I'll blog about this later this week, but you'd be surprised how unalike geeks and customers are on this one. Geeks perceive value from playing with software. Many customers perceive negative value from having to interact with software.
At the risk of stating the obvious, no HNer will ever buy ShopLocket, for somewhat hyperbolic values of "no". Optimizing for the trialing preferences of HNers, who consume many free trials but pay for fairly little in general (and near nothing in terms of hosted shopping carts for non-technical sell-atoms businesses), is directly against your interests for optimizing the first use experience of people who trial very little software but have a hair-on-fire problem in their non-technical sell-atoms business.
There's a related sell-the-sizzle-not-the-steak issue where someone is not buying the particular CSS/JS of the shopping cart but rather the ability to improve their life by selling things online. You do not necessarily need to show them a shopping cart to tell that story.
Again, further comments later this week at length.
At the risk of stating the obvious, no HNer will ever buy ShopLocket, for somewhat hyperbolic values of "no". Optimizing for the trialing preferences of HNers, who consume many free trials but pay for fairly little in general (and near nothing in terms of hosted shopping carts for non-technical sell-atoms businesses), is directly against your interests for optimizing the first use experience of people who trial very little software but have a hair-on-fire problem in their non-technical sell-atoms business.
There's a related sell-the-sizzle-not-the-steak issue where someone is not buying the particular CSS/JS of the shopping cart but rather the ability to improve their life by selling things online. You do not necessarily need to show them a shopping cart to tell that story.
Again, further comments later this week at length.