Show HN: We built a simple way to accept payments through Stripe

The payment UI looks unfamiliar and slightly confusing.

   https://gethelium.com/static/images/sales/overlay.png

* Why are the labels _inside_ the input field? It's surprising when you can edit _some_ text in a well but not all of it.

* Why is my email address under billing?

* Why is the CVC field on a different row?

* Email, name, and street address fields will contain long data. Neither my street address or email address will probably fit in there.

* Why is the year only two digits? Y2K led me to believe two-digit years means accidental ICBM lanches.

Also, I spent fifteen seconds wondering why I couldn't flip the switches underneath "Effortless for everyone" on https://gethelium.com/. I even tried dragging the switch nub left and right.

I hope this helps. This looks like a really useful service. I'd love to look at the integration documentation (if there is any).

You're asking me to connect my stripe account to your site, and give you 2% of my money and you won't even give me your first name? All of your info is anonymized and your domain who.is don't have real contact info, nor your Quora or twitter accounts...

I immediately thought you were a scammer.

<rant>

You know what pisses me off the most about a site like this? Where is your contact info? Demo? Screenshots? Samples? Names? Email? About? Who the hell are you? You provide no names, no contact info, just an overly minimal site that links to another even less informative site with no names. And I see this so often that it infuriates me. It breaks the basic most fundamental rule of the web which is, Trust and Authenticity. AKA Credibility.

http://who.is/whois/freshplum.com Even your WHO.IS info for your domain is anonymous. The only idea I have that you're not a scammer is that your HN account nick007 is 1000+ days old. And your first name might be nick and you might be a part of Ycombinator's summer 2011 class. Your clients aren't going to play the clicking game like I just did to try to find out if you're a scammer or not.

https://twitter.com/freshplum: Here's your twitter, again no names.

http://www.quora.com/Freshplum: And your Quora, again no names. Just "a pricing company".

I know I'm comming off as an asshole critic (the kind HN needs less of) but, WTF man. I had to dig your names out from the bottom of your press release. The one document on all your sites that actually tells me something.

Who is spreading this philosophy of 1 page anonymous sites that ask you for credentials?

Here's a one page website I made. http://www.timeforzen.com. All it does is stream free creative commons songs. I'm not even selling anything and I still have an about page and contact info.

</rant>

(Also for those of you who are saying 5% is too high, don't forget ebay and amazon fees add up to 11%-20%. Amazon is so expensive that I can't afford to sell my calendars on its site. And Gumroad allows you to sell links to digital content by charging 5% as well. So it's normal.)

A few comments are making an issue of the pricing (2% + Stripe's 2.9%) saying it's too high. It's not too high. If the product does it's job and makes it dead simple for the end user it might even be too low. As mentioned by someone else, the HN crowd likely isn't the target audience.

Fast Spring, which did 44.5 million in rev in 2011, charges 5.9% plus $.95 or 8.9% flat per order (user chooses which). Granted, Fast Spring may be more of a total ecommerce solution, but the point isn't +2%. It's who is the end user and how much easier does this product make their life/business.

Here's a question about Helium. The premise is that for 2% any site could be made an eCommerce store, making total transaction fees around 5% for a dead-simple solution. This is great for anyone without the technical knowledge or desire to code their own solution in. What happens when the site gets successful? At what point is it worth it for the site owner to pay someone to build a more cost-effective solution? 2% for $1,000/month is only $20, but if the site gets much larger, you lose a customer.

I guess the strange fact is that the more successful your clients are, the more likely they are to leave. How will Helium deal with this?

I really like the clouds in front of the airship! The movement is very subtle, which gives the design a refined feeling. Totally the kind of detail that could be overdone and become distracting, but I think you guys nailed it.

Curious - as someone totally ignorant to the nuances of Stripe - why doesn't Stripe offer a very simple, OOB checkout solution?

What would prevent them from doing so, which in theory could be a nice additional revenue stream for them (stealing [a part of] your 2% away)?

I've been following you guys for a while, and really love your sense of design.

As for the product, is this a direct competitor to Gumroad?

I don't understand why you need to charge with pricing-per-transaction. This seems like something you'd pay monthly for, no? I'd be curious to know why you decided not to do a subscription plan.

I run my lady's dog treat site. Arrfscarf.com

We have been trying to find a great solution for web ordering. We sell doggie ice cream. We currently sell retail in Chicago. Have a couple of stores in New York that are interested in carrying our product.

We want a simple solution for our online ordering. First, we need to test and see if people are willing to order dog ice cream online.

This looks like a good solution for us to try. I will implement this later today. I will likely give some feedback.

very cool.. the Odio family always up to big things :) love the simplicity + the design + the use-case. releasing this as a wordpress plugin would be killer - the entire shopping cart space is very muggle-unfriendly. that said, you're going to have to do alot of volume to make 2% worth your time - payments are coolest when tied to a marketplace, but your diff advantage is to not be a marketplace. you're going to have a tough time recouping the $$ you'll have to spend to gain the mass-market mindshare you'd want to drive that kind of volume. at the same time if the business turns out to be the bees knees, big guys will be quick to copy and out-spend you in marketing, while small guys (eg ribbon, gumroad) can quickly add "embedding" as a feature. i love the product (and the name!!), it's just a tough slog to "be the next PayPal" these days. quick feedback: your "effortless for everyone" is exceptionally well done, i would move it above the more standard 3 column descriptors.

We believe Helium's target audience isn't the HN community, but it'd be good to get your thoughts about it anyways.

It's basically an easy way to add a shopping cart and check-out flow to a website. Think of the small business that's not tech-savvy but wants to sell a few products (or a service) on their site.

Design was by Michael Yuan, the same designer that designed Divvyshot.

Can I ask what you guys are using for the mouse-based signature feature? Is it something off the shelf or did you guys write it yourself?

FWIW, I think it is potentially a very viable product if you can find and effectively market to the proper niche (which obviously is not the HN crowd). Good luck!

You need to state your pricing structure clearly. Saying that you charge 2% over what Stripe charges makes it seem like you are hiding the total cost of transactions. Using Helium would cost people 4.5% plus 25 cents, am I right?

I also see that you are testing the response from HN. Well done. But the landing page for HN and regular visitors are the same. Why not run some quick tests with all the traffic?

You might have branding issues with the project Blimp (getblimp.com). The founders are really cool guys, but do chat with them about it.

The design is top-notch, though a button or link that scrolls down to the area with more information should be tested. Right now, the first impression you get is that this is an empty landing page.

A demo would also be nice.

I have something similar going at https://www.bngal.com

Your homepage design is definitely better but it would be really nice to see a demo, screenshots, or a video somewhere.

Also, do you think you'll have problems with integration once you go beyond hackers who know how to paste embed code into their site?

So is your target customer is very small transaction web sellers? Because 4.9% + 30c per transaction is extremely high. That's 2.9% + 30c from stripe and 2% from you.

https://stripe.com/us/help/pricing

If you're selling in any kind of volume, something like shopify would be a no brainer over this.

This is going to sound snarky, but isn't Stripe a simple way to accept payments through Stripe?

A little like https://spacebox.io/ too.

It seems like a good idea, but I think 2% additional per transaction is a tough sell.

About freshplum: "We bring the decision-making power of data science to businesses that sell goods and services electronically."

This is a long sentence. How about "We bring powerful data analytics to online sales"?

Is there a demo anywhere?

Here's something I need which I would pay 2% for right now - the ability to email someone an invoice. I'm stuck with PayPal, which I hate.

Design-wise, it looks fantastic. Can I ask why there is absolutely no branding on the login page (or the TOS)?

Nice job! Are there plans to support mobile browsers? Works great on iPad, but not iPhone at the moment.

Far too much like spacebox.io for me.

Beautifully presented, wow.

Do sellers need to have an account with Stripe ?

How do you handle chargebacks ?

Homepage seems like not tested in IE 9-10

That page is just beautiful. Well done.