Product idea: Buffer for ecommerce platforms
jasonleow • 26 Apr 2023 •
The other day I was complaining about having to do 3 times the work because my products are on 3 different ecommerce platforms – Gumroad, Payhip and Lemon Squeezy.
It started being a hedge against platform risk, after what I experienced when Flurly shut down. Then it took me a week or more to migrate everything out of Flurly. Maybe I over-compensated a bit by going for 3 platforms. 😅 Now I’m realising that it’s real tedious everytime I wanted to add new products. Worse that every platform is ever slightly so different, so you can’t really copy-paste directly and be done. The optimal image formats are slightly different. Some have fields that others don’t.
A real PAIN. IN. THE. ASS.
I wished there’s a Buffer equivalent for ecommerce platforms. Where I key in once, and it creates the products in the respective formats for each platform. Upload an image, and it auto-crops into the right format or size for the platform. The problem is not every platform has APIs for that. So far only Gumroad seems to have a more fleshed out API endpoints. Lemon Squeezy is read-only. Payhip has only webhooks and Zapier integration.
To save time, maybe what I can do is to build an asset generating app where I key in the fields and it auto-generates the required assets and text for me, with copy buttons for easy copy-paste. A bit like what Headlime version 1 looks like. A side panel to key in my product information, and the right panel where it spits out the text and images for Payhip, Lemon Squeezy and Gumroad.
What do you think? Worth building?
Comments
@Winkletter Wow nice one by ChatGPT. Mostly agree with its scoring and analysis. Interesting how it’s accurate!
Heh heh heh. You should probably know my response by now…
Here’s what ChatGPT says:
Multi-platform Ecommerce Product Manager
The proposed Multi-platform Ecommerce Product Manager aims to ease the pain of managing products across different ecommerce platforms like Gumroad, Payhip, and Lemon Squeezy. This tool would auto-generate required assets and text for each platform based on user inputs, much like how Headlime version 1 operates.
The production cost is moderate, given the need for software development, integration with available APIs, and image processing capabilities. The scalability is relatively high, as the tool can support more ecommerce platforms in the future and manage many products. The customer budget is moderate, as the target customers are likely already investing in multiple ecommerce platforms.
The customer base is limited to sellers who use multiple ecommerce platforms and want to streamline their product management processes. The competition is moderate, as the ecommerce tools market is competitive, but this idea addresses a niche problem that may not be well-served by existing tools. Overall, the Multi-platform Ecommerce Product Manager could be a useful tool for sellers in need of a more efficient way to manage their products across different platforms.