Sellfy found way how to sell files | Hacker News Reader

Sellfy found way how to sell files

thenextweb.com

52 pointsIvarsIndriks33 comments

Interface looks nice and the innovation here is deep links into social networks.

Many of us have been selling digital files for a while. I originally came here to post how expensive 5% seemed, but after looking into it, it's not a bad deal at all.

Here's my setup: http://www.bengarvey.com/2011/04/27/my-e-commerce-stack/

My eproduct ( http://kidsdungeonadventure.com ) sells for $5.99 and I pay a flat $5/month for most of the functionality provided by Sellify. 5% of $5.99 is $0.2995. My break even point between the services is 16.7 sales per month. The other great thing about sellify is that with no other fees, you can safely run it alongside with whatever setup you currently have.

Overall, I am definitely better off with the flat rate, but the appeal of a no-cost plan is pretty enticing to newcomers.

Still, it's way better than Amazon, scribd, or other services I looked into a year ago. Glad to see some more competition in this space.

Thanks for your comment! In future we will plan to introduce some additional plans for established sellers as well.

I don't think you need special plans for established sellers. Here's what would get me on board: Convince me that your social hooks can sell more for me or lower fees at various levels (ie. drop to 4% after 50 sales in a month)

Incentivizing people via money discounts to share via social networks is in direct violation to their the terms of services. It's very obvious why they don't want this kind of spam and they all enforce this hard. They will be shut down.

Has anyone had success selling e-goods with this service or similar services? And how do they stop people from selling things they have not created?

I use it for my iPhone design files for developers: indriks.com/ios

Can't ever prevent it.

Treat your customers with respect, put a human face on the product, and remind yourself that your overhead is so small you don't need to worry about it.

ok, what if one customer is emailing me all angry and cursing he claims that another is stealing his work? which one do I respect more? and which one do I believe if both telling me "its my work".

I don't understand the question. This is about you selling digital goods that you created. Why would your customers argue?

As I understand the question it is about a person who finds their work being sold through Sellfy without their permission.

No, it's a guy who wants to start a service LIKE this one talking about what happens as a customer support issue when somebody claims someone else is selling their IP.

Another gumroad clone? Although this appears to have more fancy features, also instant payment, the embed buttons look great too.

How do they ensure that PayPal do not do chargebacks, as they do with other electronic goods, once the buyer has recevied it?

That is something that really sucks with digital good selling with Paypal as the payment gateway. They get my digital goods and then chargebacks or claims a refund. I don't want to get in with irritants, so I refund them but they get the download.

Has this been an actual problem for you?

I decided to skip the chargeback shenanigans by offering my customers a no-questions-asked money back policy. So far, less than 1% of my customers have asked for a refund. I suspect that those who want to get my product for free will simply torrent it rather than weasel around with chargebacks/refunds.

Well, it's less about the money and more about the irritating attitude. Yes, I just refund them and find it to be easier to deal with than anything else.

I'm sure they don't. I sell eproducts and haven't had this happen to me yet. Even if it did, I wouldn't care. There are enough honest people out there.

You don't sell enough e-goods then or you would have gotten them.

So I have to make a "secret" link on my website (or use a "private" link on SoundCloud etc.) right? And Sellify just sells the URL?

I just tried it out and no, they host it. You upload a file, set a price and then when the payment is made the customer is given a download link (with a 5 download limit).

That seems surprisingly reasonable.

Pretty much all of the digital goods sales platforms work this way. This is nothing new. Please don't credit them with inventing it. This technique has been around for literally a decade or more.

Sellfy hosts and delivers the file to the clients. We also provide merchants with tools for promotion and detail analytics so that they can track their sales and social network campaign impact. It's much more than a link :)

Oh great. Now half the links on Twitter and Facebook will be spam for useless digital crap.

Guys I from my experience I created http://indriks.com/io in 2hours using sellfy. But of course you can use other tools such as shopify or whatever but that is more complicated.

I go to that page and see a bird in the background and some social widgets. Is there supposed to be more?

He typoed, he forgot the s on the end:

http://indriks.com/ios

> Sellfy found way how to sell files

I guess English isn't your native language, which explains why the headline here is ungrammatical. You might want to just use the actual headline. Or at least delete the word "how" from your headline.

So did megaUpload

Tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of people have been selling digital files for years and years and years. Ever heard of Clickbank? No? Well that's because you're not doing enough research.

The moderately interesting part is the social aspect but considering how many times a person has to be exposed to a thing before they actually buy it, I doubt it will make that much of a difference.

If you're serious about selling digital goods, I'd really look into a different platform. You want something solid that's been around the block for a while, when you're talking about creating a new business based on it. You want more than a couple glossy social gimmicks.

(Note: I do NOT recommend ClickBank, for the skeeve factor. They are a totally legit, well-behaved business, but they LOOK too skeevy for YOUR customers to interact with. There are more modern, classy alternatives.)

FWIW I have sold probably around $200k of digital goods in my career so far. I know whereof I speak.

For others who are wondering what you _should_ use, just Google ‘Amy Hoy selling digital goods’ (;

Which do you recommend?

Sellfy provides a platform that is allowing for a further integration of digital content into the social networks. This is the future direction of publishing. Eventually, the models of distribution & access to information will be further changed from what we have currently known. Authors will be much more greatly empowered as will end users (the readers) who will have a greater access to information as the future is reshaped by entrepreneurs.

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