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Chec(kout) - Sell anything, anywhere. A platform for longtail ecommerce.
- ecaroth 14y agoLove your site design - great use of whitespace and big, bold images! It would be nice to see a sample of a cart/page before signing up so you know what your "shop" will look like..
- ante_annum 14y agoThe site is impossible to use on mobile.
- devan 14y agoyeah, we're working on that! we rushed the marketing site.
- yookd 14y agoThat's a great idea and we plan on adding a sample page very soon. For now, you can view the video under the "Beautiful Checkout" section on the main page. It will show you a sample page and flow of the checkout.
- sim0n 14y agoIn what ways is this different to Gumroad [1]? [1] http://gumroad.com http://gumroad.com
- devan 14y agoGumroad'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 (if they did payments). on a side note - me and sahil know each other well. Back in april 2011 when Chec was called Kout I actually reached out to him to join Kout after he launch groad on hackernews. He said "you've already built the software why do you need me" but we've kept in touch and occasionally get coffee and discuss the space. Link based selling has been around for years. 2checkout, 1shoppingcart, paypal, ejunkie, quixly etc have been at it for a while. I came up with the idea for Chec after i ended up throwing a PayPal checkout in an iframe for a info product i was selling. P.S - if anybody is wondering about the 2 year gap between launching - that story will come to light shortly.
- gurvinder 14y agoThe example you gave with PSD and app is not clear to me. Can't I sell my app through Gumroad ?
- devan 14y agoYou 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 who want to sell digital things they create. There is definitely overlap between us and groad, but its not our primary focus, for certain things you want to sell its just quicker to sell via them, and thats cool.
- sjs382 14y agoYou 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? What can I do with Chec that I can't do with Gumroad? And for that matter, what does Gumroad do that Chec doesn't (yet) do?
- devan 14y agoAnd 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..
- devan 14y agoIn 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 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? :)
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- sylvinus 14y agoMy 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!
- liquidise 14y ago$0.02 or 2¢ =P
- tgrass 14y agoIt is possible he values his thoughts less than the traditional two cents.
- BHSPitMonkey 14y agoTry explaining that to Verizon.
- lysol 14y agoIt'd be cool if there was some option to post stuff to Craigslist or auto-format copy/markup for Craigslist, but that's just me asking for my own Pony. I like the look and ease of listing stuff.
- abdophoto 14y agoThis is really great. Perfect for things like Craigslist. Think you video could be a lot better. Keep up the awesome work, though.
- cristinacordova 14y agoJust an FYI, the A/B testing link here is broken: https://trychec.com/ab-testing https://trychec.com/ab-testing
- arkitaip 14y agoHow do you handle charge backs and fraud?
- devan 14y agoheuristics & 3 strikes with chargebacks and we lock your account. But we've got a lot to do here.
- Amarandei 14y agoIt seems a bit harsh. The seller has no control over the chargebacks and you actually 'punish' the seller for them and not the buyer. Digital files chargebacks are more common than you think. How do you decide if the chargeback should receive a strike in the even that the buyer simple doesn't answer any contact requests(happened to me more then once). I've also had buyers lie about the purchase when in fact I had IP and email proof that they wore actually the ones buying but the chargeback was submitted(and approved) because they said they wore not the ones who made the transaction. Is anyone else using this 3 strike rule?
- sv123 14y agoIs there a way to order more than one product at a time?
- devan 14y agoWe're working on that.
- robinjfisher 14y agoJust an FYI, your layout has about 10% white space on the right hand side when viewed on iPad mini. Caused by the card fan lower down the page.
- devan 14y agoYeah just noticed that one, same in IOS. Working on fixing it up.
- sjs382 14y agoIt says that you handle physical products and delivery. How do you do this? Or do you just offer delivery for digital item sales?
- devan 14y agoWe 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.
- freshhawk 14y agoDo you have an eta on that integration? That sounds very interesting and the type of service we are already researching.
- devan 14y agoI'd say within 6 weeks? We're a tiny team (2 devs). I'd love to speak to you about it and see what you'd like to see implemented. drop me an email at devan [at] madebyswipe.com
- icelancer 14y agoWow. If you can provide this, I will move away from my self-hosted shopping cart to you guys.
- devan 14y agoI'd love to speak to you about it and see what you'd like to see implemented. can you drop me an email at devan [at] madebyswipe.com?
- marknutter 14y agoNot 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.
- verelo 14y agoThis is pretty funny and true. We chose a blurred background for our company http://www.checkout51.com http://www.checkout51.com
- ultimoo 14y agoIt 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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokeh).
- marknutter 14y agoYeah, 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.
- MichalBures 14y agoTL;DR Use UTF for Seller's name. Looks like a bit better Gumroad. Design is nice, blah blah blah. Why I'm writing is this: when activating account what the hell is supposed to be Seller's Name? This annoying popup keeps telling me "Must contain only letters, numbers, or - ( ) , . ' &". I must say I haven't seen many names with numbers or ampersands in it. If it's meant to be a username, than ok but say it specifically. If it's really meant to be a name - it's 2013 for Ozzie's sake, use the damn UTF.
- sjs382 14y agohttp://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b... Also, ampersands are common in company names. (Procter & Gamble, etc)
- devan 14y agoWe thought we fixed that bug. might just be some left over JS validation. we'll get into it.
- MichalBures 14y agoThank you :)
- MichalBures 14y agoCompanies.. yeah, you're right. Although the whole site feels to me like it's mainly focused on individuals.
- brador 14y agoSeems like we get a site like this every few days. Are they making crazy money or is there some other reason everyones is making one? Are they just really easy to make? Maybe because payment process disruption has occurred? What's up?
- devan 14y agoLink based selling has been around for years. 2checkout, 1shoppingcart, ejunkie etc... I started working on Chec in late 2010/early 2011, before groad launched. (https://www.facebook.com/checkoutbyswipe https://www.facebook.com/checkoutbyswipe, if you wanna trace down to the day that page was setup) - It's a long story between then and today. Short Version - University in England -> AngelPad Incubator -> Raised large seed -> Founder Split -> Had to rebuild new company.
- devan 14y agoMost of these sites will go down due to one big hurdle. Payments. Underwriting merchants and get verified by Visa/MasterCard as a payment service provider is a bitch. Aggregating credit cards is a heavily regulated area - but most of these sites are unaware of this issue. We initially started on Stripe, and got told what we were doing was unregulated/not allowed on stripe, so we then grabbed a coffee with them and learnt about this process. In fact I was grabbing coffee with Sahil (Gumroad) a few months ago and they've just run into this issue themselves - which they are starting to solve. so you'll probably notice them asking you for more information to underwrite you, unless they find a way around this. That's also why we ask users to go through an activate process.
- fatbat 14y agoInteresting. Does using Stripe Connect bypass this restriction since you are not actually handling any money? Or am I misunderstanding things? Questionable site name, but well done! :) Cheers
- devan 14y agoyup they do, thats why sites like spacebox.io & shoplocket are fine, but others are (probably) just illegally aggregating.
- zaidrahman 14y agoWho is your competitor? PayPal, Gumroad, Shopify, Stripe, Square? How would Chec work for the following cases: * A non-profit selling shirts to raise funds. * A freelancer charging for his work. Essentially, a money transfer. * A SaaS style service charging $5 a month. * Charging for a PSD.
- yookd 14y agoLike Devan stated below - "We position ourselves between Gumroad & Shopify (if they did payments)". In the future, we plan on adding widgets that will work within our application that will cater to some of the cases you pointed out. Some of these widgets will include date/time charging (tutor offering hours/days of work) and subscription based charging (SaaS service you mentioned). Of course, we're not limited to just that. As for the PSD, we host the file for you so all you need to do is upload the PSD and after the checkout process, the buyer can immediately download it.
- rgbrgb 14y agoWhat is longtail ecommerce?
- qdawg 14y agoThis is awesome! Good job!
- pogosian 14y agoIt doesn't seem to work. I created product, but when I click "Secure Checkout" button on product page nothing happens.
- devan 14y agocan you link me to the product checkout?
- aMoniker 14y agoWell done creating a fantastic-looking page that doesn't lag my browser one bit. Normally when I see pages with a lot of heavy design elements like this scrolling is jittery, but this one is super smooth.
- autoreverse 14y agoCongrats on the launch - looks cool. Do you support withdrawal of funds to non-US bank accounts? Can't see this in the FAQ. Likewise there don't seem to be any limitations on seller location. Are there any?