My immediate thought is that people will use this to sell pirated and/or illegal goods. I’m curious how you plan to address this issue?
Probably the same as any other online service; wait for DMCA takedown requests, prepare for lawsuits and be prepared to pay copyright holders or hand over gains to law enforcement. Of course, that could be prevented if they manually check and verify ownership of every submission.
Show HN: Fruits – Sell digital products via your website, newsletter, etc
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Re: Show HN: Fruits – Sell digital products via your website, newsletter, etc
#82Anyway, the idea is great, I view Paddle as an order of magnitude less work for the seller compared to lower level services such as Stripe, and your service could be an order of magnitude less work than Paddle for products that fit such simple selling model well.
Re: Show HN: Fruits – Sell digital products via your website, newsletter, etc
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
"legalese bullshit" - you sell a product, you need to handle VAT. Every single business in the EU abides by this, why should a business be exempt just because they're on the internet?
That's not true, there's a rather large minimum until you need to think about VAT. 100k EUR/year where I live.
Re: Show HN: Fruits – Sell digital products via your website, newsletter, etc
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
PayPal allows paying with a credit card without needing to create an account. If the OP doesn't have this, there's literally a checkbox for this in the merchant's settings on the PayPal's admin panel. The drawback however is an elevated risk of fraud. Edit: ... and they don't have this enabled - https://fruits.de/c/v9kgq
Content creator payouts are also paid through PayPal, so unless there's another feature I'm not aware of, it seems PayPal will get the opportunity to freeze the money either way.
Re: Show HN: Fruits – Sell digital products via your website, newsletter, etc
#85Re: Show HN: Fruits – Sell digital products via your website, newsletter, etc
#86Congrats on your launch! But honestly, your site gives me some huge red flags regarding your service: You don't have a legally valid "Impressum" on fruits.de: It points to fanbase.com and that one isn't even mentioning fruits.de. So, as a German startup, it seems you're at least bending German and EU law by not providing the information necessary for proving services on the domain fruits.de. And as a result, as a pot…
Fruits is a pivot for fanbase.com which sadly didn't make it. Within a few days, we managed to build fruits and launched it as the quickest MVP we could come up with. That's what you're seeing today. The imprint still points towards the current legal entity (fanbase GmbH). A new legal entity is currently under registration by the founders. Once the paperwork is done, the founders will move all assets to the new company and align the imprint accordingly.
Concerning taxation: this seems to be a clear improvement we need to work on communicating. Taxation is hard and we tried to break it down in a pricing calculator (which does not yet seem to do all that good of a job, point taken).
Disclaimer - as mentioned below/above in some of the comments: not the tax attorney ;-)
We are working with a tax office that helped us figuring out international taxation and will be able to answer all legal taxation questions in detail for each single country we're in business with.
Taxation for fruits essentially means:
- fruits charges the buyer and applies tax applicable for fruits (company in Germany) and the buyer in country XYZ
- each buyer will receive an invoice (issued by fruits)
- the seller will receive a single credit note for all sales performed within a month targeting a German company (fruits)
[Buyer] > [Seller]
Re: Show HN: Fruits – Sell digital products via your website, newsletter, etc
#87As a creator of digital products: great site, congrats! As a consumer: PayPal only? I’m outta here. I don’t like my money randomly frozen on a whim. Are you folks planning to offer Giropay for the consumer side? That’s pretty much the only payment service I can use nowadays.
Re: Show HN: Fruits – Sell digital products via your website, newsletter, etc
#88Re: Show HN: Fruits – Sell digital products via your website, newsletter, etc
#89A lot of feedback here mentions tax compliance. Perhaps you could use a company like paddle.com to actually handle the payments and act as a merchant of record for each transaction. This way you wouldn't need to worry about calculating taxes and collecting payments from the end customers, you would still need to handle distributing income to sellers. I'm not sure though if Paddle supports selling such 'umbrella' type…
Re: Show HN: Fruits – Sell digital products via your website, newsletter, etc
#90Congrats on your launch! But honestly, your site gives me some huge red flags regarding your service: You don't have a legally valid "Impressum" on fruits.de: It points to fanbase.com and that one isn't even mentioning fruits.de. So, as a German startup, it seems you're at least bending German and EU law by not providing the information necessary for proving services on the domain fruits.de. And as a result, as a pot…