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Stripe: Relay

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Re: Stripe: Relay

#31

Post by ianlevesque »

sradu wrote: post #27
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…

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?

Re: Stripe: Relay

#32

Post by spolu »

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. For retailers as well it's a pain. They have to create technical integrations with as many channel out there. That's why we think Relay make sense. We help both side of the equation.

Also, the relationship between a retailer and a channel app in Relay is opt-in today. This is literally a Stripe Connect (think OAuth) connection. But once a channel is onboard, it's nothing more than clicking a button for a Relay retailer to start selling there.

Also I wouldn't say they are losing control on the full shopping experience, they're merely enabling a better one on mobile. When you think of the shopping experience, a lot happen after the purchase (support, shipping, loyalty) as well and I think there are new experiences to create there, especially once the customer receive the receipt from the retailer.

Re: Stripe: Relay

#33

Post by pbreit »

tomasien wrote: post #2

The amazing thing about this to me is realizing how massively undervalued Stripe is if things like Relay are actually successful. The networks effects created by Relay would be massive.

"Massively undervalued" at $5b?

Stuff like this generally doesn't work because shoppers are less comfortable this far out of context. But I would never bet against Stripe.

Re: Stripe: Relay

#34

Post by enos_feedler »

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.

I was looking for this in the API but couldn't find it.

Re: Stripe: Relay

#35

Post by razvanr »

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…

Also founder of Two Tap here. Just to clarify on the above:

1. Pricing and inventory are realtime with Two Tap -- taken live from the merchant site when a shopping session is started. If only a size S is available on the merchant site then that's what we make available for shoppers in our carts. Merchants don't have to do any integration or manage this process.

2. Reliability has been a non problem for a while, we have a guarantee that we don't lose orders. And the process to confirm orders is async like Amazon -- step 1: we've received your order; step 2: your order is confirmed.

3. Two Tap supports over 1000 retailer integrations.

Thanks for looking into the space!

Re: Stripe: Relay

#36

Post by jusben1369 »

jodah wrote: post #24
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…

Agree that the challenge is in obtaining partnerships, but not every retailer needs full control of the shopping experience, especially on mobile. And that's the win - alleviating the need for every retailer to solve the same technical problem.

The challenge for the developer is twofold; 1) Understanding the real time availability of the inventory at the retail partner and 2) Supporting the payment provider of the retailer. In the desktop world this was solved by a straight up affiliate redirect. You arrived at the retailer page and saw your product in a shopping cart or close to it. Of course if inventory was poorly synced you occasionally got an error. This is still pretty common with things like airline metasearch services where the cheap ticket can be gone. Either way inventory was managed. Then you entered your payment method on the retailer site and it was processed by their backend processor.

In the mobile world with mobile optimized apps those redirects don't work. So app developers want to make the payment experience feel like it's happening "within the app" Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and others all then had to solve for the inventory + payments challenge. Defaulting to Stripe can be problematic if the retailer already has a different payment processor relationship in place. By solving for the inventory piece I suspect Stripe is hoping to help drive momentum around overcoming the processor objections.

Full disclosure I work at Spreedly where we help solve for the payment dilemma (not inventory) by allowing developers to work with a wide range of payment processors and/or affiliate API's.

Re: Stripe: Relay

#37

Post by tomasien »

pbreit wrote: post #33
tomasien wrote: post #2

The amazing thing about this to me is realizing how massively undervalued Stripe is if things like Relay are actually successful. The networks effects created by Relay would be massive.

"Massively undervalued" at $5b? Stuff like this generally doesn't work because shoppers are less comfortable this far out of context. But I would never bet against Stripe.

Hard for me to imagine Stripe at anything short of a $20-$30b company, so yeah $5b seems super cheap. To me though, I'm bullish on them though I understand that.

Re: Stripe: Relay

#38

Post by ilurk »

jonknee wrote: post #10
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 =/

Apple doesn't allow purchases of digital products that don't go through the In App Purchase system and its 30% tax. Physical goods are just fine (hence the Amazon app where you can buy a book, but not a Kindle book).

I wonder if along the line Apple would make it mandatory for all payments, made physically (eg: Apple Pay) or digitally (eg: Stripe), to go through by then. I mean, since they are interested in the payments area, why shouldn't them?

Re: Stripe: Relay

#39

Post by spolu »

jusben1369 wrote: post #36
jodah wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree that the challenge is in obtaining partnerships, but not every retailer needs full control of the shopping experience, especially on mobile. And that's the win - alleviating the need for every retailer to solve the same technical problem.

The challenge for the developer is twofold; 1) Understanding the real time availability of the inventory at the retail partner and 2) Supporting the payment provider of the retailer. In the desktop world this was solved by a straight up affiliate redirect. You arrived at the retailer page and saw your product in a shopping cart or close to it. Of course if inventory was poorly synced you occasionally got an error. Th…

re Inventory: we want to provide live product availability information to the developer through our API. We encourage app developers to GET latest product info from our API before even rendering a potential Buy Now button. To make that possible we keep product information extra-fresh from big retailers, and even update it on the fly when we see orders failing because the product is out of stock.

re Payments/Processor: So that's where it gets interesting. We have constructed for Pinterest a full payment distribution infrastructure to send payment information securely to large retailers or their processors. This infrastructure will also be used by Relay. Doing so, we believe we bring a ton of value to the ecosystem. But I'm sure you agree with that given your focus!

Re: Stripe: Relay

#40

Post by jonknee »

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #15
jonknee wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple doesn't allow purchases of digital products that don't go through the In App Purchase system and its 30% tax. Physical goods are just fine (hence the Amazon app where you can buy a book, but not a Kindle book).

Oh yeah you're right. But what if someone adds in a digital item into this mix? I wonder how that would work.

Then their app wouldn't be approved or if it's added after the fact would be removed from the App Store.
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