[HN Gopher] Show HN: Sell.app - A simple way to sell digital goods
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Show HN: Sell.app - A simple way to sell digital goods
Author : youseff
Score : 77 points
Date : 2021-07-22 12:49 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (sell.app)
(TXT) w3m dump (sell.app)
| laurent123456 wrote:
| > 1. Simplicity; Unlike competitors whose interfaces overwhelm
| first-time seller of digital products, we decided to keep our
| interface as minimal/simple as possible.
|
| Is that really the number 1 differentiation point? Because it's
| common that new services claim to be simpler than competitors -
| and why shouldn't they be? They have less features at this point,
| so that would be weird if they were more complicated.
|
| I'd be more curious to know how the service compares to Stripe
| for instance.
| youseff wrote:
| Agreed on the first point, however the common thing of
| storefronts like ours is that they start with digital goods,
| then tack in physical products, email marketing, affiliate
| marketing, and so on. All on the same interface.
|
| Stripe and SellApp go hand in hand. Where Stripe is a payment
| processor, SellApp is the storefront that takes care of the
| pre-sales and after-sales process including product delivery,
| security, order replacement, etc.
|
| That said, Stripe does seem to have recently launched a new
| product known as "Payment Links" which may eventually grow out
| to something similar to SellApp.
| gnicholas wrote:
| > _It 's completely free to start selling on SellApp, with no
| fees being taken (though we'll introduce a 3% fee per sale in a
| couple months)_
|
| How does this stack up against Stripe or other platforms? What
| will the all-in fee be for credit card sales?
| baby wrote:
| Stripe is less, but they don't deliver the goods for you
| gnicholas wrote:
| How does the delivery happen, and what makes this a value
| add? I'm trying to figure out how this would work for the
| various digital products I sell, and I'm not quite sure I
| understand what is difficult about delivery.
| youseff wrote:
| Delivery happens when the customer successfully completes a
| payment. The value add is this:
|
| If you sell e.g. a downloadable product, it's relatively
| easy to manually email out a link to it every time you make
| a sale.
|
| But when you start to grow and/or see an increase in sales,
| you'll be wasting a lot of time on delivering that eBook to
| all those customers. This, x10, for other digital content
| like license keys.
|
| And if you look at it from the customer's perspective: you
| don't want to wait for the seller to come online and send a
| link to the product you paid for hours ago. You want it
| instantly.
|
| That is where the simplicity of SellApp comes in. We handle
| the payment, automatically send out the product to the
| customer, and help the customer get in touch with you in
| case anything is wrong with their purchase.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Thanks for explaining. Would this work for an ebook that
| has unique watermarking per customer, or does it have to
| be the same exact downloadable each time? Other than
| ebooks, what are other popular product types that you're
| seeing?
| youseff wrote:
| Not a worry. We don't have eBook watermarking/stamping
| yet, so every customer will get the same exact eBook.
|
| That said, it's relatively easy to implement this
| specific feature (pretty sure I've got the relevant code
| from our old codebase somewhere) if/when a seller
| requests it.
|
| It's mostly either downloadable goods, or serial-based
| products, but we launched just last week so I anticipate
| the type of popular product types will change as we grow.
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| Do you have some example sites using this? I don't see any demos.
|
| How does this compare to SnipCart?
| youseff wrote:
| Hey there, there is indeed an example store which you can view
| here: https://admin.sell.app/
|
| Not too familiar with SnipCart, but looking at what they offer
| (& correct me if I'm wrong here) it's a little more technical
| than SellApp.
|
| SnipCart lets you upload a product to their platform, but then
| they return HTML/JS which you have to add to your own site.
| That means you have to purchase your own domain and hosting,
| then enter the relevant code to your server, plus take care of
| the site's design and whatnot.
|
| SellApp has a different approach. As soon as you sign up, you
| can create your own storefront by specifying the subdomain
| you'd like (such as admin.sell.app) and you're good to go. Any
| product created in the dashboard, will then be visible &
| purchaseable on your storefront. No code/configuration
| required.
| easytiger wrote:
| What is a "digital product"?
| youseff wrote:
| Great question! We see a digital product as anything that can
| be delivered online.
|
| This is generally subdivided into 4 different types:
|
| 1. A file which you can download, for example an eBook.
|
| 2. A text-based product, such as a game key or license code.
|
| 3. An online service, like creating a logo for someone.
|
| 4. A dynamic delivery which lets you programmatically perform
| certain actions once a payment is successfully processed. A
| good example is automatically upgrading someone's account on
| your forum (or Discord channel)
| [deleted]
| IanCal wrote:
| With the last two, does that mean I could generate a digital
| product/file in response to some filled in information when
| the customer is ordering?
|
| I've been interested in generating procedural art, and some
| other similar things and that's been a sticking point.
| youseff wrote:
| We do indeed have 'additional info' planned.
|
| When that's implemented, the customer will be able to enter
| any kind of detail you'd like them to (like their username,
| MAC address, or something else) and we'd pass that info on
| to you when they successfully check out.
|
| With that, you can then automatically perform actions and
| deliver the digital product/file.
| fonix wrote:
| what about subscriptions? say providing a service or website
| access to a user every month?
| youseff wrote:
| Subscriptions are indeed planned.
|
| Our roadmap currently looks something like this: API ->
| subscriptions -> product embeds -> basket system (so a
| customer can purchase multiple digital items from the same
| store)
| floatingatoll wrote:
| Congrats on the launch! I have a question.
|
| Is the EUP restriction against 'adult content' included solely
| because that restriction is placed upon you by one or more of
| your implementing vendors, platforms, etc?
| youseff wrote:
| Hey there, thank you!
|
| The restriction in our AUP is indeed because payment processors
| (unfortunately) still frown upon platforms which help
| facilitate the sale of 'adult content'. Without it, it's
| unlikely we'll be accepted to e.g. Stripe Connect and/or PayPal
| for Marketplaces further down the line.
| stevenicr wrote:
| I'd like to suggest you add the words sexually and porn to
| your AUP -
|
| first thing I did was go to that page and ctr-f > "sex" -
| then "porn" - nothing was found.. so it created interest..
|
| then I saw "are prohibited by the payment processing service;
| or " near the top and went oh my - many people are not going
| to get that this is the cop out -
|
| I came back to the comment thread here and did the ctrl-f
| 'adult' - and found the answer.
| youseff wrote:
| Ah, good suggestion! Will add that in to prevent confusion
| virgil_disgr4ce wrote:
| Damn, how much did it cost to buy sell.com?
| pradn wrote:
| They don't have sell.com, just sell.app - but that must have
| been expensive as well.
| rgbrgb wrote:
| Do you have an example storefront we could look at? I think that
| would be a great link from the homepage to help people understand
| what this thing is.
|
| On the biz front, it seems like you guys are taking on gumroad?
| How are you thinking about getting users? I'm not super familiar
| with how gumroad does distribution.
| youseff wrote:
| Hey there, I do indeed have an example storefront which you can
| view here: https://admin.sell.app/
|
| You are right in saying that we are taking on Gumroad. IIRC,
| most of Gumroad's traction has been organic/word-of-mouth, with
| little/no money spent on paid advertising.
|
| We're still figuring out the best way to acquire users at scale
| by experimenting with both conventional (Reddit/Twitter ads)
| and unconventional (Discord channel/niche forum advertising)
| methods.
|
| PS: Great suggestion! I'll be setting up & linking an example
| storefront on the homepage shortly.
| porcc wrote:
| Why you and not gumroad?
| youseff wrote:
| Great question! Gumroad seems to be focusing more and more
| on creators with a large following and is pivoting towards
| that segment of the market. This includes the decision to
| diversify into physical products, tipping, subscribing to a
| user (like Patreon), and so on.
|
| Given their refocus/pivot, it's made their interface a
| little too complex/overwhelming for new sellers and/or
| sellers who just want to sell digital products without all
| the hassle. SellApp is built for this segment of the
| market.
| toefee wrote:
| The success of Gumroad is in part due to the stores-beget-
| stores snowball effect: if someone is successful selling
| online, those that want to emulate the success -- of which
| there are many -- will gravitate towards the platforms their
| eyeballs are on.
|
| I suggest setting aside paid advertising, and instead invest
| in paying creators[1] to switch platforms. For example, pick
| some medium successful Gumroad creators (maybe they do
| $1k/sales per month) and offer them a 20% bonus on each sale
| they make through your platform. A single creator using your
| platform to make sales will deliver far more value than
| thousands in paid adverts -- and you can directly link spend
| to revenue, which is nice for attribution of spend.
|
| [1] I'd pick creators who operate in the creator niche, e.g:
| people who make content about running an online business,
| because they're most likely to convert into platform users.
| gotostatement wrote:
| whats the purpose of showing "Free store" - why would a
| customer care about that, and why would a seller be okay with
| that?
| youseff wrote:
| That's a small experiment I'm carrying out.
|
| People on the internet tend to love free 'badges' - if
| you've ever been active on a forum, they're full of them.
|
| The "Free store" badge is what a seller gets when they
| create a store on SellApp. If they then decide to upgrade
| their store, the badge will be replaced by a more colorful
| "Premium store" or an even fancier "Advanced store" badge.
|
| I want to check two things: 1. Whether the "Free store"
| badge bothers new sellers 2. Whether sellers are more
| incentivized to upgrade in order to get the fancier
| "Premium store" or "Advanced store" badge
| gotostatement wrote:
| hmmm, I feel like that is "user-hostile", might not be a
| great idea for a nascent service. I think that if you're
| starting a new service you would want to pump it up, make
| every user feel awesome so they keep using it. you can
| incentivize upgrade with a carrot without punishing free
| with a stick. i.e. maybe a "premium" badge only, not the
| "free" badge. I dont anticipate anyone will be happy that
| their cheapness is being advertised
| youseff wrote:
| I haven't thought about it like that. Will definitely go
| about it the way you suggested and remove the "free"
| badge.
|
| Appreciate the suggestion and feedback!
| smoldesu wrote:
| For future reference, Hacker News shouldn't be used as an
| "unconventional advertising method"
| youseff wrote:
| Heh, that's definitely not the case here! I don't think
| there's very many digital good sellers active on Hacker
| News to begin with.
| smoldesu wrote:
| I would argue that most people on HN _exclusively_ export
| digital goods.
| youseff wrote:
| Hey HN!
|
| We recently launched SellApp and wanted to share it with the HN
| community.
|
| SellApp is a simple way to sell digital products online. A
| digital goods seller can spin up a storefront in less than a
| minute and start selling instantly, while we automatically take
| care of all the difficult parts -- delivery, checkout, payment
| methods, security, and more.
|
| We built SellApp with a small (remote) team of 3, in a little
| less than 4 months from start to finish (happy to elaborate more
| on how)
|
| What makes SellApp different from competitors:
|
| 1. Simplicity; Unlike competitors whose interfaces overwhelm
| first-time seller of digital products, we decided to keep our
| interface as minimal/simple as possible.
|
| 2. Payments; where other storefronts tend to custody funds and
| pay sellers out after 7-14 days, we enable sellers to receive
| earnings instantly.
|
| 3. Pricing: Alternatives either charge a high monthly recurring
| subscription to start, or take anywhere between 8% to 25%+ in
| commission per sale. It's completely free to start selling on
| SellApp, with no fees being taken (though we'll introduce a 3%
| fee per sale in a couple months)
|
| Happy to answer any questions and go more in-depth on the
| technical side of things.
| karolisram wrote:
| So what's the secret sauce for building it less than 4 months ?
| [deleted]
| youseff wrote:
| One of the things I did, was draft a complete design of the
| project structure in advance of actually writing any code. This
| included only the essential features with no additional
| bells/whistles in order to prevent feature creep.
|
| By the time my two team members formally joined, the above
| design was already split up in manageable chunks of tasks which
| could be worked on in parallel.
|
| In addition to the above, we decided not to decouple the
| frontend and backend, but instead used Livewire in conjunction
| with Laravel & Alpine. This, coupled with Tailwind's UI
| components (tailwindui.com), helped us spend very little time
| on the frontend aside from a few specific aspects.
| masterof0 wrote:
| Hey, one question, what type of digital goods can I sell in your
| platform? is in-game digital currency acceptable? (WOW gold,
| etc...) do you act as a escrow for that type of transactions?
| youseff wrote:
| Hey there, yes that would be OK from our side, though we don't
| act as an escrow or custody funds.
|
| Given the above, you'll definitely want to keep in mind the
| high chargeback rates for in-game goods/currencies and put
| (additional) appropriate measures in place to negate those.
| IconianGate wrote:
| The payout times and fees you advertise for competitors charging
| are overly inflated by like double at least.
|
| Once you move away from Shopify or woocommerce there are plenty
| of companies offering these services with similar enough
| interfaces. Sellfy, selly, rocketr to name a few that have been
| around ~3+ years.
|
| Most of these have clones that offer free services in all major
| payment options and cryptocurrencies.
|
| I think you will need to differentiate your company more to have
| any traction. Creator sponsoring of some nature seems like the
| best suggestion I read here. Good luck
| youseff wrote:
| Both Sellfy and Selly charge a monthly fee starting at $20 to
| even create a store. Rocketr has stalled/been abandoned since
| early 2019 if I'm not mistaken.
|
| However, I do agree with you in that we need to differentiate
| ourselves a little more, which is what we'll be doing as we
| progress with our roadmap. Sponsoring does indeed look like a
| good way to get traction going and we'll definitely be looking
| into that as a viable way to grow our userbase.
|
| Many thanks for the feedback!
| IconianGate wrote:
| But sellfy started at under 5% fees and selly was originally
| free. These are the pricing models they moved to with the
| hopes of growing beyond the percent commissions which
| honestly isn't that great for the general "indie" market.
|
| They do both have multiple clones that have popped up and
| which you could eventually probably find for free.
|
| Sellfy sort of went with artists if I remember correctly.
| Another one focused on films. Another on ebooks. Others stay
| general to digital products but be aware you're also going to
| have to combat fraud.
|
| Rocketr continues to process orders but development did for
| the most part stall after not being able to move toward
| payment processing more generally (costly).
|
| Sharing this as a former team member
| youseff wrote:
| Yeah, you're right with their respective histories, though
| I do think a freemium model with a relatively low fee/tx
| can definitely work (look at e.g. Gumroad/Shoppy)
|
| We do also indeed have plans for a fraud detection system
| to help combat fraud.
|
| Btw since you're a former team member, I think we might
| have crossed paths on HF a couple years ago :)
| bberenberg wrote:
| How do you square "2. Payments; where other storefronts tend to
| custody funds and pay sellers out after 7-14 days, we enable
| sellers to receive earnings instantly." with chargebacks /
| refunds?
| youseff wrote:
| That's a great question!
|
| What we currently do on SellApp, is block purchases coming from
| VPN's/proxies (via MaxMind) which'll help reduce the rate of
| fraudulent purchases.
|
| However, that by itself is probably not going to be enough to
| keep a low chargeback rate for all our sellers, so we are also
| planning on creating a fraud detection system that factors in a
| number of aspects in order to keep malicious customers at bay.
|
| For refunds, customers can open a ticket with a seller to
| request a refund. We also give sellers the ability to set a
| 'refund timer' and terms of a refund during the product
| creation process, so that in case something does go wrong, they
| have that to refer back to.
|
| Lots of room for improvement on both aspects though!
| netr0ute wrote:
| > What we currently do on SellApp, is block purchases coming
| from VPN's/proxies
|
| That's basically a non-starter for me as I need to give all
| potential users a good UX.
| youseff wrote:
| We give the customers a heads up to contact the seller when
| they get blocked, so it'll be as easy as telling them that
| they need to disable their VPN/proxy in order to make the
| purchase.
|
| Although, it'd make more sense if we tell them that and
| save you the time to reply to a few customer support
| tickets. Will add it to our roadmap :)
| netr0ute wrote:
| > that they need to disable their VPN/proxy in order to
| make the purchase.
|
| That's also a non-starter because that defeats the
| purpose of a VPN.
| samrolken wrote:
| The pricing page mentioning "platform fees" without specifying
| what they are doesn't seem like the best thing. If you charge, or
| plan to charge, other fees, maybe also mention them on the
| pricing page.
|
| If you aren't charging fees yet you can turn it into a
| promotional thing about how you're waiving the fees for the first
| X months.
| youseff wrote:
| Agreed, the pricing page was rushed a little, so the "platform
| fees" placeholder isn't relevant at this point in time.
|
| We will indeed introduce fees at a later date (in ~6 months or
| so), so I'll definitely be incorporating your suggestion.
| Thanks for that :)
| somebodythere wrote:
| You can say "Platform fees (waived during beta)" or something
| like that to make it clear.
| rileymichael wrote:
| Is there currently support for programmatically handling
| completed purchases? I can't seem to find any docs.
|
| These type of digital marketplaces are actually pretty popular in
| gaming communities, where players purchase something through the
| store and receive it in game (e.g. runescape private servers), so
| I thought your username placeholder was pretty funny. Might be a
| niche worth exploring.
| youseff wrote:
| We do indeed support dynamic goods via a pre-defined URL,
| though the docs still need to be written on this. Give me a
| little and it'll be up.
|
| And yeah that's what my intuition is telling me as well, people
| really underestimate the amount trades that are done in
| gaming/niche communities. Already reached out to the admin of
| Sythe to inquire about advertising ;)
| webinvest wrote:
| Can we see a working example of something to buy? For example: 10
| cents just as a test purchase.
| youseff wrote:
| Hey there, I just created an example listing costing 10 cents:
| https://admin.sell.app/listing/ycombinator-news-test-purchas...
|
| - The listing has a volume discount, so if you make the
| quantity 10 or more, it'll automatically apply a 10% discount
|
| - You can also opt to pay more by clicking on "or more" just
| below the product's price
|
| - If you wish to apply a coupon code to see how that works, you
| can enter "coupon" into the "Coupon code" input field to get 5%
| off the product's price
| adamqureshi wrote:
| So i can make some GIF's and sell them? Is that a "digital"
| product? I can't refund and what about if i get a chargeback?
| youseff wrote:
| You can indeed. Anything that can be delivered digitally, can
| be sold on SellApp.
| fraXis wrote:
| >> "It's completely free to start selling on SellApp, with no
| fees being taken (though we'll introduce a 3% fee per sale in a
| couple months)"
|
| Are you using Stripe to process your payments?
| Guffton wrote:
| The frontpage of the site suggests so.
| joshmlewis wrote:
| The stats are a bit confusing on the home page. 1,100 stores and
| millions of views but only $32k in revenue generated?
| youseff wrote:
| Those stats will need to be changed as they are from the 'old'
| project on which SellApp was based/rebuilt (toffee.com), but
| they are indeed correct. That platform didn't convert
| particularly well, heh.
|
| For a view of current stats - updated daily:
| https://sell.app/stats
| toefee wrote:
| oh hey! you're the toffee guy. Did you swap the name because
| it was bad, or are you selling the domain? I thought the
| novelty of the toffee.com domain would be quite valuable to
| users -- but clearly not.
| youseff wrote:
| Hey, I am indeed! I actually obtained the toffee.com domain
| on a lease from a company (venture.com) back when funds
| were very limited and the lease made sense.
|
| When I raised funding earlier this year and inquired about
| a potential outright purchase of toffee.com, the answer was
| that they didn't want to sell.
|
| So instead of staying on the lease plan (which'd increase
| by a sizable amount y/o/y), I started looking for a
| suitable domain we could purchase outright, and luckily
| found sell.app for sale.
| otterpro wrote:
| This looks like a great alternative to Gumroad, Sellfy, and even
| Etsy and Shopify. I hope this takes off, as I like this freemium
| pricing.
| youseff wrote:
| Thank you! If you have any feedback on how we can improve, I'd
| love to hear it :)
| Cyph0n wrote:
| Nice work! I'm also in the process of working on a checkout app +
| API, but focused more on the payment processing side of things
| and targeting the North African market.
|
| I'm still in the very early stages, but I've been prototyping the
| checkout page and we seem to have both chosen a yellow Tailwind
| theme haha! I won't be sticking to that, but I just thought it
| was a funny coincidence.
| youseff wrote:
| Great to hear, wishing you the best of luck with your product!
| And yeah, Tailwind is really mind-blowing in how good it is.
|
| By the way, the Tailwind team will soon release an eCommerce
| package, so you might want to look out for that (I sure will!)
| Cyph0n wrote:
| Yep, as someone who sucks at frontend design, I was
| absolutely blown away by Tailwind.
|
| Is there any way to follow the development progress of
| Sell.app? And best of luck to you as well!
| youseff wrote:
| Thank you! And yes, we post regular product updates on both
| our Discord as well as Twitter
| (https://twitter.com/AppSell)
| analognoise wrote:
| Could I offer programming services on it?
|
| Or is this like if you had IP to sell (a file or group of files),
| you could sell it?
|
| It would be interesting to sell FPGA odds and ends people needed.
| Probably not enough of a market though.
| youseff wrote:
| With SellApp you can sell both your programming services as
| well as IP, that's the interesting thing about our platform.
|
| We don't limit you on what kind of product you sell, as long as
| it's digital (and not illegal)
| analognoise wrote:
| So I could test out a storefront for no cost, and if it looks
| like it isn't viable it's not much of a loss?
|
| Is there any kind of tracking or metrics? Like if I setup a
| storefront, could I A/B test different marketing copy and be
| able to figure out what was working?
|
| This frankly sounds pretty awesome.
| youseff wrote:
| You can indeed spin up a store at absolutely no cost.
|
| There's no tracking or A/B testing yet, but you'll
| definitely be able to see which product performs better in
| terms of sales.
| fraXis wrote:
| Are you going to apply to YC?
| youseff wrote:
| I'm still on the fence whether to apply or not.
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(page generated 2021-07-22 23:00 UTC)