Hey is the blogpost reloading every second (on mobile safari)?
A vending machine, on the internet
61–70 of 92 posts
Re: A vending machine, on the internet
#62> The machine was jammed. It wasn’t a big deal. I shrugged and moved on to buy my groceries. I resonate with the sentiment, but this is very far from my experience selling cheap software products. I had multiple people reach out to me because a software upgrade they paid $2 for 8 years ago stopped working. And they were, like, pissed about it.
You can choose not to engage. What are they going to do, fire you?
Re: A vending machine, on the internet
#63Hey is the blogpost reloading every second (on mobile safari)?
For me it is indeed
Re: A vending machine, on the internet
#64Hey is the blogpost reloading every second (on mobile safari)?
Yes (mobile Firefox)
Re: A vending machine, on the internet
#65Hey is the blogpost reloading every second (on mobile safari)?
Yes, mobile (chrome)
Re: A vending machine, on the internet
#66Your machine has jammed, doesn't work in Firefox (macos). The words dropdown doesn't populate, nor does the style dropdown. I see a JSON.parse uncaught SyntaxError.
Hey man he's out drinking free beer with his buddies, not losing sleep when the machine jams.
(Paraphrasing TFA for anyone confused)
Re: A vending machine, on the internet
#67so this "vending machine" is a postcard drop shipping website?
With a cute gimmick to hook customers and so cheap / low stakes that people will toss a few bucks into it for fun and not think too hard about it. It's like the chocolate bars and other items at the cashier of a supermarket, works entirely off of impulse purchases. The problem for OP is that they aren't physically in front of hundreds of potential customers wandering by. They're on the internet so they need to go viral like the bag of dicks guy or do stuff like blog about it and get posted places like hn.
Re: A vending machine, on the internet
#68> The machine was jammed. It wasn’t a big deal. I shrugged and moved on to buy my groceries. I resonate with the sentiment, but this is very far from my experience selling cheap software products. I had multiple people reach out to me because a software upgrade they paid $2 for 8 years ago stopped working. And they were, like, pissed about it.
I run a free website with a monthly active user count in the 100k range. When something breaks - even if it's a really niche feature or a compatibility issue with an outdated browser - I get an army of furious users contacting me however they can. I can't imagine what would happen to me if the site completely broke or went down for more than a few hours.
Re: A vending machine, on the internet
#69I looked up alien stickers, and you can get 300 of them for $52. Assuming you sell them at 50 cents each and sell out in one month, that's a $98 profit. However, that depends on the cost of placing/location the vending machine.
Re: A vending machine, on the internet
#70The article is not about vending machines even if it seems so. It's about low friction (you don't have to sign up, sign it and the process of buying is very simple) and selling cheap stuff so the customer is tempted to buy without having safeguards (an account, customer support).
The title gave me PTSD flashback to the snack machine at my library, which requires you to scan a QR code, interact with a React app, and do internet banking to access the snacks.
I’d just bring my own snacks at that point