Ask HN (+girlfriends): Review my site - RetailFans.com

I just launched RetailFans.com and would love to get some feedback from the HN community. The site is focused around fashion, clothes, beauty products etc. and works on a similar algorithm to news sites like HN (except that it's product-based) - the latest popular items rise to the top of the list. It's not exactly a hacker's paradise, so if you have someone nearby that more closely fits my target audience, it would be great if you could persuade them to have a play around and look over their shoulder.

Any feedback you can give is much appreciated. I really liked the stream of consciousness feedback that sam_in_nyc gave in this post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=446638 - more of that would be fantastic.

As a side, HN has been a great source of inspiration during this project - thank you.

You should have some sort of contest to get more ppl to sign up and create content. For example, the user with the most votes of the day wins X.

You're driving away new submissions by asking for a login or registration at that stage. At this point you can't afford any barriers between the submitter and getting their item up on the list.

I suppose you could include the login/registration info on the submission page, but I'd allow anonymous submission.

(OK... I'll be the token girl who suggests you change your request to "+ friends" instead of "+ girlfriends" :D)

So... I checked out your site. Some early thoughts: the graphic assets and design could probably be improved a bit. There are a million aesthetics that could go here (urban sophisticate, funked up, modern Japanese a la MUJI), so I won't suggest any single one, but right now it's just a little too much like a YouTuber's personal channel. I think the YouTube channel look can work IF it's matched by a really personal editorial voice, but this site is kind of "crowdsourced," so the design should probably be adjusted for that.

Idea: Stackoverflow, but for retail.

As others have pointed out, you need to entice people to join in, and I will make a radical suggestion here that will kind of disrupt your entire model:

Make it problem-centric, rather than product-centric.

As many other other sites have proven, when the "social object" is a question, it invites participation.

People asking what they should wear to a party, how to get rid of acne... all the same items at play, but just a different paradigm. Kind of like Stackoverflow.com, but for retail stuff. (Yes, I went there.)

Going back to YouTube, there is an incredible YouTube community around retail reviews, reviewing what sucks, what's a rip-off, who's having a sale. Sometimes it's 14 year old girls, sometimes it's adult make-up artist guys. But they are REALLY enthusiastic and doing it "for free." (Proving people like this exist on the Internet.)

You might tap into that.

Example: http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=xsparkage&view=video...

Also, as for the question-centric model, I think Yahoo! Answers also has a lot of questions about this stuff (and yeah, admittedly of varying quality.) You could mine that, too.

Back to design: here's a "digg but for shopping" site you might check out: http://www.stylehive.com/

Maybe for now, you could more manually garden the landing page, using feed of recent comments, so even if they're infrequent, they can be emphasized.