Not really related to the product idea (there've been a raft of gumroad-type services launching lately), but has anyone else noticed the absolute explosion in blurred background images in designs these days? I swear the vast majority of new startup landing pages involve a highly blurred background of some kind.
It makes the landing page similar to a photo captured with an expensive lens on a high quality camera, where the foreground (text and logos, in this case) is in crisp focus, whereas the background is said to be in [bokeh](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokeh).
Yeah, I just realized that myself as I was looking through a bunch of sites that use the effect. I think it's a great trend, for sure, but it's just been popping up everywhere.
Seems like we get a site like this every few days. Are they making crazy money or is there some other reason everyones is making one? Are they just really easy to make? Maybe because payment process disruption has occurred? What's up?
Most of these sites will go down due to one big hurdle. Payments.
Underwriting merchants and get verified by Visa/MasterCard as a payment service provider is a bitch. Aggregating credit cards is a heavily regulated area - but most of these sites are unaware of this issue.
We initially started on Stripe, and got told what we were doing was unregulated/not allowed on stripe, so we then grabbed a coffee with them and learnt about this process.
In fact I was grabbing coffee with Sahil (Gumroad) a few months ago and they've just run into this issue themselves - which they are starting to solve. so you'll probably notice them asking you for more information to underwrite you, unless they find a way around this.
That's also why we ask users to go through an activate process.
Interesting. Does using Stripe Connect bypass this restriction since you are not actually handling any money? Or am I misunderstanding things?
Questionable site name, but well done! :) Cheers
My guess is that it's because payments are much easier thanks to online and developer-friendly merchant systems. PayPal has had IPN for a long time. Then there was BrainTree and open-sourced libraries like ActiveMerchant. This made billing for your own app and some marketplace options easier. We do 3rd party payment aggregation with NextProof (www.nextproof.com) and I still get an email every week from someone who read an HN post I wrote 2+ years ago. But after the financial crisis, most merchant underwriters frowned upon payment aggregation.
Then all the billing/charging services came along. Recurly, Chargify, Spreedly, CheddarGetter, etc. These made billing and charging your own customers easier. They never really handled "products" but I think they paved the way a bit by showing that having easy APIs is important.
Now you have services like Stripe. So, you can do recurring billing and individual charges. You can let your customers setup their own accounts (via Stripe Connect) but still keep the business logic in your app. This also takes care of the disbursements/payout issue and puts the onus of chargebacks on the user. The API is easy. PCI compliance is not as much of a problem. Transaction fees are in line with PayPal (but our BrainTree fees are lower). You can build a tool like this, a marketplace like Etsy, a crowdfunding site, etc. ... If you look through Stripe posts on HN, the biggest gripe is always international payments. I built www.bngal.com because it was easy and fun.
It will be interesting to see what's next ... possibly integration with in-person payment systems (like Square) or maybe cardless payments (linked to bank account?).
Link based selling has been around for years. 2checkout, 1shoppingcart, ejunkie etc...
I started working on Chec in late 2010/early 2011, before groad launched. (https://www.facebook.com/checkoutbyswipe, if you wanna trace down to the day that page was setup) - It's a long story between then and today.
Short Version - University in England -> AngelPad Incubator -> Raised large seed -> Founder Split -> Had to rebuild new company.
My 0.02c: you should change the name. If you already have to append "(kout)" to explain it to hackers, it will be 10x more difficult marketing it to a larger crowd. Or you can start printing stickers that read "you know, without the 'k'" ;-)
Gumroad's a platform for people who want to sell digital things they create and has a 5% fee.
We're a platform for long tail merchants. So for example - you'd sell the psd your not going to use in your app on gumroad, but you'd sell the final app through chec. - if that helps. - we also only charge 3.5% and can do a lot more with downloads + handle physical products.
We position ourselves between Gumroad & Shopify (if they did payments).
on a side note - me and sahil know each other well. Back in april 2011 when Chec was called Kout I actually reached out to him to join Kout after he launch groad on hackernews. He said "you've already built the software why do you need me" but we've kept in touch and occasionally get coffee and discuss the space.
Link based selling has been around for years. 2checkout, 1shoppingcart, paypal, ejunkie, quixly etc have been at it for a while. I came up with the idea for Chec after i ended up throwing a PayPal checkout in an iframe for a info product i was selling.
P.S - if anybody is wondering about the 2 year gap between launching - that story will come to light shortly.
You can, I was just trying to get across the usage cases/types of products.
We've had one user crowd fund for a childs trustfund through us.
Dudes in europe selling rare coffee beans.
Contracts invoicing for their time through the platform.
The generic digital sales cds/ebooks/etc
We cover a wide spectrum of products.
We're trying to create a framework/platform for longtail ecommerce. Not just a platform for people who want to sell digital things they create.
There is definitely overlap between us and groad, but its not our primary focus, for certain things you want to sell its just quicker to sell via them, and thats cool.
You seem to be throwing the word "long tail" into the answer, but I still don't understand what makes Chec different/better than Gumroad for selling "long tail" items. I can sell both my app and my PSDs through both Gumroad and Chec. I really don't see a difference other than the fact that you can set fixed shipping prices. Maybe Gumroad doesn't support Paypal?
Can you compare and contrast the two in a meaningful way?
What can I do with Chec that I can't do with Gumroad? And for that matter, what does Gumroad do that Chec doesn't (yet) do?
Inline Social Payments on Facebook (checkouts in customers newsfeeds)
Social Deals - Based on influence or demographics
And a powerful merchant backend.
as well as a few smaller features around.
Groad is primarily built to deal with digital files, we can handle any type of good.
and that's just in v1. we've got a lot to do, and you'll see us differentiate more in the future.
It might be easier to give the stories behind the idea to help.
So, i created this initially for myself. As a teenager i had resale rights to a DVD info product, and made a couple thousand a month selling it.
I hated the checkout process of 2checkout, 1shoppingcart, ejunkie, and others. So I ended up throwing a paypal checkout in an iframe and creating a post hook script to manage the order.
I wanted a simple, clean, yet powerful app to manage everything, so i made one. The first version of this was built in 2010.
I had one professional/full product to sell and i sold it in fairly high volume, and I didnt need a fully fledged store, i just had a single product to sell. Over time i created more and more minisites to sell different types of info products so i could have some passive income whilst i was at school.
Gumroads story
Sahil created an icon on photoshop that he wasnt going to use, but thought other people would find value in it so he wanted a service that let him sell his "value" to his followers (if that makes sense).
Gumroad allows people to sell their small snippets of value. (primarily digital).
Chec allows smaller merchants to start selling online who have no need for a front end store. Merchants like mmfixed.com etc..
And the way tailoring works is. We detect were the user clicked the link from (using the headers) then tailor the landing page to leverage that source.
I.e. clicked via FB? Let try and use fb connect to prepopulate the checkout, provide an incentive to share this page if they're influential. etc..
You say you are trying to create a platform for longtail ecommerce as opposed to platform to sell things somebody creates.
My point is that why will we need two platforms for these use cases.. To me all these services ( there was one announced yesterday also ) look the same with very minimum differences. Seems like this space is getting crowded.
We went through a pretty messy founder split which will probably come to light in full later on.
in short.
Chec's the original - you can probably tell by how consistant our product is compared. The old cofounder ran off with the corporation and didnt follow through on his agreement to transfer the assets over, after i was asked to stand down and incorporate a new entity - so i had to rebuild the company from the old room back in england.
Looks like a bit better Gumroad. Design is nice, blah blah blah. Why I'm writing is this: when activating account what the hell is supposed to be Seller's Name?
This annoying popup keeps telling me "Must contain only letters, numbers, or - ( ) , . ' &". I must say I haven't seen many names with numbers or ampersands in it. If it's meant to be a username, than ok but say it specifically. If it's really meant to be a name - it's 2013 for Ozzie's sake, use the damn UTF.
Like Devan stated below - "We position ourselves between Gumroad & Shopify (if they did payments)".
In the future, we plan on adding widgets that will work within our application that will cater to some of the cases you pointed out. Some of these widgets will include date/time charging (tutor offering hours/days of work) and subscription based charging (SaaS service you mentioned). Of course, we're not limited to just that.
As for the PSD, we host the file for you so all you need to do is upload the PSD and after the checkout process, the buyer can immediately download it.
It'd be cool if there was some option to post stuff to Craigslist or auto-format copy/markup for Craigslist, but that's just me asking for my own Pony. I like the look and ease of listing stuff.
Checkout how airbnb does this. It's technically not posting directly, but directing user to the right page and populating the post information in a nice looking format. T&C compliant :)
Love your site design - great use of whitespace and big, bold images! It would be nice to see a sample of a cart/page before signing up so you know what your "shop" will look like..
We provide region specific shipping options for physical products, and will be doing tight integrations with UPS, Fedex, RoyalMail apis to help you with fulfilling physical items.
It seems a bit harsh. The seller has no control over the chargebacks and you actually 'punish' the seller for them and not the buyer. Digital files chargebacks are more common than you think. How do you decide if the chargeback should receive a strike in the even that the buyer simple doesn't answer any contact requests(happened to me more then once). I've also had buyers lie about the purchase when in fact I had IP and email proof that they wore actually the ones buying but the chargeback was submitted(and approved) because they said they wore not the ones who made the transaction. Is anyone else using this 3 strike rule?
