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Sellbox – Sell your files from Dropbox and Google Drive with Paypal

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Re: Sellbox – Sell your files from Dropbox and Google Drive with Paypal

#21

Post by 6thSigma »

ricardo_ramirez wrote: post #19

The % transaction fee is a turndown. I have been looking for a solution to distribute digital goods, and I try to stay away from anything that is a percentage, it does not scale once you have hundreds of sales. They are not absorbing the Paypal transaction fee, which means that on top of the 5% I would still be charged the 2.6% that Paypal wants (amount vary). So, unless the service provides a payment gateway, where…

Those are subscription prices. So on the other hand, if you sell 0 digital goods in a month you will owe nothing with this service but $5 on the other service. With % pricing you will never go in the negative.

Edit: Not saying this is a better pricing model - just playing devils advocate.

Re: Sellbox – Sell your files from Dropbox and Google Drive with Paypal

#22

Post by snoonan »

tossedaway wrote: post #20
snoonan wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No argument! They should charge for the service, but not a % of the value I create. It costs them the same to deliver a $5 file as it does a $50, apart from the transaction fees claimed by their upstream payment processor.

Interesting...and I don't disagree. How would you like them to charge for a service like this?

Since they are charged a percent upstream, then they will have to pass that on to operate.

So I would imagine they could pass on the percent component of cost with no markup, and then charge a flat fee (ex: $1). I'm assuming they are never stuck with the bill in a fraud case. If they are, then the price should include that risk component as a percentage as well.

Re: Sellbox – Sell your files from Dropbox and Google Drive with Paypal

#24

Post by ricardo_ramirez »

6thSigma wrote: post #21
ricardo_ramirez wrote: post #19

The % transaction fee is a turndown. I have been looking for a solution to distribute digital goods, and I try to stay away from anything that is a percentage, it does not scale once you have hundreds of sales. They are not absorbing the Paypal transaction fee, which means that on top of the 5% I would still be charged the 2.6% that Paypal wants (amount vary). So, unless the service provides a payment gateway, where…

Those are subscription prices. So on the other hand, if you sell 0 digital goods in a month you will owe nothing with this service but $5 on the other service. With % pricing you will never go in the negative. Edit: Not saying this is a better pricing model - just playing devils advocate.

The % model would indeed work better with a low volume sales. So, if I wanted to distribute a file just once or twice, then this would work, since I end up paying just 50c (if the price of the digital goods were $10) instead of a fixed price for the subscription.

But if someone intends to sell several hundreds of copies, or the price is bigger (say, 5% of $10,000), then it is not a good deal.

So, I really only see the target audience as someone that must have DropBox integration (though other services also have integration with your webserver, and mounting a DropBox folder and exposing that through the webserver seems trivial), or maybe people with such a dispersion of files that the other services won't work (they allow you a fixed number of products).

Re: Sellbox – Sell your files from Dropbox and Google Drive with Paypal

#26

Post by wavesounds »

tossedaway wrote: post #20
snoonan wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No argument! They should charge for the service, but not a % of the value I create. It costs them the same to deliver a $5 file as it does a $50, apart from the transaction fees claimed by their upstream payment processor.

Interesting...and I don't disagree. How would you like them to charge for a service like this?

A flat fee per file seems to make the most sense, since their operation costs are per transaction. They should just figure out how much it costs them per transaction, then bake in a percent of their startup costs to reach the black in a reasonable time and use that as a flat fee. I can't see a justification for a percentage approach, its the same amount of work either way on their end.

Re: Sellbox – Sell your files from Dropbox and Google Drive with Paypal

#27

Post by clarky07 »

6thSigma wrote: post #21
ricardo_ramirez wrote: post #19

The % transaction fee is a turndown. I have been looking for a solution to distribute digital goods, and I try to stay away from anything that is a percentage, it does not scale once you have hundreds of sales. They are not absorbing the Paypal transaction fee, which means that on top of the 5% I would still be charged the 2.6% that Paypal wants (amount vary). So, unless the service provides a payment gateway, where…

Those are subscription prices. So on the other hand, if you sell 0 digital goods in a month you will owe nothing with this service but $5 on the other service. With % pricing you will never go in the negative. Edit: Not saying this is a better pricing model - just playing devils advocate.

while true, it seems if you are selling 0 for too long, you just take it down. i'd rather plan for success than failure, and $5 is pretty trivially worth it to test a product out.

Re: Sellbox – Sell your files from Dropbox and Google Drive with Paypal

#29

Post by w0rd-driven »

tossedaway wrote: post #20
snoonan wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No argument! They should charge for the service, but not a % of the value I create. It costs them the same to deliver a $5 file as it does a $50, apart from the transaction fees claimed by their upstream payment processor.

Interesting...and I don't disagree. How would you like them to charge for a service like this?

1) Cover the standard 2.6% from paypal. Make that obvious. 2) Add a flat rate on top to cover operating expenses.

The current model makes a lot of sense for small to medium amount transactions but I too have a problem with 7.6% total of a much larger transaction this company didn't do any extra work for.

Alternatively you could have multiple rates based on the size of the payload. If you're really using their storage, which I doubt, then that percentage cost would cover the bandwidth to serve it. With that you would have people like me that would check their work though, to make sure if I'm really paying bandwidth costs, you better not be leveraging Dropbox's infrastructure for that too.

Personally, I do like the idea over a Zapier though that's a flat monthly fee. I couldn't possibly determine if the monthly rate is enough on principle but a cut of my profits is much less of an "up front" cost I can't adequately measure yet.

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