Show HN: Our photo print & ship library for iOS | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Our photo print & ship library for iOS

dev.sincerely.com

96 pointsbrezina19 comments

Really like it, this is of the same "I should have thought of that" smartness as Slideshare was when I was first told of it. Youtube for presentations - brilliant! Photoprint api for photo apps - brilliant!

And a built-in business model. Good luck guys!

Interesting. I run a web service that is looking for this type of service as an addon, but I'm confused at your pricing. You take 99¢ base plus 30% of anything over that? So if I charge $2, I get 70¢, you get $1.30, and you'll mail a post card anywhere in the world? I run out of Canada, so you're spending 59¢ for the stamp, xx¢ for the payment processing, and xx¢ for the printing. Seems like a solid deal, hope you can make some $$ too!

Edit - I read your blog and see that it does seem to work that way. Interesting, if you work for web services I may be interested as well.

Ditto on the Edit. Id be interested as well. Just sent a tweet to the owners...

SO COOL! Now I want to crowbar this into apps that don't even need it. :) "Who wants to send a postcard from their to-do list!?"

Are there enough iOS apps that need this functionality to support you as a business?

And will there be enough in the future? I'm worried about this being way too niche...

Value proposition is surprisingly similar to PicPlum. Printed photos are important.

PicPlum as a platform?

Cool concept but I just never see myself using this. As a frequent event photographer, boy would I love a similar app that lets me quickly enter in a number from a file name take down payment, and ship a print that I will upload later to the customer.

cool. yeah - this is more for developers of photo apps. but there might be a market for what you want as well. thanks for the feedback

Also see PostalMethods.com - a complete API for sending postal mail. You send them the data (document, street addresses, etc) and they print and mail.

I use postal methods a lot for one of my websites (postsecretcollection.com <- Shameless plug). But they are a tad expensive on the postcard side if you ask me. I just want to know how they get the price down to just 99 cents.

Isn't Apple going to shoot you down for accepting credit cards? It's in-app or bust now.

I believe that is only for subscription services. There are still plenty of e-commerce applications on the App Store. Also, Apple unfortunately only supports in-app purchasing for digital goods (and ours is physical).

No. Off the top of my head, both the Square and Uber apps allow manual CC entry.

Apple does not allow in-app payments for physical goods.

they are either really bad at research or they know something that you do not.

I like the idea, but I do think the UI could be simplified a bit.

Some of the views can be bypassed by the developer (say a dev has no need for the cropping or messaging view), but we're always refining our flow and looking for ways to adjust our UI. If you have any suggestions, we'd love to hear from you. Just shoot an email to team@sincerely.com, SUBJECT: iOS Ship Library Feedback.

I have to type in a credit card number? Talk about a deal-breaker. That's a very non-iOS interaction.

I understand the constraints, but that's what startups are all about - finding clever ways around them. How soon can you put in a seamless flow?

We have many many customers on postagram and popbooth that don't have a problem with entering a credit card. This is THE way that Apple wants developers to charge for physical goods - see item 11.3 on these guidelines http://appadvice.com/appnn/2010/09/apples-app-store-review-g... (the actual guidelines are behind a login for developers). So given these constraints, we believe this is a very seemless flow - and our customers agree.

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