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Chec(kout) - Sell anything, anywhere. A platform for longtail ecommerce.

trychec.com

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Re: Chec(kout) - Sell anything, anywhere. A platform for longtail ecommerce.

#51
post #32
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can, I was just trying to get across the usage cases/types of products. We've had one user crowd fund for a childs trustfund through us. Dudes in europe selling rare coffee beans. Contracts invoicing for their time through the platform. The generic digital sales cds/ebooks/etc We cover a wide spectrum of products. We're trying to create a framework/platform for longtail ecommerce. Not just a platform for people w…

You seem to be throwing the word "long tail" into the answer, but I still don't understand what makes Chec different/better than Gumroad for selling "long tail" items. I can sell both my app and my PSDs through both Gumroad and Chec. I really don't see a difference other than the fact that you can set fixed shipping prices. Maybe Gumroad doesn't support Paypal? Can you compare and contrast the two in a meaningful way…

In terms of features

3.5% fee compared to 5%

PayPal Integration (for your customers who feel safer using them)

Physical Product Handling

Access Windows for digital sales (https://trychec.com/assets/img/anything-digital.png)

Inline Social Payments on Facebook (checkouts in customers newsfeeds)

Social Deals - Based on influence or demographics

And a powerful merchant backend.

as well as a few smaller features around.

Groad is primarily built to deal with digital files, we can handle any type of good.

and that's just in v1. we've got a lot to do, and you'll see us differentiate more in the future.

It might be easier to give the stories behind the idea to help.

So, i created this initially for myself. As a teenager i had resale rights to a DVD info product, and made a couple thousand a month selling it.

I hated the checkout process of 2checkout, 1shoppingcart, ejunkie, and others. So I ended up throwing a paypal checkout in an iframe and creating a post hook script to manage the order.

I wanted a simple, clean, yet powerful app to manage everything, so i made one. The first version of this was built in 2010.

I had one professional/full product to sell and i sold it in fairly high volume, and I didnt need a fully fledged store, i just had a single product to sell. Over time i created more and more minisites to sell different types of info products so i could have some passive income whilst i was at school.

Gumroads story

Sahil created an icon on photoshop that he wasnt going to use, but thought other people would find value in it so he wanted a service that let him sell his "value" to his followers (if that makes sense).

Gumroad allows people to sell their small snippets of value. (primarily digital).

Chec allows smaller merchants to start selling online who have no need for a front end store. Merchants like mmfixed.com etc..

Is that a little clearer? :)

Re: Chec(kout) - Sell anything, anywhere. A platform for longtail ecommerce.

#52
post #8

My 0.02c: you should change the name. If you already have to append "(kout)" to explain it to hackers, it will be 10x more difficult marketing it to a larger crowd. Or you can start printing stickers that read "you know, without the 'k'" ;-) Apart from this, great design!

$0.02 or 2¢ =P

Re: Chec(kout) - Sell anything, anywhere. A platform for longtail ecommerce.

#53
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can, I was just trying to get across the usage cases/types of products. We've had one user crowd fund for a childs trustfund through us. Dudes in europe selling rare coffee beans. Contracts invoicing for their time through the platform. The generic digital sales cds/ebooks/etc We cover a wide spectrum of products. We're trying to create a framework/platform for longtail ecommerce. Not just a platform for people w…

You say you are trying to create a platform for longtail ecommerce as opposed to platform to sell things somebody creates. My point is that why will we need two platforms for these use cases.. To me all these services ( there was one announced yesterday also ) look the same with very minimum differences. Seems like this space is getting crowded.

see my answer just above

Re: Chec(kout) - Sell anything, anywhere. A platform for longtail ecommerce.

#54
post #32
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can, I was just trying to get across the usage cases/types of products. We've had one user crowd fund for a childs trustfund through us. Dudes in europe selling rare coffee beans. Contracts invoicing for their time through the platform. The generic digital sales cds/ebooks/etc We cover a wide spectrum of products. We're trying to create a framework/platform for longtail ecommerce. Not just a platform for people w…

You seem to be throwing the word "long tail" into the answer, but I still don't understand what makes Chec different/better than Gumroad for selling "long tail" items. I can sell both my app and my PSDs through both Gumroad and Chec. I really don't see a difference other than the fact that you can set fixed shipping prices. Maybe Gumroad doesn't support Paypal? Can you compare and contrast the two in a meaningful way…

And the way tailoring works is. We detect were the user clicked the link from (using the headers) then tailor the landing page to leverage that source.

I.e. clicked via FB? Let try and use fb connect to prepopulate the checkout, provide an incentive to share this page if they're influential. etc..

Re: Chec(kout) - Sell anything, anywhere. A platform for longtail ecommerce.

#55

Not really related to the product idea (there've been a raft of gumroad-type services launching lately), but has anyone else noticed the absolute explosion in blurred background images in designs these days? I swear the vast majority of new startup landing pages involve a highly blurred background of some kind.

It makes the landing page similar to a photo captured with an expensive lens on a high quality camera, where the foreground (text and logos, in this case) is in crisp focus, whereas the background is said to be in [bokeh](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokeh).

Re: Chec(kout) - Sell anything, anywhere. A platform for longtail ecommerce.

#56
post #30
post #29

It says that you handle physical products and delivery. How do you do this? Or do you just offer delivery for digital item sales?

We provide region specific shipping options for physical products, and will be doing tight integrations with UPS, Fedex, RoyalMail apis to help you with fulfilling physical items.

Do you have an eta on that integration? That sounds very interesting and the type of service we are already researching.

Re: Chec(kout) - Sell anything, anywhere. A platform for longtail ecommerce.

#57
post #8

My 0.02c: you should change the name. If you already have to append "(kout)" to explain it to hackers, it will be 10x more difficult marketing it to a larger crowd. Or you can start printing stickers that read "you know, without the 'k'" ;-) Apart from this, great design!

$0.02 or 2¢ =P

It is possible he values his thoughts less than the traditional two cents.

Re: Chec(kout) - Sell anything, anywhere. A platform for longtail ecommerce.

#58
post #55

Not really related to the product idea (there've been a raft of gumroad-type services launching lately), but has anyone else noticed the absolute explosion in blurred background images in designs these days? I swear the vast majority of new startup landing pages involve a highly blurred background of some kind.

It makes the landing page similar to a photo captured with an expensive lens on a high quality camera, where the foreground (text and logos, in this case) is in crisp focus, whereas the background is said to be in [bokeh]( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokeh ).

Yeah, I just realized that myself as I was looking through a bunch of sites that use the effect. I think it's a great trend, for sure, but it's just been popping up everywhere.

Re: Chec(kout) - Sell anything, anywhere. A platform for longtail ecommerce.

#59
post #30
post #29

It says that you handle physical products and delivery. How do you do this? Or do you just offer delivery for digital item sales?

We provide region specific shipping options for physical products, and will be doing tight integrations with UPS, Fedex, RoyalMail apis to help you with fulfilling physical items.

Wow. If you can provide this, I will move away from my self-hosted shopping cart to you guys.

Re: Chec(kout) - Sell anything, anywhere. A platform for longtail ecommerce.

#60
post #4
post #3

In what ways is this different to Gumroad [1]? [1] http://gumroad.com

Gumroad's a platform for people who want to sell digital things they create and has a 5% fee. We're a platform for long tail merchants. So for example - you'd sell the psd your not going to use in your app on gumroad, but you'd sell the final app through chec. - if that helps. - we also only charge 3.5% and can do a lot more with downloads + handle physical products. We position ourselves between Gumroad & Shopify (i…

Regarding the P.S. - is this why there is now Chec and Ribbon.co (a d/b/a for Kout Inc.) doing similar things?
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