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 don't have a PayPal account, so I couldn't really try out the integration. Do the files remain in Dropbox/Drive, or do they get copied to Sellbox's storage?
The 5% cut is a big problem. It's inherently not fair.
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.
Well, you're paying for the middle man. They setup and main the infrastructure for persons that are not technically inclined and for whom it's not feasible to hire a coder to do it for them.
Since they are charged a percent upstream, then they will have to pass that on to operate.
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.
A flat fee per file seems to make the most sense, since their operation costs are per transaction. They should just figure out how much it costs them per transaction, then bake in a percent of their startup costs to reach the black in a reasonable time and use that as a flat fee. I can't see a justification for a percentage approach, its the same amount of work either way on their end.
1) Cover the standard 2.6% from paypal. Make that obvious.
2) Add a flat rate on top to cover operating expenses.
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.
This sounds pretty much exactly the opposite of what I hear from pricing experts. Charge based on the value you provide to the person using your service, not based on your costs.
An easy system to post ebooks and charge for them is probably worth more to a person selling $200 ebooks rather than $100 ebooks.
What would be interesting would be a) ability to sell entire folders and b) ability to automatically generate sell links for files. Combined, you could create an instataneous online storefront automatically.
I am a currently planning a project that might be able to make good use of Sellbox. :) we'll see how that works.
I've used them for selling a couple of Mac apps[1] (along with Gumroad, for credit card buyers), and it's turned out just fine.
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).
I really like the idea but scary immediate stuff for layperson:
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".
A very interesting concept, but after clicking on "Start with Drive", one of the permissions requested is the ability to "Upload, download, update, and delete files in your Google Drive"
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 don't understand the advantage of using cloud storage instead of uploading a file. Unless I were selling a 4GB file and it was already in Dropbox and I was in a hurry...
Dropbox and Google Drive made uploading file super easy. You just drag&drop file on your hard drive and they take care about the rest. In addition to that, whenever you are going to update the file, you don't have to login. Again just drag&drop and Dropbox + Sellbox do the magic.
I agree it's convenient, but I'm having a hard time imagining people who would be selling digital content, if only they didn't have to upload it to a storefront...
Are there any generic examples of a digital storefront that you can easily self-publish files (preferably up to 25MB or so)? I'm not currently aware of any (although I haven't actually tried to search them out).
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.
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.
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.
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.
There are plans of integrating that. However, Stripe is limited only to US market, so still looking for better worldwide (at least US and Europe) solution.
This is interesting. Similar services seem to be:
1. GumRoad (5% + 25cents)
2. InstaMojo (5% + 30cents)
3. e-junkie (it's complicated)
4. Pulley (per month starting from $6)
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).
That's a nice option for bloggers who don't want to be bothered with business scale setup. I guess it would be great if you had an embeddable widget for Wordpress.
52 comments
[ 6.3 ms ] story [ 109 ms ] threadFrom 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.
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.
How would you like them to charge for a service like this?
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.
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.
An easy system to post ebooks and charge for them is probably worth more to a person selling $200 ebooks rather than $100 ebooks.
I am a currently planning a project that might be able to make good use of Sellbox. :) we'll see how that works.
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).
[1] http://analytics.wizardapps.net/
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.
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".
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).
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.
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).
<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>
Well done.
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).