Since March 2013, I've been working on building a payment system to sell products for my business. It started out as a modified version of Stripe Checkout. And, from there, I bolted on a full-featured back-end to manage the checkout and collected payments.<p>I named my payment system "Snappy Checkout". Here's an example of how I use it on one of my websites:<p><a href="https://www.snappycheckout.com/pay?E13DZ319DJ1SJCNDH2JDP1" rel="nofollow">https://www.snappycheckout.com/pay?E13DZ319DJ1SJCNDH2JDP1</a><p>After adding a few lines of JavaScript, the checkout can also be launched directly from any website that uses HTTPS.<p>Here are some differences from other checkouts I've used:<p>- Both Stripe and PayPal payments can be accepted. I prefer Stripe over PayPal (API-wise), but I didn't want to switch soley to Stripe because a lot of people still like paying with PayPal.<p>- When a payment is received, a number of checks are run to determine if it's possibly fraudulent. I'm using the term "possibly" because it's hard to programatically determine a payment is fraudulent at 100% accuracy. So far though, I've found Snappy Checkout's detection to be accurate when scanning payments that I've received.<p>- If selling digital products, files are stored in your own Dropbox account. I suppose there could be pluses and minuses here. But, I prefer to allow people to control their own files.<p>- Snappy Checkout offers a variety of payments -- including one-time payments, discounted payments, subscriptions, subscriptions with a trial period prior to the first payment, and the option to split a payment over several months.<p>- Both Stripe and PayPal payments can be viewed, searched, and refunded from the Snappy Checkout dashboard.<p>- The cost is 2.9% + 80¢ per sale. Most people are charging a percentage of the sale price on top of the credit card processing fee.<p>I think others will find this can work for their business too. What do you think?
Really nice to see some innovation in this space. I have used a particular provider since 2006 and eventually ripped out 98.5% of their system to replace with my own, but am familiar with the offerings you're competing with. Most are <i>godawful</i>. They're largely bubblegummed-together, the reporting is atrocious, they're virtually unusable by the (surprisingly) non-technical people who have to work with them, they have UXes which actively discourage customers' customers from spending money (!), etc etc.<p>I would not be surprised if the market eventually pushed you into handling fulfillment, by the way. For many of the early adopters in this space that's as simple as "proxy a download link and send two emails" but it's a really important part of the puzzle for them.
Am I the only one who thinks 50 cents per transaction (in addition to the Stripe/Paypal) fees is still an awful lot?<p>For the typical $5/mo SaaS subscription, that's a full 10% just to pay for your checkout system (not including the payment system).<p>That said, our team is likely not Snappy Checkout's audience as we're devs who can integrate Stripe/Paypal ourselves.
It's great, the functionality is good and the price is fair.<p>I could only see USD hardcoded as the currency, though, and there is the old euro VAT problem -- businesses in Europe need to be able to charge customers VAT depending on where the goods will be delivered and what type of goods they are. It's all pretty complicated stuff, but without it a checkout system is useless to most Europeans :(<p>It has always seemed to me that anyone who can build a checkout that handles VAT properly would have the whole of Europe beating a path to their door.
This looks really nice. We are looking for something to integrate into <a href="http://Clara.io" rel="nofollow">http://Clara.io</a> (our online 3D modeling + rendering tool) so we can start accepting payments. We are looking at Stripe of course, but things on top of stripe that make life easier are always welcome.<p>Q: Can I migrate from this to something else (stripe.com directly) if it proves to be insufficient or it doesn't have longevity? How much of the customer information is locked in this versus stripe?<p>Q2: On a separate question, how easily can I move my subscribers away from Stripe.com for whatever reason? Will I need them to re-enter in their payment data? That would be killer for us.<p>Q3: How do other websites handle this these types of issues of potentially switching payment systems?
Hmm. I really like this, and I'm definitely going to use it when I finish my service. However, I have two small problems and one large problem with it:<p>- It's impossible to go back and select another payment option once you click one of them.<p>- You can't style your payment dialog. (This may be a good thing [consistency], but I think it'd be nice to be able to add custom CSS to the pricing dialog.)<p>My large problem is that the price is crazy; your 50 cent per transaction fee means that for all transactions under $7 you collect more in fees than Stripe does. With a $5 payment - very common for services such as the one I'll release soon - I'm paying 20% to you. With a $1 payment, I pay a prohibitive 83% in fees. That's a really large cut compared to using the Stripe API directly, and I think that for anyone looking to increase their profits it's a no-brainer to cut Snappy Checkout out of the equation.<p>To give a personal example, my service will be primarily receiving $5 payments. For the first 1000 payments or so, I'll probably stick with Snappy - the $500 I give up isn't worth the time I would've spent rolling my own solution. However, as soon as I can see that there's a clear market for my product, I'll roll my own with Stripe - I clearly wouldn't want to give up 20% to payment processing alone.<p>Meanwhile, Frank is selling antique vases on Facebook for $1.5k each, and he pays 50 cents a transaction to you.<p>However, if you were to switch to a flat fee + a percentage (say 1.5% and 15 cents), as Stripe does, you would probably retain my business for a lot longer. Suddenly, I pay a 4.5% cut to you as opposed to a 10% cut, which is quite reasonable. At the same time, Frank the antique vase seller doesn't really care about a 1.5% fee: a win-win situation.<p>tl;dr I recommend that you change to a percentage of the total sales: sellers of cheap items will use your service and sellers of expensive items won't care. There's a reason why Stripe, Visa, and every other payment processor everywhere ever does this.
Love innovation in this area and will play with this a bit. HNers interested in this might find happiness with Snipcart (<a href="https://snipcart.com/" rel="nofollow">https://snipcart.com/</a>)
This is one of the better looking implementations of "checkout on top of stripe" that I've seen (I've seen a lot).<p>I'm not sure of your target market but the best advice I can give is to make a WordPress plugin to go with this. Website integration (easy for us, I know) is probably daunting for most people. That's why SquareSpace is so attractive–it's all built in. But if you went after the WordPress market with this, it could be huge.
From a purely usability point of view I don't see the advantage of having the choice of payment (credit card via stripe vs. paypal) be offered after the user clicks on the payment button.<p>The more efficient option is to show pay with credit card and pay with paypal right off the bat.<p>This implementation means the user clicks PAY, then is shown a modal window and from there clicks, paypal and is then redirected to paypal.<p>Instead the user could click pay with paypal from the payment page and be taken to paypal with the unnecessary intermediary step.<p>Same goes for credit card payment: click pay with credit card and the modal window opens up and they enter cc details.<p>I know, it is just one click or interaction but still, this is the stuff that UX cares about!<p>This is especially true for check out processes. If you aren't extremely critical of your check out process from a UX/UI view you're leaving lots of easy money on the table.<p>The implementation is nice and I don't mean to offend but I just don't understand what benefit it can offer. Especially when it has this usability failing outlined above<p>:/
Apart from Paypal support, what does Snappycheckout provide over just using Stripe directly? And for the extras it does offer, are those likely features on Stripe's roadmap?
Just trying to wrap my mind around your service.
I've been waiting for stripe + paypal, as half my payments come from paypal, stripe is such a simple checkout process, and needed one admin for both. Fantastic!<p>Questions:<p>1) Will metered billing on subscription services be supported?<p>2) Not sure if this is feasible, but any plans to allow PayPal payments through PayPal Payments Pro, so they fill in their details in the form on our site instead of being redirected to PayPal?<p>Thanks!
This looks great. I've already signed up as I've been looking for a replacement for Gumroad for awhile now. Their UI just isn't suited to physical subscriptions. This looks much better.<p>Found an error: My login date under sessions is "Sat, Dec 30, 1899 @"<p>Feature request: product variants ie. shirt sizes, phone types, colors, etc.
Mike, I signed up and the admin area looks great. I don't see any info/docs on how to actually sell product though. I'm currently using SpaceBox.io for hosted checkout. Do you offer something similar or do I have to host the checkout page on my site?
I love the pricing - only 50¢ on top of Stripe/PayPal fees.<p>From the quick look, digital download protection based on IP address and storing files in Dropbox? That makes me uncomfortable and I see tons of potential issues here.<p>Also what does automatic fraudulent payment detection involves?
The messaging on the site reiterates that you can accept payments and sell product any time "day or night". Is this a problem with existing solutions? Or is this geared towards people who currently have a fully manual fulfillment process?
Could it do things like offer a yearly subscription with a starting price of $x and a recurring price of $y? Basically, like an ongoing maintenance - buy the product at $x and then pay $y for yearly upgrades/support.
Any concerns about naming? My first reaction was to think this was a new offering from Snappy <a href="https://besnappy.com/" rel="nofollow">https://besnappy.com/</a>
Helium (<a href="https://gethelium.com" rel="nofollow">https://gethelium.com</a>) is less expensive for items priced less than $25, since they charge 2% rather than $0.50.
Is there a way to embed a picture within a payment link?<p>My friend could use this because her 'digital storefront' is literally Facebook and there's no way for her to sell things.
Interesting choice of an IE preview for the home page. Is it by accident or is this something online stores are looking to validate in terms of features? (IE compatibility)
Great job! I'll definitely be giving this a shot!<p>Quick question, though... Do you use Stripe's Connect API for the 50 cent transaction fee you're taking (application_fee)?
Looks awesome. A great checkout experience is always a delight to use. Even Amazon's feels kind of clunky if you have to enter credit card information.
few questions<p>how does this differ from stripe? does it charge extra on top of stripe? What is the justification for the price increase? I don't see what else this offers besides stripe does. For me, I focus on subscriptions.<p>What is the template being used on the website and where can I get it?