Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Stripe: Relay

stripe.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 85 posts

Re: Stripe: Relay

#41

Post by spolu »

callmeed wrote: post #25

This is pretty cool (I'm working on an ecommerce app now). What I'm not clear on is this: Can apps selling relay products get a cut of the sale? What incentive is there for a "product discovery app" (or whatever) to sell other products? Can they define some sort of fee %? UPDATE: Chatted with Stripe on IRC and they clarified that there's currently no way to share sales revenue or let apps define a % commission.

(Stripe Engineer working on Relay here)

Indeed there is no way to do so at the moment. But we have that on our radar and we'd like to construct something that makes sense for apps and sellers.

Some questions related to that: How would you see it working? Isn't ads the new affiliation in the app world?

Re: Stripe: Relay

#42

Post by matthewarkin »

spolu wrote: post #41
callmeed wrote: post #25

This is pretty cool (I'm working on an ecommerce app now). What I'm not clear on is this: Can apps selling relay products get a cut of the sale? What incentive is there for a "product discovery app" (or whatever) to sell other products? Can they define some sort of fee %? UPDATE: Chatted with Stripe on IRC and they clarified that there's currently no way to share sales revenue or let apps define a % commission.

(Stripe Engineer working on Relay here) Indeed there is no way to do so at the moment. But we have that on our radar and we'd like to construct something that makes sense for apps and sellers. Some questions related to that: How would you see it working? Isn't ads the new affiliation in the app world?

Its pretty common for Stripe Connect integrations to charge an application fee. With Relay, Stripe would allow some apps that use connect to "move" their products database from their own database to Stripe. Also it allows merchants to sell on more platforms. It just becomes "You can use Relay and Stripe to sell on our platform, however we'll take a 1% transaction fee"

Re: Stripe: Relay

#43

Post by spolu »

noahr wrote: post #26

What's the difference between Relay and the Enterprise version of Shopify?

(Hi Stripe Engineer here)

Relay is a way for merchants to route products to channels. We certainly don't want to replace Shopify (with whom we're pretty close) but just give merchants an easy way to expose product information to apps and accepts orders directly from there. In particular, Relay will not provide you with store front, or complex shipping and taxes calculations and integrations.

Ideally Relay should work seamlessly with Shopify, and Shopify users should be able to start selling on Twitter and other apps directly from Shopify through Relay without even necessarily hearing the name Relay (as it is ~the case with their payments currently processed by us)

Re: Stripe: Relay

#44

Post by sradu »

ianlevesque wrote: post #31
sradu wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Founder of Two Tap here. It takes an average of three minutes to send the order to the retailer via our platform. On the frontend we use a similar model to Amazon where tell the shopper we're confirming her purchase and handle the process in the background. It's working great for Amazon, and it works great for us for a thousand merchants. Retailers are incredibly happy by the fact that they don't have to do a complic…

Is that a conflict of interest having your mentor launch a direct competitor to your company?

No hard feelings here. We mean it when we say we're big fans of Patrick, John, Stripe. It's unfortunate that we have to compete, we would have loved to work with them.

Our approach is completely different than theirs: light integrations vs deep integrations. We believe their approach will do more harm than good for the industry causing retailers/platforms to invest millions of dollars in building infrastructure that's not going to be ROI positive. Retailers will end up paying to build/maintain that infrastructure part, they will pay the merchant fees, and they will have to pay Twitter/any partner promoting them.

Re: Stripe: Relay

#46

Post by seiji »

gtCameron wrote: post #7
BinaryIdiot wrote: post #4

Blog post: https://stripe.com/blog/relay This is interesting. How does this work with Apple not allowing purchases unless they go through them? Edit: deleted the part where I confused square for stripe. My bad =/

Stripe and Twitter do not have the same CEO, you are thinking of Square.

Actually: twitter, square, and pied piper all have the same CEO.

Re: Stripe: Relay

#47

Post by ianlevesque »

sradu wrote: post #44
ianlevesque wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that a conflict of interest having your mentor launch a direct competitor to your company?

No hard feelings here. We mean it when we say we're big fans of Patrick, John, Stripe. It's unfortunate that we have to compete, we would have loved to work with them. Our approach is completely different than theirs: light integrations vs deep integrations. We believe their approach will do more harm than good for the industry causing retailers/platforms to invest millions of dollars in building infrastructure that'…

That's good. Market will decide!

Re: Stripe: Relay

#48

Post by spolu »

matthewarkin wrote: post #42
spolu wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Stripe Engineer working on Relay here) Indeed there is no way to do so at the moment. But we have that on our radar and we'd like to construct something that makes sense for apps and sellers. Some questions related to that: How would you see it working? Isn't ads the new affiliation in the app world?

Its pretty common for Stripe Connect integrations to charge an application fee. With Relay, Stripe would allow some apps that use connect to "move" their products database from their own database to Stripe. Also it allows merchants to sell on more platforms. It just becomes "You can use Relay and Stripe to sell on our platform, however we'll take a 1% transaction fee"

So this confirms the approach that we have in mind: the ability to setup a fee at order creation as it is the case in Connect (per charge there). Very :+1: on this.

Re: Stripe: Relay

#49

Post by prbuckley »

spolu wrote: post #32
efuquen wrote: post #23

We've been looking at a few other players to do exactly this, i.e. TwoTaps ( https://twotap.com/ ) and Cosmic Cart ( https://cosmiccart.com/ ). The big problem we've seen is: 1) Having pricing and inventory data keep up to date. 2) Reliability and speed, TwoTaps has robots that fill in an order on retailers sites and checkout is slow as a result. Aside from the ugliness of it, I'm sure a lot of retailers don't like t…

Very thoughtful analysis! (Stripe engineer working on Relay here) Getting retailers on-board is definitely core to the success of Relay. As announced today Saks and the SAP Hybris platform are live on Relay and we're working with numerous other retailers as we speak. For apps, getting retailers to sell on their platform is a huge pain (custom integration to their APIs and payment systems) convincing them to do so. Fo…

Can I request a Shopify platform integration? My company (www.dodocase.com) would love to sell our products in mobile apps. Feel free to reach out to me at patrick at dodocase dot com.
Post reply on HN