Show HN: Sell.app – A simple way to sell digital goods
sell.app
sell.app
We recently launched SellApp and wanted to share it with the HN community.
SellApp is a simple way to sell digital products online. A digital goods seller can spin up a storefront in less than a minute and start selling instantly, while we automatically take care of all the difficult parts — delivery, checkout, payment methods, security, and more.
We built SellApp with a small (remote) team of 3, in a little less than 4 months from start to finish (happy to elaborate more on how)
What makes SellApp different from competitors:
1. Simplicity; Unlike competitors whose interfaces overwhelm first-time seller of digital products, we decided to keep our interface as minimal/simple as possible.
2. Payments; where other storefronts tend to custody funds and pay sellers out after 7-14 days, we enable sellers to receive earnings instantly.
3. Pricing: Alternatives either charge a high monthly recurring subscription to start, or take anywhere between 8% to 25%+ in commission per sale. It's completely free to start selling on SellApp, with no fees being taken (though we'll introduce a 3% fee per sale in a couple months)
Happy to answer any questions and go more in-depth on the technical side of things.
If you aren’t charging fees yet you can turn it into a promotional thing about how you’re waiving the fees for the first X months.
We will indeed introduce fees at a later date (in ~6 months or so), so I'll definitely be incorporating your suggestion. Thanks for that :)
How do you plan to handle:
Today: customer signs up for free.
In six months: you start charging fees
In six months plus one day: the customer sells something, incurring a fee even though they signed up for free.
On the biz front, it seems like you guys are taking on gumroad? How are you thinking about getting users? I'm not super familiar with how gumroad does distribution.
You are right in saying that we are taking on Gumroad. IIRC, most of Gumroad's traction has been organic/word-of-mouth, with little/no money spent on paid advertising.
We're still figuring out the best way to acquire users at scale by experimenting with both conventional (Reddit/Twitter ads) and unconventional (Discord channel/niche forum advertising) methods.
PS: Great suggestion! I'll be setting up & linking an example storefront on the homepage shortly.
Given their refocus/pivot, it's made their interface a little too complex/overwhelming for new sellers and/or sellers who just want to sell digital products without all the hassle. SellApp is built for this segment of the market.
I suggest setting aside paid advertising, and instead invest in paying creators[1] to switch platforms. For example, pick some medium successful Gumroad creators (maybe they do $1k/sales per month) and offer them a 20% bonus on each sale they make through your platform. A single creator using your platform to make sales will deliver far more value than thousands in paid adverts -- and you can directly link spend to revenue, which is nice for attribution of spend.
[1] I'd pick creators who operate in the creator niche, e.g: people who make content about running an online business, because they're most likely to convert into platform users.
People on the internet tend to love free 'badges' - if you've ever been active on a forum, they're full of them.
The "Free store" badge is what a seller gets when they create a store on SellApp. If they then decide to upgrade their store, the badge will be replaced by a more colorful "Premium store" or an even fancier "Advanced store" badge.
I want to check two things: 1. Whether the "Free store" badge bothers new sellers 2. Whether sellers are more incentivized to upgrade in order to get the fancier "Premium store" or "Advanced store" badge
Appreciate the suggestion and feedback!
Once you move away from Shopify or woocommerce there are plenty of companies offering these services with similar enough interfaces. Sellfy, selly, rocketr to name a few that have been around ~3+ years.
Most of these have clones that offer free services in all major payment options and cryptocurrencies.
I think you will need to differentiate your company more to have any traction. Creator sponsoring of some nature seems like the best suggestion I read here. Good luck
However, I do agree with you in that we need to differentiate ourselves a little more, which is what we'll be doing as we progress with our roadmap. Sponsoring does indeed look like a good way to get traction going and we'll definitely be looking into that as a viable way to grow our userbase.
Many thanks for the feedback!
They do both have multiple clones that have popped up and which you could eventually probably find for free.
Sellfy sort of went with artists if I remember correctly. Another one focused on films. Another on ebooks. Others stay general to digital products but be aware you're also going to have to combat fraud.
Rocketr continues to process orders but development did for the most part stall after not being able to move toward payment processing more generally (costly).
Sharing this as a former team member
We do also indeed have plans for a fraud detection system to help combat fraud.
Btw since you're a former team member, I think we might have crossed paths on HF a couple years ago :)
I do mean fraud by sellers not buyers though.
The others were more active but quite possibly. Good luck on th journey m8 hmu if you like.
Is that really the number 1 differentiation point? Because it's common that new services claim to be simpler than competitors - and why shouldn't they be? They have less features at this point, so that would be weird if they were more complicated.
I'd be more curious to know how the service compares to Stripe for instance.
Stripe and SellApp go hand in hand. Where Stripe is a payment processor, SellApp is the storefront that takes care of the pre-sales and after-sales process including product delivery, security, order replacement, etc.
That said, Stripe does seem to have recently launched a new product known as "Payment Links" which may eventually grow out to something similar to SellApp.
I’m still in the very early stages, but I’ve been prototyping the checkout page and we seem to have both chosen a yellow Tailwind theme haha! I won’t be sticking to that, but I just thought it was a funny coincidence.
By the way, the Tailwind team will soon release an eCommerce package, so you might want to look out for that (I sure will!)
Is there any way to follow the development progress of Sell.app? And best of luck to you as well!
This is generally subdivided into 4 different types:
1. A file which you can download, for example an eBook.
2. A text-based product, such as a game key or license code.
3. An online service, like creating a logo for someone.
4. A dynamic delivery which lets you programmatically perform certain actions once a payment is successfully processed. A good example is automatically upgrading someone's account on your forum (or Discord channel)
Our roadmap currently looks something like this: API -> subscriptions -> product embeds -> basket system (so a customer can purchase multiple digital items from the same store)
I've been interested in generating procedural art, and some other similar things and that's been a sticking point.
When that's implemented, the customer will be able to enter any kind of detail you'd like them to (like their username, MAC address, or something else) and we'd pass that info on to you when they successfully check out.
With that, you can then automatically perform actions and deliver the digital product/file.
Thanks a lot for the candid feedback HN, learned a lot from talking to you all!
I've already gone ahead and implemented most suggested changes in the thread, and will be implementing the others soon.
How does this compare to SnipCart?
Not too familiar with SnipCart, but looking at what they offer (& correct me if I'm wrong here) it's a little more technical than SellApp.
SnipCart lets you upload a product to their platform, but then they return HTML/JS which you have to add to your own site. That means you have to purchase your own domain and hosting, then enter the relevant code to your server, plus take care of the site's design and whatnot.
SellApp has a different approach. As soon as you sign up, you can create your own storefront by specifying the subdomain you'd like (such as admin.sell.app) and you're good to go. Any product created in the dashboard, will then be visible & purchaseable on your storefront. No code/configuration required.
What we currently do on SellApp, is block purchases coming from VPN's/proxies (via MaxMind) which'll help reduce the rate of fraudulent purchases.
However, that by itself is probably not going to be enough to keep a low chargeback rate for all our sellers, so we are also planning on creating a fraud detection system that factors in a number of aspects in order to keep malicious customers at bay.
For refunds, customers can open a ticket with a seller to request a refund. We also give sellers the ability to set a 'refund timer' and terms of a refund during the product creation process, so that in case something does go wrong, they have that to refer back to.
Lots of room for improvement on both aspects though!
That's basically a non-starter for me as I need to give all potential users a good UX.
Although, it'd make more sense if we tell them that and save you the time to reply to a few customer support tickets. Will add it to our roadmap :)
That's also a non-starter because that defeats the purpose of a VPN.
Is the EUP restriction against 'adult content' included solely because that restriction is placed upon you by one or more of your implementing vendors, platforms, etc?
The restriction in our AUP is indeed because payment processors (unfortunately) still frown upon platforms which help facilitate the sale of 'adult content'. Without it, it's unlikely we'll be accepted to e.g. Stripe Connect and/or PayPal for Marketplaces further down the line.
first thing I did was go to that page and ctr-f > "sex" - then "porn" - nothing was found.. so it created interest..
then I saw "are prohibited by the payment processing service; or " near the top and went oh my - many people are not going to get that this is the cop out -
I came back to the comment thread here and did the ctrl-f 'adult' - and found the answer.
Are you using Stripe to process your payments?
Given the above, you'll definitely want to keep in mind the high chargeback rates for in-game goods/currencies and put (additional) appropriate measures in place to negate those.
These type of digital marketplaces are actually pretty popular in gaming communities, where players purchase something through the store and receive it in game (e.g. runescape private servers), so I thought your username placeholder was pretty funny. Might be a niche worth exploring.
And yeah that's what my intuition is telling me as well, people really underestimate the amount trades that are done in gaming/niche communities. Already reached out to the admin of Sythe to inquire about advertising ;)
For a view of current stats - updated daily: https://sell.app/stats
When I raised funding earlier this year and inquired about a potential outright purchase of toffee.com, the answer was that they didn't want to sell.
So instead of staying on the lease plan (which'd increase by a sizable amount y/o/y), I started looking for a suitable domain we could purchase outright, and luckily found sell.app for sale.
- The listing has a volume discount, so if you make the quantity 10 or more, it'll automatically apply a 10% discount
- You can also opt to pay more by clicking on "or more" just below the product's price
- If you wish to apply a coupon code to see how that works, you can enter "coupon" into the "Coupon code" input field to get 5% off the product's price
How does this stack up against Stripe or other platforms? What will the all-in fee be for credit card sales?
If you sell e.g. a downloadable product, it's relatively easy to manually email out a link to it every time you make a sale.
But when you start to grow and/or see an increase in sales, you'll be wasting a lot of time on delivering that eBook to all those customers. This, x10, for other digital content like license keys.
And if you look at it from the customer's perspective: you don't want to wait for the seller to come online and send a link to the product you paid for hours ago. You want it instantly.
That is where the simplicity of SellApp comes in. We handle the payment, automatically send out the product to the customer, and help the customer get in touch with you in case anything is wrong with their purchase.
That said, it's relatively easy to implement this specific feature (pretty sure I've got the relevant code from our old codebase somewhere) if/when a seller requests it.
It's mostly either downloadable goods, or serial-based products, but we launched just last week so I anticipate the type of popular product types will change as we grow.
Or is this like if you had IP to sell (a file or group of files), you could sell it?
It would be interesting to sell FPGA odds and ends people needed. Probably not enough of a market though.
We don't limit you on what kind of product you sell, as long as it's digital (and not illegal)
Is there any kind of tracking or metrics? Like if I setup a storefront, could I A/B test different marketing copy and be able to figure out what was working?
This frankly sounds pretty awesome.
There's no tracking or A/B testing yet, but you'll definitely be able to see which product performs better in terms of sales.
I'd say if it's a one-off sale, you're good to go. But if it's more than one account being sold, we'd have to remove your store.
By the time my two team members formally joined, the above design was already split up in manageable chunks of tasks which could be worked on in parallel.
In addition to the above, we decided not to decouple the frontend and backend, but instead used Livewire in conjunction with Laravel & Alpine. This, coupled with Tailwind's UI components (tailwindui.com), helped us spend very little time on the frontend aside from a few specific aspects.
Given their refocus/pivot, it's made their interface a little too complex/overwhelming for new sellers and/or sellers who just want to sell digital products without all the hassle. SellApp is built for this segment of the market.
The first thing I did was check if you are an MoR or a front for other payment gateways and quickly realised it is the latter. Please make it an MoR. We have too many digital goods/services payment processors (which I am sure many commenters have already listed) but very very few that are a full blown MoR. I don't mind paying 5%-8% fees for MoR. MoR is the selling point for me. Everything else can easily be achieved with Stripe and some coding. Not MoR. MoR requires a lot of setup but any Startup that can properly pull off an MoR specifically made for creators will take off big time IMHO.
For whatever reason best known to Startups in this space, they actively tend to avoid going the MoR route. Maybe it is the legal hassles of setting one up or complications with handling taxes across multiple regions. I don't know what exactly is the issue but a disruption is required here. I can literally count on my fingers the number of payment processors that are MoR. It is that low.
If you are a Startup that is in the payments space and want to truly reduce burden of Creators then it is not in the fees. It is in providing an MoR. I am honestly surprised to see payment startups fighting to lower fees (which probably isn't a concern for most) rather than innovating on and fixing real pain points of Creators. When I choose a payment processor I don't fixate only on the fees. That is probably my last priority. I have other factors that take precedence (the points are listed in order):
1. Are they an MoR? (If no, I just skip. It doesn't solve my pain point).
2. How do they handle chargebacks?
3. How do they handle scammers who misuse their services?
4. How do they handle Creator accounts? Do they have draconian policies where Creator accounts just get shutdown without proper notices?
5. How flexible is their payment schedule?
6. Do they support Wire transfers for payouts?
7. Pricing
As you can see, Pricing comes at the very bottom of the priorities I have set before choosing my payment processor. It is, in all aspects, a lifetime relationship. Why would I give more importance to pricing if you are solving my pain points? That is worth more than a few percentage points you shave off the price. I want Startups in this space to compete on the 6 points and give the 7th point a lower priority. Only those who are not exposed to this space tend to first go for point 7 but quickly realise they have to deal with taxes and other complex legal stuff and quit your service. You'll just end up having a higher churn rate and not so loyal customers.
Not taking anything away from your launch. Just providing some constructive feedback.
We are not a MoR, and aren't planning on becoming one either. There's already fairly decent MoR solutions out there which take payments on the seller's behalf and distribute funds after a given timeframe (usually 1-2 weeks).
You could indeed spin up something that somewhat does the job with Stripe and some coding, but not everyone can code, and doing so also requires you to worry about hosting, domains/DNS, file distribution, security, fraud, and so on.
What we offer is a simple, straightforward way for someone to spin up a store in minutes, sell a digital good, and have the funds in their account right when the sale is completed. I think that's a bigger value-add than being yet another MoR
However, the few dozen sellers I did have a chance to talk to, primarily cite three reasons why they switch to us instead of staying at a competitor:
1. Our freemium pricing. When a seller wants to spin up a storefront and sell a digital product, most competitors charge upfront (i.e. Shopify, Sellfy, Podia) whereas we have a completely free plan a seller can make use of immediately.
2. The way payouts work. Alternatives tend to hold/custody funds for a specific timeframe for various reasons. SellApp makes it possible for a seller to directly link their PayPal and Stripe accounts with their storefronts, resulting in them receiving payments instantaneously.
3. The interface/UI. As also mentioned in a few other replies, competitors tend to start off as a digital product storefront, but then completely neglect it in favor of physical products, tipping, email/affiliate marketing, and so on. That, for the average digital goods seller, becomes overwhelming and unnecessary. SellApp's intuitive and minimal design is a 'breathe of fresh air' in that sense.