Show HN: Forge - an easy way to take payments powered by balancedpayments.com

https://www.forgesimple.com

by jordanmessina • 13 years ago

21 17 13 years ago

switch336• 13 years ago

Is this just another wacky advertisement? Why would people use this over the more useful/well-known ones like stripe or braintree payments?

Even if it's free, it's not really any better. Running the payment process of checking/validating cards and all that for your company individually that is primarily web-based may be more work and end up costing more.

jareau2• 13 years ago

I think the point is that it's way easier to use this than something like braintree or stripe that require coding skills. Did you think helium or spacebox were just wacky adverts too?

switch336• 13 years ago

Considering one of the payments system was literally a copycat originating from the US but then taken to China to develop the same product just in a different place to avoid patent lawsuits. Yes, I do consider some of these to be a bit "wacky." I think this one if I remember correctly may be spacebox or something with a similar name.

Helium i haven't heard much about, so I can't say much about that.

It's not exactly like this stuff hasn't been coded before in easy enough to use solutions. I'm just annoyed primarily that this site wants you to sign up before showing any of the code/example of how easy it is to use if it's free. Seems kind of like an extra step for no real reason.

Also from what i've heard a lot of stripe/braintree really isn't that hard to set up. If you want to prove that the process is really easy you need to show that stuff on the front-page in pictures or snippets.

kevinholesh6• 13 years ago

Designer of Forge here.

We're aiming to solve the problems of the non-techie market. People who just want to sell something online shouldn't be worrying about payment gateways, payment processors or designing a checkout process. Forge handles that.

With Stripe, it's fairly easy for a programmer to write their own payment processing backend and build a checkout process for it. We're not trying to serve the people that have the development skills to use Stripe. We're going after the people who use PayPal Buy Now buttons.

switch336• 13 years ago

This sounds like a good enough idea, but the front page kind of just doesn't tell any of how it's done, instead it just sort of has an example. Not sure how that is going to convey the "easyness" of it. That is my main concern really.

niggler• 13 years ago

I'm not convinced that a standalone payments system is useful for anyone: the type of person who couldn't get stripe or balanced payments to work most likely will leverage a turnkey storefront solution.

Forge needs to have connectors to storefronts (or build their own system and market the package). A payment system in absentia makes no sense.

kevinholesh6• 13 years ago

I agree. It would be better if we had storefronts for these people, and product pages they can link to.

That's on our todo list.

minouye• 13 years ago

Congrats on launching! Really like the design and prominent example. One question: what's the advantage of this over Gumroad/Ribbon.co? Lower fees?

Also, you mentioned that this is targeted at a non-technical market. I'd definitely think about revisiting the homepage copy/selling points. To me it still feels targeted toward a developer audience. Perhaps a couple of use cases would be helpful to show off the types of businesses that would find Forge useful? (http://goodsie.com and http://shopify.com come to mind as decent examples of this).

Good luck!

jordanmessina• 13 years ago

Thanks so much! As for the competitors in the space, we have some things in the pipeline that will differentiate us quite a bit. We needed to at least catch up, and we wanted to launch as soon as possible.

Now that you point out the homepage, I agree completely. That will be the first thing we fix up first. Thanks for pointing these out. Adding examples is a great idea. I think we'll end up showcasing businesses built on top of Forge.

Thanks again!

Show HN: Forge - an easy way to take payments powered by balancedpayments.com

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