Comment by ricardo_ramirez | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ricardo_ramirez | Hacker News Reader

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ricardo_ramirez

The % transaction fee is a turndown. I have been looking for a solution to distribute digital goods, and I try to stay away from anything that is a percentage, it does not scale once you have hundreds of sales.

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.

I ended up writing my own app to sell my ebook and it wasn't all that hard using Stripe. Deploying to Heroku is free if you're ok with their wildcard https certificate.

<shameless plug> The book is called Mastering Modern Payments: Using Stripe with Rails. It's a guide to integrating Stripe with your Rails app and includes a bunch of goodies that help make your integration robust in the face of failure.

http://www.petekeen.net/mastering-modern-payments </plug>

Yo dawg!??

Yeah!

Those are subscription prices. So on the other hand, if you sell 0 digital goods in a month you will owe nothing with this service but $5 on the other service. With % pricing you will never go in the negative.

Edit: Not saying this is a better pricing model - just playing devils advocate.

The % model would indeed work better with a low volume sales. So, if I wanted to distribute a file just once or twice, then this would work, since I end up paying just 50c (if the price of the digital goods were $10) instead of a fixed price for the subscription.

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).

while true, it seems if you are selling 0 for too long, you just take it down. i'd rather plan for success than failure, and $5 is pretty trivially worth it to test a product out.

https://gumroad.com/ is another that uses 5% (+ 25c per transaction) but doesn't go through paypal or Dropbox. The ease of use and customisability provides a lot of value in itself.

I've used e-junkie before. It is certainly not pretty, but it works.

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