Show HN: CropUp, Sell your _ on _

by jackseviltwin • 13 years ago

84 74 13 years ago

mikejarema• 13 years ago

Great looking product, I'm a big fan of empowering everyday people to make money doing what they love. ShopLocket is a (local) favourite of mine, and I think GumRoad is also in this category.

Are there specific use cases that CropUp provides more value? Eg. on physical products? Photography? Digital downloads?

I ask because I see more and more similar products cropping up (pardon the pun) which want to help anyone sell anything online, but can't help but think that focusing on a specific vertical may result in the platform providing more value to the sellers.

pfredrich20• 13 years ago

(I do product at CropUp.)

For now we're focused on physical products, which come with a couple of challenges sellers of digital products usually don't have to worry about, like taxes, fulfillment, returns/refunds, etc. Our goal is to provide a product that equips sellers with everything needed for selling online and to make it real simple, so that they can focus on making their products and don't have to worry about selling them.

eduardordm3• 13 years ago

My only humble suggestion is to make the 'how it works' page more explicit. I did understand what you do but my mother would probably think you are just some kind of bitly for product listings she made herself. She would have to go to the FAQ sections to understand.

Maybe you should add more text to that page.

flexie2• 13 years ago

Cool site! Just notice that in some jurisdictions sellers of digital products also have to worry about taxes, cancellations, refunds etc.

rohansingh• 13 years ago

For the box that shows a random service, I'd recommend just making it sequential. When it randomly comes back to a service I've seen before, I assume that I've seen all the services.

For example, I got: YouTube, Tumblr, YouTube, YouTube, Twitter

pfredrich20• 13 years ago

(I do product at CropUp.)

Yep, we noticed that as well, will fix it. Excellent observation, thank you.

cocoflunchy• 13 years ago

+1, I got Handmade Bags 3 times in a row...

darushimo• 13 years ago

I want to suggest that it moves a little bit faster too. Either that or have both fields change at the same time. I get that you're trying to say "you can sell anything on any platform" by having the item persist while showing a different platform, but I think the fast that they're different fields is enough of a hint that you can sell "anything on anything."

MichaelApproved2• 13 years ago

You could have it start at a random spot in a sequential list.

snowcandy• 13 years ago

(dev @ cropup)

Thanks for the feedback. Really appreciate it :D - It's now sequential! (yay~) We also modified it slightly to (hopefully) make the idea "you can sell _anything_ on _anything_" clearer. Any thoughts?

callmeed• 13 years ago

Your design overall is really nice. Me thinks this is either becoming a crowded space or there's just a lot of people doing similar projects for fun because the payment part is much easier (I did http://bngal.com as a side project for example).

BIG QUESTION: why PayPal for disbursing funds? With Stripe and BalancedPayments as options, I'm not sure why you'd use PayPal (other than possibly international reach).

pfredrich20• 13 years ago

(I do product at CropUp.)

Good question. PayPal was the easiest to use, for now, and works well. We'll likely add additional payout options, but no concrete plans or timing just yet.

jareau• 13 years ago

Paul, just sent you an email about Balanced Payouts (https://www.balancedpayments.com/#payouts)

Nice job with Cropup!

cristinacordova• 13 years ago

Hi Paul. I work at Stripe and just sent you an email about our Connect product (https://stripe.com/connect), which is used by many e-commerce platforms such as Shopify and Goodsie.

eduardordm3• 13 years ago

I know you guys are overwhelmed with work by now, but I really want to know how was your experience with AngularJS.

jackseviltwin4• 13 years ago

(I'm the tech lead at CropUp)

I'm surprised how well AngularJS has worked for us.

Currently, we're using it for the shopping checkout page and also for the merchant dashboard. The dashboard is all driven by AngularJS (using $resource/$http api calls). The checkout page is more like Twitter, in that we preload data in the DOM when it's rendered, but there are API calls via AngularJS to create the order, check quantity, etc. These pages are actually served directly from our CDN.

As far as how it's worked for us. We've actually rewritten our dashboard and checkout page twice, and it look some getting used to on how to structure our controllers. Getting used to writing directives instead of using jQuery and doing DOM manipulation in our controllers also takes some discipline, because it's just way simpler to drop some selectors and event bindings/triggers in your controller.

The way AngularJS encourages you to keep any dom manipulation out of the controller and to think about reusable directives has really helped for readability and maintainability of the code base. We're consistently surprised how quickly we can implement features because of AngularJS. We've actually said, "Wow, that was easier than I was expecting" quite a few times.

However, there are some hurdles. $http doesn't support file uploads, the stable release doesn't support custom http headers with $resource, only one ngView, etc. That said, I still would not hesitate to recommend AngularJS.

hustletime• 13 years ago

(I'm a developer at CropUp)

Totally agree with Jack on this, I enjoy working with AngularJS. I think the learning curve could be made less steep with better docs. It would be great if they were moved to GitHub to make contributing easier.

alexmic2• 13 years ago

Did the limitation of having only one ng-view affect your project at all? I'm embarking on a new project using Angular and there are mixed opinions on the web. People that were shouting against it have come back saying that it's actually not so bad [1].

[1] https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/angular/...

manuelflara4• 13 years ago

Great work, love the design. One thing I'd like to see before I sign up, though, is a sample "product / purchase page". When I needed something like this I ran to Gumroad because I had used them before (as a customer) and loved the experience.

sulldc2• 13 years ago

(I work at CropUp, I'm the designer there.)

Thanks! That's a great point and we're in the process of creating a few more product screenshots and possibly a video demo to cycle in that header area. In the mean time feel free to take a look at it here: http://crop.to/fW

BHSPitMonkey• 13 years ago

Thanks; That link made me understand what the service is. (The home page, "How it Works", and FAQ did not.)

trhaynes• 13 years ago

I notice that my shirt size isn't included on the final confirmation page. Seems like it should be.

notahacker• 13 years ago

This. Basically all the emphasis is on the shorturl, which is a nice feature but the least important factor when selling products on an online store (hyperlinks are older than ecommerce, after all). There's nothing about what the buying process is like for the customer, how you support fulfilment, how easy it is to tweak prices/availability etc. - it's all assumed away by the "how it works" section which seems to imply you don't do anything after initial setup.

manuelflara4• 13 years ago

Much better! I really, really like the design. Better than Gumroad IMO. On the other hand, I would highlight a bit more or add more contrast to the link "My shipping address is not in the US", just in case. Other than that, it would be great to have a "test product" just like this but where we wouldn't need to input real CC details, just to check out the whole process, emails being sent, etc. Anyway, on what I've seen so far: Congratulations!

So then you only support physical products for now, or also digital ones (no shipping, etc)?

robgaafar3• 13 years ago

(I work at CropUp, I'm the founder)

Thanks for the feedback and we're working on a test product feature for sellers.

Yes, we only support physical products for now. Digital goods will be coming soon.

Tihiy2• 13 years ago

Excellent idea! Waiting for digital goods selling / purchase notification API.

But.. if you give money to sellers with PayPal, you're paying PayPal fee?

pfredrich20• 13 years ago

(I do product at CropUp.)

Correct, great observation. PayPal Masspay charges the payment sender a fee, but it's free for the recipient. So these payouts are free for our merchants.

jollari• 13 years ago

Hey I'm curious as to what you mean by a purchase notification API?

Would you imagine something like a pub/sub system or something that you would ping?

Tihiy2• 13 years ago

I mean something like PayPal IPN or another system which notifies my server about a purchase so I can send digital good to buyer e-mail for example.

nikoftime2• 13 years ago

Really cool idea and site. How do you guys differ from CashieCommerce.com ?

pfredrich20• 13 years ago

(I do product at CropUp.)

I'm not familiar with them, but I'll check them out now. Have you used them? Do you like them?

nikoftime2• 13 years ago

Yeah - I know the guys building it - I definitely like their product and take on the market. It seems like it must be a crowded space, just saw this come up on HN: https://trychec.com

mapleoin• 13 years ago

US only. And it's quite hard to figure out. This is all I could find>

http://cropup.com/help/merchant

What about international buyers?

Yep, no problem. You can accept payments from international customers.

pfredrich20• 13 years ago

(I do product at CropUp.)

Hmm. I'm not following, can you please explain? It's not US only and that's what the FAQ says / is supposed to say.

MichaelApproved2• 13 years ago

I think OP is referring to the merchant side of things being US only.

guru_shastry• 13 years ago

Looks great. One thing I was looking for is a demo/test purchase. As a seller I want to know how it looks like to buy my product. In general, a sandbox with a bunch of test products and credit card numbers would make it a lot easier to adopt. Good luck.

pfredrich20• 13 years ago

(I do product at CropUp.)

You're right. We need to -- and will -- figure something out to better convey the buyers' end to end experience to people interested in using our service to sell their products.

orangethirty• 13 years ago

Ten percent is too high.

anandkulkarni• 13 years ago

Is this only for people who don't have a product order form yet, or is there a way for us to benefit from using you too?

pfredrich20• 13 years ago

(I do product at CropUp.)

It's for anyone who wants to sell a product on a social network like Facebook, Twitter, etc., whether you have an online store already or not. It's not great to share a link to your online store on social networks because then your customers have to go through the entire checkout flow incl. putting the item into the shopping cart, going to the shopping cart, clicking on checkout, creating an account or not, ... even though all they want to do is buy one specific item quickly and easily. With CropUp you can sell individual products via a very streamlined checkout flow, that works great regardless of the social network or the customer's device (mobile, tablet, desktop).

ivan_ah• 13 years ago

You should consider modifying your pricing to be more in line with gumroad --- who appear to be your main competitor. They charge 5 percent of the purchase price plus a $0.25 flat fee.

pfredrich20• 13 years ago

(I do product at CroUp.)

We see shopping cart providers as our competition and they usually charge setup and/or monthly fees, which we do not. Given the value and functionalities our product provides we feel our pricing is fair, but we're open to structuring it differently in the future depending on market feedback, like volume or product price based, or we introduce a premium account with a monthly fee but lower per transaction fees.

manuelflara4• 13 years ago

I'm sure people who don't know about other direct competitors (Gumroad, etc) will see it as an alternative to a more elabore shopping cart or ecommerce site, and in that case 10% may be a no brainer. But if someone -like myself- knows about both alternatives, I may use CropUp initially but if I get some decent volume, I'd switch to Gumroad unless you guys had a 5% option for higher volume customers.

zitterbewegung• 13 years ago

The start selling button seem to be displaying incorrectly on chrome. The color isn't filling the button and instead it takes the color of the background.

robgaafar3• 13 years ago

(I work at CropUp)

We can't reproduce that issue. Did you try to clear your cache?

If you're still having that issue, can you send me an email: robert@cropup.com

chudi• 13 years ago

Nice idea, but I couldn't find a demo product or some place with current customers so I can check how it looks, etc

jackseviltwin4• 13 years ago

Sure, try this product: http://crop.to/fW

revorad• 13 years ago

What provider do you use for processing the credit card payments?

pfredrich20• 13 years ago

(I do product at CropUp.)

Based on the other comments here you can tell we use neither Stripe nor Balanced :) One of the other big guys... Please email me if you'd like to discuss details: paul@cropup.com

lubujackson• 13 years ago

I like it. But 10% seems a little high - I'd at least have reduced percentages for volume.

I'm not sure if you have (or intend) to support people with a lot of products, but I'd be interested to see how it works if you have 50 products vs. 500 vs. 5000. It would be nice to get group reporting (like every color of a T-shirt combined, all my mugs, etc. Ideally with tags instead of categories so you can cross-report).

pfredrich20• 13 years ago

(I do product at CropUp.)

We have some interesting ideas for what we can do with pricing in the future, like based on volume or product price or maybe we introduce a premium account that comes with a monthly fee, but lower fees per transaction. Still thinking about these.

For now we think 10% is a fair price given the value and the functionalities our product provides, e.g. calculating taxes based on the seller's nexus states and the buyer's shipping address. Also, the seller is only charged a fee in case of a successful order, but not e.g. in case of a refund, which is different from other services like e.g. PayPal. (And different means better here, we think.)

zipop• 13 years ago

I think 10% will create a rather large barrier to entry for most.

YPetrov• 13 years ago

The website looks great! When I opened it, for some reason, I instinctively looked for a short video explaining what the website does and how it works. Maybe that could be something you might want to consider? Also, I had to check the comments here in order to find a demo product page - I would recommend you add a demo product page link on the front page, so people can see how it looks like in practice.

sulldc2• 13 years ago

(I work at CropUp, I'm the designer there.)

Thanks! I completely agree with you on getting a video for the homepage, and we're actually in the process of creating one (they just take some time), as well getting a product demo link up.

rgbrgb• 13 years ago

Cool! This is a pretty crowded space but your site looks great. My one criticism is that the pricing is pretty hidden. That's the first thing I look for before signing up for something like this. It's especially important in this case because the service is supposed to help users make money, so they will really want to know how much they can make. Don't be ashamed that you take a cut for providing an awesome service!

pfredrich20• 13 years ago

(I do product at CropUp.)

You're right, we need to make pricing more visible.

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Show HN: CropUp, Sell your _ on _