devan

Chec's the original - you can probably tell by how consistant our product is compared. The old cofounder ran off with the corporation and didnt follow through on his agreement to transfer the assets over, after i was asked to stand down and incorporate a new entity - so i had to rebuild the company from the old room back in england.

Comment · 13 years ago

I'd love to speak to you about it and see what you'd like to see implemented.

can you drop me an email at devan [at] madebyswipe.com?

Comment · 13 years ago

I'd say within 6 weeks? We're a tiny team (2 devs). I'd love to speak to you about it and see what you'd like to see implemented.

drop me an email at devan [at] madebyswipe.com

Comment · 13 years ago

And the way tailoring works is. We detect were the user clicked the link from (using the headers) then tailor the landing page to leverage that source.

I.e. clicked via FB? Let try and use fb connect to prepopulate the checkout, provide an incentive to share this page if they're influential. etc..

Comment · 13 years ago

see my answer just above

Comment · 13 years ago

In terms of features

3.5% fee compared to 5%

PayPal Integration (for your customers who feel safer using them)

Physical Product Handling

Access Windows for digital sales (https://trychec.com/assets/img/anything-digital.png)

Inline Social Payments on Facebook (checkouts in customers newsfeeds)

Social Deals - Based on influence or demographics

And a powerful merchant backend.

as well as a few smaller features around.

Groad is primarily built to deal with digital files, we can handle any type of good.

and that's just in v1. we've got a lot to do, and you'll see us differentiate more in the future.

It might be easier to give the stories behind the idea to help.

So, i created this initially for myself. As a teenager i had resale rights to a DVD info product, and made a couple thousand a month selling it.

I hated the checkout process of 2checkout, 1shoppingcart, ejunkie, and others. So I ended up throwing a paypal checkout in an iframe and creating a post hook script to manage the order.

I wanted a simple, clean, yet powerful app to manage everything, so i made one. The first version of this was built in 2010.

I had one professional/full product to sell and i sold it in fairly high volume, and I didnt need a fully fledged store, i just had a single product to sell. Over time i created more and more minisites to sell different types of info products so i could have some passive income whilst i was at school.

Gumroads story

Sahil created an icon on photoshop that he wasnt going to use, but thought other people would find value in it so he wanted a service that let him sell his "value" to his followers (if that makes sense).

Gumroad allows people to sell their small snippets of value. (primarily digital).

Chec allows smaller merchants to start selling online who have no need for a front end store. Merchants like mmfixed.com etc..

Is that a little clearer? :)

Comment · 13 years ago

Most of these sites will go down due to one big hurdle. Payments.

Underwriting merchants and get verified by Visa/MasterCard as a payment service provider is a bitch. Aggregating credit cards is a heavily regulated area - but most of these sites are unaware of this issue.

We initially started on Stripe, and got told what we were doing was unregulated/not allowed on stripe, so we then grabbed a coffee with them and learnt about this process.

In fact I was grabbing coffee with Sahil (Gumroad) a few months ago and they've just run into this issue themselves - which they are starting to solve. so you'll probably notice them asking you for more information to underwrite you, unless they find a way around this.

That's also why we ask users to go through an activate process.

Comment · 13 years ago

Link based selling has been around for years. 2checkout, 1shoppingcart, ejunkie etc...

I started working on Chec in late 2010/early 2011, before groad launched. (https://www.facebook.com/checkoutbyswipe, if you wanna trace down to the day that page was setup) - It's a long story between then and today.

Short Version - University in England -> AngelPad Incubator -> Raised large seed -> Founder Split -> Had to rebuild new company.

Comment · 13 years ago

We thought we fixed that bug. might just be some left over JS validation. we'll get into it.

Comment · 13 years ago

We provide region specific shipping options for physical products, and will be doing tight integrations with UPS, Fedex, RoyalMail apis to help you with fulfilling physical items.