take and once an artist matched we got into merch-specific recommendations sales data and inventory amounts.
Then we realized there were some really special items that wouldn't show up programatically... so we spent hours ranking 10's of thousands of items by hand.
There's still a whole lot of improvement to make. In the next version we hope to allow users to tell us which recommendations are good (other that just sales).
Your website says "The best way to discover and buy merch from all your favorite bands" but I can't even shop online? It wasn't very clear that this was an app on your website. And then last - how is this any different than places like Insound.com who have been doing this since the late 90's?
@andyfortson Hey Andy. Lets just say... this is just the first product we are launching. Stay tuned!
Insound is a great company for sure. Merchbar is different in that we aren't focused on one genre or scene and are working very hard on unique experiences for discovery and browsing.
Are you an Insound customer? What have you bought?
Backchannel
UnitedMasters
Shazam
Shazam
YesGraph
Farmstead
Jukely
Shazam
Jukely
Shazam
Self-Quarantine Book Club
Shazam
Shazam
Protocol Jobs
Faraday
Shazam