AdList.co.nz - We never really left!

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EdenCoder

49 posts

Geek

#1376508 30-Aug-2015 18:08

http://www.adlist.co.nz/

AdList is up - albeit briefly

We have been hard at work, building everything you can think of. We decided that we should throw at least "something" up to show you all what we have been up to.

Check it out, give us your feedback, let us know where we can improve. Please also keep in mind that what you see there is not the final product, we chucked up an early alpha version to gauge peoples response.

Cheers

AdList - The Kiwi Alternative

DravidDavid

1907 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 305

#1376520 30-Aug-2015 18:34

EdenCoder: http://www.adlist.co.nz/

AdList is up - albeit briefly

We have been hard at work, building everything you can think of. We decided that we should throw at least "something" up to show you all what we have been up to.

Check it out, give us your feedback, let us know where we can improve. Please also keep in mind that what you see there is not the final product, we through up an early alpha version to gauge peoples response.

Cheers

Looking good.

The Home button thing in the top left hand corner of the screen does nothing, nor is there any links in the header or footer to follow. So I'll just comment on the look. :)

I'm not a fan of the mobile layout on my desktop. The mis-matched tile theme you've got going on distracts my eye and frustrates me. So does TradeMe's new layout. It's too cluttered and full of crap I couldn't care less about. I like the light colours though.

This may or may not be in the pipeline, or perhaps even technically impossible. But I've always been a fan of multiple themes to suit different users. TradeMe recently pushed a new theme on everyone and I hate it. I'd love to be able to choose the old theme I knew, or perhaps a different theme all together that I personally found more intuitive.

I feel like your tile solution in a bounding box on a loop underneath the primary categories on your main page would be a much more readable and user friendly. By primary categories, I mean the usual "Automotive", "Property", "Electrical", "General Appliances"...etc.

I'm by no means a builder of websites, but I really do find the attitude of big players annoying when it comes to forcing random items down my throat and themes I don't like, but get anyway.

I'm looking forward to seeing more progress!

All the best. :)

freitasm

BDFL - Memuneh
80653 posts

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Geekzone

Lifetime subscriber

#1376525 30-Aug-2015 18:37

Are we non-logged in visitors supposed to be able to bid?

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EdenCoder

49 posts

Geek

#1376530 30-Aug-2015 18:49

DravidDavid:
EdenCoder: http://www.adlist.co.nz/

AdList is up - albeit briefly

We have been hard at work, building everything you can think of. We decided that we should throw at least "something" up to show you all what we have been up to.

Check it out, give us your feedback, let us know where we can improve. Please also keep in mind that what you see there is not the final product, we chucked up an early alpha version to gauge peoples response.

Cheers

Looking good.

The Home button thing in the top left hand corner of the screen does nothing, nor is there any links in the header or footer to follow. So I'll just comment on the look. :)

I'm not a fan of the mobile layout on my desktop. The mis-matched tile theme you've got going on distracts my eye and frustrates me. So does TradeMe's new layout. It's too cluttered and full of crap I couldn't care less about. I like the light colours though.

This may or may not be in the pipeline, or perhaps even technically impossible. But I've always been a fan of multiple themes to suit different users. TradeMe recently pushed a new theme on everyone and I hate it. I'd love to be able to choose the old theme I knew, or perhaps a different theme all together that I personally found more intuitive.

I feel like your tile solution in a bounding box on a loop underneath the primary categories on your main page would be a much more readable and user friendly. By primary categories, I mean the usual "Automotive", "Property", "Electrical", "General Appliances"...etc.

I'm by no means a builder of websites, but I really do find the attitude of big players annoying when it comes to forcing random items down my throat and themes I don't like, but get anyway.

I'm looking forward to seeing more progress!

All the best. :)

Wow, actually helpful feedback!

The idea with the 'boxes' is to price ads by their size rather than their nature. You would expect to pay more for an ad that is 2x2 rather than 1x1; however you would not expect to pay more for an ad that is a car versus a boat (like some people do).

Very simply, our pricing is one square per fortnight is $1, and if the ad costs $1 it is free.

I love the idea of different themes however; I cant see how we wouldn't be able to support this in future. Although right now we are just working on getting one thing working as well as we can.

Lastly your idea about a bounding box is exactly what we have done in the full version (let me know if i got this wrong). When someone is searching for something, it is expected that they start with everything and slowly filter down to a few items; to make this more user friendly we are trying to solve this problem with the grid, and being able to reorder and add/subtract items from the grid on the fly seemed like a good solution.

For the frontpage on the full version we simply have a few categories: 'hot ads', 'latest ads', 'my ads', 'things that you might want (we dont know the name of this one yet)' and possible a few that the user can add by themselves (eg a saved search).

freitasm: Are we non-logged in visitors supposed to be able to bid?

Yes,

We tried to open up as much functionality for the approval tests as we could; the ads will never actually be set as 'won' or 'lost' however.

We are also looking to partner up with some businesses that may be interested in listing what they have on adlist, especially for when we launch. We dont want to launch with a ghost town and are very motivated to find people that might like to help us out in that respect.

Thanks for the feedback so far! Looking forward to hearing more!

Alex,
Founder

AdList - The Kiwi Alternative

EdenCoder

49 posts

Geek

#1378303 2-Sep-2015 14:52

We have pushed a few of the things we were talking about earlier, however it is difficult to push some things and not everything...

* frontpage now shows sort of what the categories will look like
* HTTPS/SPDY3 enabled on https://adlist.co.nz

We are still looking for more business partners who wish to take advantage of our analytics and integration software. Currently we are finalizing integration with woocommerce, drupal commerce, magento, and a standard REST api for the rest of us.

We will announce these in the coming weeks with the launch of our support forum. However if you are a business and want to check out what we are doing, please send me a direct message here and we will be in touch.

Cheers!

AdList - The Kiwi Alternative

DravidDavid

1907 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 305

#1378367 2-Sep-2015 15:28

The tiles thing is growing on me.

I did notice the elongated tiles in all categories aren't displaying properly if that's of any help. Using Firefox 40.0.3. Not sure if that's the latest version or not.

I hope "Coder" doesn't manage to out-bid me on Paddington Bear! (EDIT: It appears I am Coder!)

This is my first time bidding and I like the way the system says "Successful" when bidding, but it's a bit too easy. I invision 8 year olds spamming the button or accidental bids without two-step confirmation. Perhaps a compromise between the two would be to have a toggle on the page. That way if you're not in a rush, you can toggle fast bidding off and allow for that additional safety measure. But the ability to turn it on would mean you don't lose out on an intense final 10 second bidding war trying to click past the "Yes I want to place this bid" confirmation.

I clicked list an ad and am experiencing similar UI issues to the screenshot above. Could be my browser though. I'm also struggling to work out how to set a title, so I'm guessing that function isn't working yet. :)

Other than the above the interface seems bitsy. I don't feel the flow like one usually would on other auction sites. It's hard to explain and will probably be fixed later, but that's just how I feel when interacting with it. I feel as if you're working on functionality right now, rather than design. So this probably isn't very useful feedback right now.

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EdenCoder

49 posts

Geek

#1378383 2-Sep-2015 15:54

DravidDavid: The tiles thing is growing on me.

I did notice the elongated tiles in all categories aren't displaying properly if that's of any help. Using Firefox 40.0.3. Not sure if that's the latest version or not.

I hope "Coder" doesn't manage to out-bid me on Paddington Bear! (EDIT: It appears I am Coder!)

This is my first time bidding and I like the way the system says "Successful" when bidding, but it's a bit too easy. I invision 8 year olds spamming the button or accidental bids without two-step confirmation. Perhaps a compromise between the two would be to have a toggle on the page. That way if you're not in a rush, you can toggle fast bidding off and allow for that additional safety measure. But the ability to turn it on would mean you don't lose out on an intense final 10 second bidding war trying to click past the "Yes I want to place this bid" confirmation.

I clicked list an ad and am experiencing similar UI issues to the screenshot above. Could be my browser though. I'm also struggling to work out how to set a title, so I'm guessing that function isn't working yet. :)

Other than the above the interface seems bitsy. I don't feel the flow like one usually would on other auction sites. It's hard to explain and will probably be fixed later, but that's just how I feel when interacting with it. I feel as if you're working on functionality right now, rather than design. So this probably isn't very useful feedback right now.

Wow you're right, that is a bit of a mess right now. I will see what i can push up at COB to fix that (looks like we are missing one of the SASS files somewhere).

You are completely right about the spamming the bidding button, I think there should be some sort of initial modal that forces the user to pick their shipping preference or something that would act as a second step confirmation; this wouldn't be difficult to implement. Although a simple toggle would also do for a safety switch in after second confirmation.

As for the listing screen; it seems the same issue is present here. Did you make it up to this screen?

Title is part of the steps required before an ad can be submitted; although i dont think we automatically take the user to the pane -> input that is incorrect on submit as yet. Something we will amend tonight.

In all honesty, we are only just acceptance testing the product as we speak; So everything we are being told is getting reviewed and implemented almost on the fly. The end result for us is to have a product that is intuitive enough for people to use as well as innovative enough that people would see its use. At the moment you are right; what is shown does not meet these criteria as yet. But stick with us and we will get there!

Im going to see if the guys can push anything else up tonight that could show of a bit more of what we have built!

Thanks again David! Awesome work.

Cheers

AdList - The Kiwi Alternative

EdenCoder

49 posts

Geek

#1378387 2-Sep-2015 15:58

For anyone who is interested, here is a snapshot of our technology stack:

NGINX SPDY enabled load balancing server with php-fpm proxy
PHP7 as default (although acceptance is running on php56)
MongoDB for the database
Redis for model and data caching
SASS for preprocessing
jQuery/prototype for javascript (console eden.adList to take a peak)
Proprietary framework named 'eden'
MaxCDN for CDN (although not for testing)

Let me know what you think!

AdList - The Kiwi Alternative

EdenCoder

49 posts

Geek

#1387082 14-Sep-2015 11:07

Hi all,

We have been actively searching for some business partners for launch. We have managed to get a few and are currently importing their products.

AdList now has 11700 active listings; with about 30000 in the que. We decided we would partially launch features as they become available (such as the import functionality and AdList products API). We are right now pushing toward launching the search bundle which will enable us to search for things much more easily than normal. We are focusing our attention on the electronics and computers section of the website right now also.

For now all links to priced ads will go directly to the business they came from.

Check it out!
Alex

AdList - The Kiwi Alternative

EdenCoder

49 posts

Geek

#1389655 18-Sep-2015 12:29

Hi again,

We just re-enabled registrations after pushing some more of the profile related stuff.

AdList will allow you to register with facebook, google, and twitter.

Cheers

AdList - The Kiwi Alternative

Jeeves

301 posts

Ultimate Geek
+1 received by user: 90

#1391663 22-Sep-2015 09:18

I may be kind of dumb here - but I can't seem to find an about page or anything of the sort. Is this an auction site, a classifieds site, a shop front kind of site like amazon... ?

You really need an about/how it works page...

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EdenCoder

49 posts

Geek

#1391712 22-Sep-2015 10:35

Jeeves: I may be kind of dumb here - but I can't seem to find an about page or anything of the sort. Is this an auction site, a classifieds site, a shop front kind of site like amazon... ?

You really need an about/how it works page...

You're right,

We haven't really thought about these sections of the website yet (typical developer team), but we will be focusing on them very soon.

The original idea for AdList was to build a website that could rival TradeMe (dreams are free). We realized very quickly that building a more functional website was not going to be enough, at least initially. We decided that in order to give ourselves the highest chance of being successful in this heavily monopolized area we needed to focus on getting businesses to use adlist so that there are actually products for us to market; the auctions and buy/sell/trade aspect would shift back into focus once people realize we exist.

That said, we have spent a lot of time thinking about and attempting to implement a newer and simpler way for people to create auctions/classifieds/priced ads which we call the 'ad designer (https://adlist.co.nz/ad - excuse the current version)'. From a business perspective, we need traffic in order to make it worthwhile paying to list stuff with us (it is free to list a 1x1 ad for 2 weeks), and we cant get traffic without some form of advertising, and advertising will probably not work if we have nothing to show people that are advertised to. It is the whole chicken and egg situation that many failed businesses like ours have tried to solve. Our solution is simply to partner with a select few kiwi businesses; offer them the advertising we would be paying for anyway; and have their products on adlist.

We are about to launch the 'AdList Dashboard' for our business users which makes this very easy. As part of a business subscription (which we have handed out for free to our partners) businesses will have access to resources that will help them utilize AdList its fullest. Further we plan to charge a monthly fee for this regardless of the amount of ads a business wants to list (no more $12 per listing). Businesses with 50000 products will no longer have to budget a massive section of their income on TradeMe fees if they switch.

We have opened the dashboard up for preview on https://adlist.co.nz/dashboard, you need to be logged in. see below the preview:

This will only be accessible to business users once we fully launch however.

I will get on to the guys and see if we cant come up with a page for our mission statement and business objectives.

Cheers

AdList - The Kiwi Alternative

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