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Show HN: Fruits – Sell digital products via your website, newsletter, etc
Hi HN!
Whilst trying to build an online community for content creators, we failed!
Taking the learnings and stripping down our product to a true MVP, we now started working on "fruits", which allows creators to sell files such as ebooks, designs, checklists, music and online coachings online in less than two minutes.
https://fruits.de/en https://fruits.de/en
It works as simple as this:
1. upload a file at "fruits" & set a price
2. you will receive your individual fruits-sales-link
3. share the link wherever your customers are (e.g. website, newsletter, social media)
In addition, we also take care of the tedious office work such as invoicing and VAT collection for you, and this is completely automated.
What do you think? We are looking forward to your feedback!
- tomschwiha 4y agoCongratiolations! 1. How do you handle inner EU-vat free excemption (validation of tax numbers)? 2. How easy or hard was your KYC-integration? As payment processor in Germany I assume you are required for money laundering checks, or?
- helen_fruits 4y agoThank you :-) ! Before a creator's first payout we are conducting a KYC process: checking the plausibility of the address, verifying the existence of the company, a valid & correct VAT ID, etc. In addition, products undergo a check once they are generating sales and of course there is a reporting possibility to hello@fruits.de .
- probabletrain 4y agoAny plans to make the download/payment page more customizable e.g. formatting/images in the description, or giving sellers control over the background?
- donjoe 4y agoHi, one of the devs here - happy to answer any questions :-) We're currently working exactly on that feature - been requested a few times yet. To keep the product as simple as possible for the MVP, we stripped all initial features and will add them step by step in the coming days.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- andybak 4y agoIt sends you a code that expires and there's no way to request another. In general - please let codes last at least an hour or so. I always get distracted waiting for the code and have to request another one - often several times. Unless you can guarantee instant code delivery (which you probably can't) then I am going to go off and do something else and I probably will forget to check for a while.
- khanan 4y agoOh, how I hoped I read that "... sell digital produce" :(
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- cebula 4y ago
- peteconcrete 4y agoThank you so much! We're glad you like it.
- pcmill 4y agoWhat is the "bookkeeping" fee in the price calculator for? https://fruits.de/en/payment/price-calculator https://fruits.de/en/payment/price-calculator
- peteconcrete 4y agoHi, we do have a bookkeeping fee which is the fee we forward 1/1 from the accounting company currently connected. This allows us to handle payments in the sub- $10 area by not having losses whilst handling payments. We might consider removing the fee in the future once we see sales in the lower $10 area are not really relevant.
- notafraudster 4y agoTypically when someone says "accounting" or "bookkeeping", they don't mean payment processing. Accounting and bookkeeping typically refers to tracking payments, invoices, credits, and debits, not actually taking payment. This could be an English <-> German thing. I'd also say that the norm in this space is that your 7% fee should cover this (and if it doesn't, whatever fee you do set should cover it). Saying you charge a 7% fee when actually you mean 7% + some amount is sort of shady. I would consider hiring a professional English copywriter, generally, as the language page reads as ESL. ("digital contents", "where ever", missing comma after "fruits", generally prefer oxford commas, "where ever [sic] you want to super fast" oddly informal, "receive a link that leads customers to your product", "place your fruits link wherever your customers are", "content formats", redundant "files and content formats of all kinds", "where your customers are already", "every channel, really every one!", missing period at end of secure payment bullet point, missing period at end of automatic billing bullet point, "any open questions", "set itself the task", about us list also missing an oxford comma, "anyone who wants it", "for this purpose")
- peteconcrete 4y agoVery good points. Your feedback shows that we still have some things to adjust! We will take care of it as soon as possible.
- omitmyname 4y agoCould you show an example of how it will look like
- logikblok 4y ago+1 on this, looks good would appreciate a live/mock example
- peteconcrete 4y agoThat would be the view for selling a digital file https://fruits.de/c/85nn9 https://fruits.de/c/85nn9
- peteconcrete 4y agohttps://fruits.de/c/v9kgq https://fruits.de/c/v9kgq ;)
- Dand313 4y agolooks good Peter. Take a look at getrevin.com if you are interested in using stripe but having the tax compliance taken off your hands
- will0 4y ago
- simplehuman 4y agoI am curious about the name and the de domaim
- peteconcrete 4y agoWe first launched the service in Germany last week. The domain is not final yet. International domain will follow soon.
- GordonS 4y agoJust a note on the name from someone in the UK. "fruits" is a slang term for testicles, as in "she kicked him right in his fucking fruits!". I doubt it's the first thing folk would think of with "fruits", but thought it worth mentioning. Naming is hard :/
- corrral 4y agoAs in "fruits of one's labor"? That's how I took it.
- peteconcrete 4y agoThat was definitely the intention. ;)
- velcro 4y agocongratulations on the launch! how does this compare to Gumroad?
- peteconcrete 4y agoUnlike Gumroad, our goal is not to offer sales pages for digital products - at least not initially. We found out creators don't necessarily need a complicated landing page when selling content through e.g. tiktok or instagram or a newsletter that already provides trust. In addition, we will also process and handle invoices and credit notes
- Aeolun 4y agoYes, the same was true for me. I literally only want to accept payments, the sales page and the fulfilment is already done externally, so I really just need a payment form that sends me a callback. Stripe does this, but going through their whole KYC process has become extremely arduous (and they seem incapable of being clear about what they need/want, as well as understanding that Dutch people with a Dutch company sometimes do not reside on the Netherlands).
- rawbot 4y agoYou might want to fix the fact that you can specify a negative price for the product, at least in the calculator. Other than that, looks cool!
- donjoe 4y agoGood catch, thanks!
- pabloem 4y agoCongrats for shipping! I love the simplicity of the idea. It reminds me a lot to Drop to sell[0]. At first glance, both cover the same use case, or is there any significant difference? [0] https://www.droptosell.com/ https://www.droptosell.com/
- peteconcrete 4y agoThank you very much! The service was actually not yet known to us. But it also looks very exciting.
- peteconcrete 4y agoWe will handle the intl. taxation for sellers and hand out invoices to the buyers. With us you also don't have the hassle of creating your own Stripe account, API key etc etc. We learned the required expertise to set up multiple accounts when trying to sell a file was a huge pain point for creators.
- fxtentacle 4y agoHow does this differ from Gumroad?
- peteconcrete 4y agoUnlike Gumroad, our goal is not to offer sales pages for digital products - at least not initially. We found out creators don't necessarily need a complicated landing page when selling content through e.g. tiktok or instagram or a newsletter that already provides trust. In addition, we will also process and handle invoices and credit notes
- ozten 4y agoThere are hundreds of successful CRM SaaS companies out there. Same for email marketing. I think there is room for tons of creator sales platforms without asking "How does this differ from Mailchimp?" I think the #1 "product design" problem for these tools is customer trust with a brand you've never seen before. I find Gumroad a little jarring instead of being in the background. Gumroad has been around long enough that it is now a brand that someone might have interacted with more than once through different creators, but I think that is a secondary use case.
- closedloop129 4y agoIs €0.49 for bookkeeping a competitive price? For a €1.99 product, that's more than the paypal fees at €0.40. Apart from bookkeeping in their own system, paypal also has to handle fraud and regulatory obligations. How can they be cheaper?
- peteconcrete 4y agoHi, we do have a bookkeeping fee which is the fee we forward 1/1 from the accounting company currently connected. This allows us to handle payments in the sub- $10 area by not having losses whilst handling payments. We might consider removing the fee in the future once we see sales in the lower $10 area are not really relevant.
- AussieWog93 4y agoWhy would you want to log every transaction with an external accountant? This increases the cost of your service and adds absolutely nothing of value to the customer.
- donjoe 4y agoThat's due to rules and regulations here in Germany. We need to have our outgoing and incoming invoices being handled properly to not run into tax fraud issues. By talking to creators from e.g. OnlyFans, the biggest issues they faced was explaining their earnings to the tax authorities with no proper invoices at hand. By further automating those tasks, we will be able to reduce costs dramatically and might get rid of the bookkeeping fee alltogether.
- Aeolun 4y agoMaybe you want to just include it in the fee itself. It feels silly to have a separate fee when you advertise with 7%. At the very least it’s 7%+0.49. It’s not my problem that you have to hire an external accountant, and not something that I think is relevant for your customers.
- 4y ago
- ThePhysicist 4y agoHappy to see a startup from Germany here, way to go folks! Also I wasn't aware you can now add a description and post a link to an external website here, that's quite helpful.
- peteconcrete 4y agoThank you! Greetings from Bavaria. :)
- cycomanic 4y agoCongrats withdrawn, not from Germany. I kid, I kid! ;) Context for all non-Germans: Many "northern" Germans joke about Bavaria not being part of Germany. Another often made "joke" is that Bavaria starts ~50km south of were one lives.
- Semaphor 4y agoAFAIK a "Show HN"-only feature.
- ar0 4y agoGreat idea. However, I think you need to be careful in the VAT area not to overpromise: I selected “selling from Switzerland to Switzerland” and your calculator quoted a VAT of 0%, which is of course false (selling stuff in Switzerland requires deducting 7.7% VAT). My guess would be that you only cover VAT within the EU, but of course there are VAT regimes outside of the EU too; so “we also take care of VAT collection for you” does not seem to apply in all cases.
- chinathrow 4y ago> selling stuff in Switzerland requires deducting 7.7% VAT Only if you're selling more than 100k CHF per year.
- donjoe 4y agodisclaimer: developer, not tax attorney :-) Our connected tax office figured out taxation concerning international transactions. Why and how different taxation rules apply depends on a couple of instruments and setups such as reverse tax charges, MOSS and others. It basically burns down to fruits: - charging the buyer with the applicable tax between fruits (company in Germany) and the buyer in country XYZ - each buyer receiving an invoice (issued by fruits) - the seller receiving a single credit note for all sales within that month targeting a German company (fruits) We will have to clarify taxation as I can see from comments in this thread - thanks for your input!
- jacquesm 4y agoVATMOSS would seem to be the way to go, note that you may not have visibility on all of the transactions of a party so you won't be able to determine when they cross the limit for VAT liability for their country.
- conductr 4y agoI have no stake in this but, is there not a VATaaS API/library by now? I see the VAT complications discussed all the time online and figured this would be rather centralized by now
- Hackbraten 4y agoAs 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.
- once_inc 4y agoOr CreditCard, or iDeal, or AliPay, or crypto, or... or... or... Of the vast amount of payment options available online, only a handful is used by people in a geographic area. Dutch people have a very strong preference for iDeal, for example, and rarely purchase things with credit cards, while Chinese customers heavily lean on AliPay.
- Tijdreiziger 4y agoThat's why you use a payment processor like Adyen or Mollie, who handles all these geographic differences for you.
- huhtenberg 4y agoPayPal 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 https://fruits.de/c/v9kgq
- a2128 4y agoContent 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.
- huhtenberg 4y agoAnd that's just a random boogeyman.
- Trigalti 4y agoHow do you deal with KYC / Money laundering practices?
- andyjih_ 4y agoMy 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?
- Cthulhu_ 4y agoProbably 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.
- trh0awayman 4y agoCan anyone in Germany use this as an individual? For example, I have an office job. If I write a song/comic book, can I just start using this platform or do I need to do some tax nonsense/form a company?
- Aeolun 4y agoThat’s up to your country, not to the company handling the payments. Edit: Never mind, didn’t realize they called this out as something they handle.
- helen_fruits 4y agoSure thing, every kind of business is welcome, also sidehustlers/ individual business activities. You can simply note that down when you are filling in your billing / VAT information. We can't wait to see you selling soon :-)
- FlyingAvatar 4y agoI love the simplicity. How are things like fraud and chargebacks handled? With collecting money being this easy, I immediately worry about how it would be abused.
- mstolpm 4y agoCongrats 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 potential user, I can't trust you with my business. Moreover, I couldn't find information about your "sales tax" claim. You know better than me that selling digital products in the EU and across borders can be kind of tricky, depending on what you are selling (e.g. ebook vs software), if you're selling B2B or B2C, and depending on the origin of your customer. As a user, I'd need much more information about how you handle this and the bookkeeping you mentioned, but it somehow looks like you're relying on PayPal as the payment gateway and are not handling sales tax / USt by yourself? And no: As someone looking for a simple solution to sell my digital products, I don't want do book a consultation for answers to the questions above.
- schnebbau 4y agoYou sound like a user that expects the world for your $20/month business. These red flags could be corrected in a day.
- bryanrasmussen 4y agoI think they sound like a user who expects the service to follow German and EU rules and regulations when on a German domain, which sounds not like the world but common sense. Also "for your $20 month business"? I mean I guess he expects it for everyone's $20 month business.
- emteycz 4y agoThis thread (and it being upvoted to the top) is a prime example of why there isn't any Big Tech in EU - because we slam down even fun little startups with this legalese bullshit as soon as they appear.
- 4y ago
- scanny 4y agoCool to see a München based startup popup here! Nice going neighbour :)
- helen_fruits 4y ago<3
- Aillustrator 4y agoHow will taxes be handled? I am in Europe. That means every time I sell something, I need to charge taxes depending on the country of the buyer. And once a year, I have to make a report for the tax authorities with all the revenues I made with all the countries. Does fruits abstract that away somehow?
- donjoe 4y agoThis! fruits will: - charge the buyer with the applicable tax between 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 within that month targeting a German company (fruits) As I can see from the comments (above and below), we need to come up with a way explaining intl taxation more thoroughly. Disclaimer: I am the developer and not the tax attourney. In case you do have any questions, feel free to contact us (or me) and we will set up a meeting with our Tax-Daniela which will be able to explain taxation-related tasks in detail with a proper legal background :-)
- dan1234 4y agoI made a little test file & purchase - how do I actually get paid? First impressions are that it seems very expensive for smaller purchases - my $2.00 turned into $0.56 (and then I'll have currency fees as GBP wasn't an option).
- helen_fruits 4y agoHi there! With the upload of your first file (congrats!) you should have received an email summarizing the file infos as well as a link that leads you to your fruits account, asking you to fill in your payout info. :-) As for smaller purchases, it is probably best to go for quantity - you can also use our price calculator, to see how you should price your product to receive amount x in the end. Also definitely noting down that GBP should be an option. Thank you for your input :-)
- iamzamek 4y agoWhy did you decide on .de domain? I think more global domain would be better.
- pg5 4y agoI like the idea, but I would expect your PayPal business account to get banned pretty quickly without a more rigorous sign up process to prevent illegal content from being sold.
- jameshart 4y agoImmediate feedback on your simple ‘step 1 - 2 - 3’ explanation… It’s great to reduce the steps down to so few, but I feel like you’re missing an explanation of the follow up steps where a customer pays for a thing, and the money gets to me.
- helen_fruits 4y agoHi there, Helen here from the fruits Team - I am always keen to improve the user experience and to provide smart content, super grateful for your input! We're already working on a step by step guide + video - coming soon :-) !
- SnowHill9902 4y agoIf you are selling digital goods why put yourself within Germany? Do it from Gibraltar or Luxembourg.
- damir 4y agoCongrats on the launch! But IMO payment service and the term "Sidehustler" (in About us part) don't fit well together... ;)
- franze 4y agoseems cool, but work on your trust signals to the users, why should they trust you?
- helen_fruits 4y agoGreat input, the seal for secure payment etc. will be live shortly.
- xz18r 4y agoLooks good but upon clicking I thought for over 5 seconds that this was a sideproduct of WeTransfer - at least styling-wise. Serif font for titles, big blue plus sign, split screen of colorful graphic and the info. Also curious about the name. "Fruits" domains seem to be worth quite a bit. May sound harsh but change the name and sell the costly domain for something that is more explanatory?
- helen_fruits 4y agoThank you for your input - feeling flattered for the WeTransfer comparison ;-) definitely a key player we look up to, however our roadmap will differ quite a bit, looking at micro landing pages etc. As for fruits - "fruitful work" , harvest the fruits of your hard labour.
- LudwigNagasena 4y agoAny precautions against money laundering and fraud?
- mixedbit 4y agoA 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 of products. Anyway, 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.
- peteconcrete 4y agoThanks for your suggestion. That looks interesting! We'll take a closer look at paddle.
- s1291 4y agoIt looks like you're avoiding answering the question related to follow up steps where a customer pays for a thing, and the money gets to me.
- ramesh31 4y agoPeople are 100% going to sell drugs with this.
- 4lejandrito 4y agoIt made me really sad not to see the developers' avatars on the "About us" section. It seems they are not part of the team, but they're the ones answering questions here. Other than that, great product!
- PufPufPuf 4y ago"Digital nomad", "sidehustler" or "freelancer" aren't actual jobs. What do these people even do? The actual developers are listed in the footer.
- joshyeetbox 4y agoLol, that was what I noticed first. All those employees but the people who actually built the site aren't even listed as team members.
- helen_fruits 4y agoThank you for voicing your concern - the team section is just being built. We are super grateful and appreciative for our hard working team, which includes being understanding as not everyone wants to show their face online. We'll hopefully be showing more faces soon :-) .
- divbzero 4y agoDoes licensing relate to what Fruits currently offers, or will offer eventually? Or is licensing a separate responsibility and decision for the creator?
- helen_fruits 4y agoHi there :-) for now, licensing is the creator's / seller's responsibility.
- Princetobi 4y ago
- ps901 4y agoI can't click none of the links in the footer of your slide menu, such as Imprint (Firefox and Edge testet)..
- helen_fruits 4y agoThanks for pointing this out - the fixes are underway!
- dmix 4y agoThe create page is nice but the first thing I always look for is a demo. Stripe always provides these on their pages.
- helen_fruits 4y agoThanks <3 we'll be shortly providing you with a demo / tutorial video as well as an animated run-through of the product. Good points!
- daanlo 4y agoLove this!
- helen_fruits 4y ago<3
- gerdesj 4y ago"Blessed are the fruit".
- quinncom 4y agoNice! Can I use it to sell software registration codes that are generated by an API I run from my server? After a user clicks to purchase my item, Fruits would call my API with a preconfigured shared secret, the API responds with a unique code, then Fruits gives this to the buyer. Can it do that?
- smarri 4y agoCongrats on the MVP. I got a test of your service up and running very quickly and smoothly. The biggest feature request for me would be simple custom branding to make the user journey look good when connecting from my website. I'm less concerned about the tax situation, I see that as my/the users problem and not yours.
- helen_fruits 4y agoNoted :-) great feedback, thank you! The customization features is well on its way and we hope to have it live for you within the next two weeks!
- XCSme 4y agoThe links in your sidebar don't work, I can't see any info about your company.
- helen_fruits 4y agoThanks for pointing this one out - already forwarded your feedback, the correct linking will be live in no time.
- deadcoder0904 4y agothis is awesome. how is it different from paddle.com or getrevin.com? it looks like a merchant of record :)