Sellbox – Sell your files from Dropbox and Google Drive with Paypal
sellboxhq.com
sellboxhq.com
They are not absorbing the Paypal transaction fee, which means that on top of the 5% I would still be charged the 2.6% that Paypal wants (amount vary). So, unless the service provides a payment gateway, where is that 5% coming from? That starts adding to the cost really fast.
It might not be pretty but ejunkie (http://www.e-junkie.com/ej/pricing.htm) has a fixed cost of 5 dollars. It ends up being cheaper as soon as I sell more than 10 copies of any $10 digital goods.
For something prettier than ejunkie (but with way less features), PulleyApp does a fixed price of $6 (http://pulleyapp.com/signup). The only reason I am not using PulleyApp is because I wanted different paypal email addresses (for microtransactions vs. regular one - different fees), and at some point the ability to call a backend service does matter for integration.
I don't really see why I would use a service that takes a commission and does not charge a fixed price unless they have a value added service. As it stands, there are better alternatives already that do the same thing.
The new thing in here is the DropBox and Google Drive integration, but that is not enough for me to justify using them.
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Edit: Not saying this is a better pricing model - just playing devils advocate.
But if someone intends to sell several hundreds of copies, or the price is bigger (say, 5% of $10,000), then it is not a good deal.
So, I really only see the target audience as someone that must have DropBox integration (though other services also have integration with your webserver, and mounting a DropBox folder and exposing that through the webserver seems trivial), or maybe people with such a dispersion of files that the other services won't work (they allow you a fixed number of products).
Now, I don't know if there are more granular permissions than that, but if so, you might want to restrict things further so that files can only be added to my Google Drive (and possibly updated, for those that I've purchased via Sellbox).
I'm not too worried about the 5% fee because the apps were ~$5, and it's nice to get an instant deposit into my PayPal account. I could pretty easily build my own system for payments to eliminate their fee, but it isn't worth it to me for lower volume stuff, which this is targeted towards.
That being said, I still prefer Gumroad. It's all about the user experience, and Sellbox's isn't very good at all. The dashboard kind of sucks (though, it's usable).
This might be a good candidate for the Dropbox Chooser: https://www.dropbox.com/developers/dropins/chooser/js, which gives nice UI for picking files and then only grants the app access to those specific files.
(I work at Dropbox and am happy to answer questions. Email: smarx@dropbox.com)
Good question.
They aren't making a market (like an App store), promoting my files, creating my content, or otherwise providing value that scales with the growth of the success of my product. Why are they entitled to $5 on my $100 or $10 on my $200 if that's the price I choose? Charging a fixed price per sale is more fair + any %fees you might incur from payment processing.
Clearly many businesses are based on the same % transaction fee, but it's not really fair if you look closely.
It costs them the same to deliver a $5 file as it does a $50, apart from the transaction fees claimed by their upstream payment processor.
An easy system to post ebooks and charge for them is probably worth more to a person selling $200 ebooks rather than $100 ebooks.
How would you like them to charge for a service like this?
The current model makes a lot of sense for small to medium amount transactions but I too have a problem with 7.6% total of a much larger transaction this company didn't do any extra work for.
Alternatively you could have multiple rates based on the size of the payload. If you're really using their storage, which I doubt, then that percentage cost would cover the bandwidth to serve it. With that you would have people like me that would check their work though, to make sure if I'm really paying bandwidth costs, you better not be leveraging Dropbox's infrastructure for that too.
Personally, I do like the idea over a Zapier though that's a flat monthly fee. I couldn't possibly determine if the monthly rate is enough on principle but a cut of my profits is much less of an "up front" cost I can't adequately measure yet.
So I would imagine they could pass on the percent component of cost with no markup, and then charge a flat fee (ex: $1). I'm assuming they are never stuck with the bill in a fraud case. If they are, then the price should include that risk component as a percentage as well.
Screen 1) Login. Screen 2) Dropbox: "This app will be able to read and modify everything." Screen 3) Paypal: Login to Paypal, go to "Resolution Centre" and "Remove Limitations".
We wrote a blog post on doing this with Zapier: https://zapier.com/blog/the-ultimate-guide-to-selling-downlo... except you can mix and match any payment, storage and email/notification system and start to augment it however you like.
https://sellboxhq.com/l/A6KW/How-Google-Cars-Will-Change-Com...
While $1.00 is not much in this particular case - I have no idea what the actual details of the file are that I am looking to buy.
Pulley seems like the most promising to me (nice UI + appropriate pricing model).
But what I am really interested in is a store model, where there are categories, and ratings and users can discover more stuff and generic enough to host music, apps, etc. In short, an amazon for digital goods. And slim processing fees.
The tricky part is handling VAT for some geographies (such as Euro). What I would love is a service which either: a. Handles all VAT concerns b. allows me to limit sales for such countries. (to an Indie seller it can be a hassle).
From T&C: "Sellbox does not pre-screen Content, but Sellbox has the right (but not the obligation) in their sole discretion to refuse or remove any Content that is available via the Service."
Then add in Paypal account freezes on top of that.
I wouldn't want to depend on a combo like that for my company's cashflow.
I am a currently planning a project that might be able to make good use of Sellbox. :) we'll see how that works.
Well done.