razvanr

OP is clearly a weirdo :)

Many people ask me how I knew about YC back in early 2007. It was Founders at Work for me. It took me a few years to get my hands on a copy of the book (Amazon didn't deliver in Romania back then), but the content was incredibly useful and completely original.

Reddit also had a play in it. At the time it was the competing Digg Upstart, or that's how everyone saw it. I distinctly remember a blog post after Reddit was acquired by Conde Nast, where the founders said they went out for ramen and for the first time ever it didn't matter who picked up the check at the end of the meal. That pushed me to apply to the program.

It might have been the early days looking back -- but YC seemed like a big thing even back then if you were into the startup scene. Between Reddit, Stripe and Auctomatic (Founded by Harj Taggar and Patrick Collison, which to me meant european founders are welcome in the program) you could sense that everyone involved with the group was continuing the stories I read about in Founders at Work.

Go on being that better prepared YC startup then.

We'll all miss seeing you at YC Garry!

Also founder of Two Tap here. Just to clarify on the above:

1. Pricing and inventory are realtime with Two Tap -- taken live from the merchant site when a shopping session is started. If only a size S is available on the merchant site then that's what we make available for shoppers in our carts. Merchants don't have to do any integration or manage this process.

2. Reliability has been a non problem for a while, we have a guarantee that we don't lose orders. And the process to confirm orders is async like Amazon -- step 1: we've received your order; step 2: your order is confirmed.

3. Two Tap supports over 1000 retailer integrations.

Thanks for looking into the space!

Pretty much what we're building at Two Tap, a gateway API that can be used to order any product from a supported retailer's inventory and benefitting from realtime product data (inventory, price etc). A huge benefit to being an independent API is that new features become available for all of the supported stores in a matter of days (vs months-years-never if each retailer would have to update their API).

You're right on a lot of accounts. Let's talk, can you get in touch at hello@ please? Happy to talk about all of this.

The main difference now is that both retailers as well as affiliate networks are actively trying to push this model once they've seen they can make 5x more money from the same amount of impressions.

Also, the publisher gets to keep PART the relationship -- the one dealing with the users interaction with their product. The relationship with the retailer that sells the product is also kept intact -- consumer loses just one touchpoint (a visit to the product page) but gets same confirmation email, returns, customer support etc. The retailer has same load on servers and gets the exact same user data they would normally (shipping, email, address, billing, payment etc).

Oldnavy and a few other retailers are not active yet. We've pre-built these integrations despite not having requests to sell their inventory just yet.

I'd mention more on the BD side but can't at this point for competitive reasons. The fact that we currently support sending orders through to 450 retailers does not mean we have deals in place with all of them, but that the infrastructure is built to allow this to happen -- if affiliates or publishers get an approval from retailers or the affiliate networks that govern this. Perhaps we should make this clearer on the supported stores page.

All in due time. The industry as a whole is being pushed to decide which models they will embrace -- and as always some will be slower to adapt than others. The pressure comes from lost revenue on mobile which makes retailers a LOT more flexible now compared to even 6 months ago when talking about this.

Considering multiple format screens and devices fragmenting retailers distribution channels over the next years this is set to become an even bigger chapter down the line.

Good question. That's because this method doesn't scale and fails as a solution to the industry's challenges.

There's companies that are trying to get retailers to implement APIs but this leads to a fragmented ecosystem. Year's past payment processors that sold "pay/checkout with ..." buttons and wallets have failed to achieve significant merchant adoption despite being fuelled with marketing spend in the billions.

The solution everyone embraces seems to rely in building an independent and neutral piece of infrastructure (an API) that any publisher can integrate and that plugs into every checkout out there. It's the missing pipes in ecommerce, anyone can use it and nothing really changes (we don't process payments, it's all automated etc) -- and conversions go UP.

I'm repeating some ideas in the post but on the publisher side it's worth noting NONE would entertain the idea of integrating multiple APIs -- one for each merchant. Did I also bring up the required combined efforts of all merchants to keep those APIs up & running? :)

So pro-scraping because it's the only way to build adoption in ecommerce.

This is strongly correlated with brand values they push in certain marketing campaigns and both returns as well as excellent service are promoted. Flipping it you could say they attract people that do returns more than avg.

That's the app developer's responsibility.

Not really, we're not building a product catalog.

We're fetching the live data only for the products requested via an URL. Two Tap mimics a consumer visiting the retailer and getting that info for themselves which also allows retailers to retain their analytics layer with no negative impact.

Our current supported stores span the top 500 as well as a number of specific integration requests.

Yes, you could say that. We're laying down pipes in ecommerce so you can send an order to a merchant from anywhere on the web in a standardised API.

Retailers can extend their reach and make their inventory shoppable from anywhere with an internet connection and publishers can build ecommerce in their apps.