Show HN: Sell.app – A simple way to sell digital goods • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: Sell.app – A simple way to sell digital goods

#61

Post by youseff » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 9:41 PM UTC

laurent123456 wrote: post #57

> 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…

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.

Re: Show HN: Sell.app – A simple way to sell digital goods

#62

Post by youseff » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 9:43 PM UTC

Cyph0n wrote: post #60

youseff wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!)

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!

Thank you! And yes, we post regular product updates on both our Discord as well as Twitter (https://twitter.com/AppSell)

Re: Show HN: Sell.app – A simple way to sell digital goods

#63

Post by IconianGate » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 9:58 PM UTC

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

Re: Show HN: Sell.app – A simple way to sell digital goods

#64

Post by somebodythere » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 9:59 PM UTC

youseff wrote: post #26

samrolken wrote: post #21

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.

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 :)

You can say "Platform fees (waived during beta)" or something like that to make it clear.

Re: Show HN: Sell.app – A simple way to sell digital goods

#65

Post by youseff » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 10:07 PM UTC

IconianGate wrote: post #63

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 thi…

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!

Re: Show HN: Sell.app – A simple way to sell digital goods

#66

Post by gotostatement » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 10:09 PM UTC

youseff wrote: post #50

gotostatement wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

whats the purpose of showing "Free store" - why would a customer care about that, and why would a seller be okay with that?

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. W…

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

Re: Show HN: Sell.app – A simple way to sell digital goods

#67

Post by IconianGate » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 10:15 PM UTC

youseff wrote: post #65

IconianGate wrote: post #63

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 thi…

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 vi…

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

Re: Show HN: Sell.app – A simple way to sell digital goods

#68

Post by analognoise » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 10:20 PM UTC

youseff wrote: post #58

analognoise wrote: post #54

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.

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)

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.

Re: Show HN: Sell.app – A simple way to sell digital goods

#69

Post by karolisram » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 10:22 PM UTC

So what’s the secret sauce for building it less than 4 months ?

Re: Show HN: Sell.app – A simple way to sell digital goods

#70

Post by stevenicr » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 10:27 PM UTC

youseff wrote: post #55

floatingatoll wrote: post #41

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?

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.

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.