Hacker News

points by WarmWash 1 day ago | 0 comments

Business 101, page 1, line 1:

"Never put any friction between your customer and giving you money"

Dude, absolutely get rid of the requirement to make an account to get a quote. Understandable(ish) to need one to check-out, but hell "Check-out as guest" was probably one of the most profitable innovations in e-commerce ever.

A longer list of accounts is not worth more than a longer list of orders.

[–] pcdoodle1 1 day ago

I was interested and hit the friction twice, after making an account, It wouldn't accept eagle files or just the raw gerbers. I know it's older but even sparkfun and adafruit designs are in this format.

[–] kevin42 1 day ago

I hesitated to even get a quote when it said I have to upload my schematic and pcb source. Their legal terms offer very little protection or reassurances that they will protect my IP. Giving them source files is was more risky than gerbers to me.

It's industry standard to accept gerbers and BOMs. Now that I've reviewed their legal agreements, using them is a hard no right now.

[–] mmmlinux 1 day ago

I got stuck at make an account and didn't progress farther. am i hearing right they don't accept industry standard gerber files?

[–] mft_ 1 day ago

100%. Let people play and —most importantly— invest time and effort in the platform without friction.

[–] netrap 1 day ago

For PCB quotes yes, but this kind of thing can be gamed by competitors. I think this is why there isn't great price info for many brick and mortar and online shops now..

[–] SlimyHog 1 day ago

> but this kind of thing can be gamed by competitors

What's preventing a competitor from creating an account?

[–] elxr 1 day ago

Which is more important? Blocking competitors from gaming your price quotes, or making the buying experience instantly better for every single customer and potential customer?

[–] j16sdiz 1 day ago

Most of these work have real person to look and validate the cost. Doing that without account would be too little friction and overwhelm the team.

[–] katbyte 1 day ago

Most of the ones (for cnc and sheet metal at least) I’ve used do an estimate while you poke around and select options and then you send it for a final validation and quote.

[–] mft_ 22 hours ago

If you're deliberately creating additional inconvenience to potential customers to handle your own resource/scaling issues... that's a 'you problem', and you need to figure out a better way to run things, or customers will just run to competitors who've already done so.

[–] ilaksh 1 day ago

Right and they already said they have a massive backlog and are trying to increase by 500%.

[–] seddona 1 day ago

Yeah mostly we just haven't got around to it as the burning fire is always increasing capacity vs demand. Defo agree we should not require login though!

[–] myself248 1 day ago

For years, I've said that if there's a "call for quote" where I expect an "add to cart", I'm gone, instantly. I will buy somewhere else.

Now there's a login before I can even figure out if it's a quote or a cart.

Byeeee.