
Sellbox – Sell your files from Dropbox and Google Drive with Paypal - cdvonstinkpot
https://sellboxhq.com/
======
ricardo_ramirez
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](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](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.

~~~
6thSigma
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.

~~~
ricardo_ramirez
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).

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jackmaney
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).

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andrewmunsell
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).

[1] [http://analytics.wizardapps.net/](http://analytics.wizardapps.net/)

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smarx
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?

This might be a good candidate for the Dropbox Chooser:
[https://www.dropbox.com/developers/dropins/chooser/js](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)

~~~
csdreamer7
> Do the files remain in Dropbox/Drive, or do they get copied to Sellbox's
> storage?

Good question.

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snoonan
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.

~~~
umsm
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.

~~~
snoonan
No argument! They should charge for the service, but not a % of the value I
create.

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.

~~~
tossedaway
Interesting...and I don't disagree.

How would you like them to charge for a service like this?

~~~
w0rd-driven
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.

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untilHellbanned
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".

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bryanh
Very nice!

We wrote a blog post on doing this with Zapier: [https://zapier.com/blog/the-
ultimate-guide-to-selling-downlo...](https://zapier.com/blog/the-ultimate-
guide-to-selling-downloads-with-zapier/) except you can mix and match any
payment, storage and email/notification system and start to augment it however
you like.

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hawkharris
Cool service! I spent a few months researching and writing an article about
self-driving cars. I'm selling my research for $1 just as an experiment.

[https://sellboxhq.com/l/A6KW/How-Google-Cars-Will-Change-
Com...](https://sellboxhq.com/l/A6KW/How-Google-Cars-Will-Change-
Communication)

~~~
samstave
It would be cool if sellbox would tell me more about the file. If PDF - tell
me how many pages, how big the file etc.

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.

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dools
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...

~~~
daniula
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.

~~~
eli
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...

~~~
bostonvaulter2
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).

~~~
eli
I've used [http://www.e-junkie.com/](http://www.e-junkie.com/) before

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hrjet
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).

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slaven
I love this idea - I just wish they implement their own billing via Stripe
instead of PayPal (not a big fan of PayPal for the obvious reasons).

~~~
daniula
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.

~~~
slaven
Ah makes sense (we just got it in Canada recently)

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draugadrotten
High risk service for a business.

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.

~~~
MichaelApproved
It's a great option for low budget projects. I could see it working well for
hobby or MVP projects.

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eberfreitas
This is really useful for artists like musicians and so on... How do you plan
to market it? What is the core audience?

~~~
thrush
Completely agreed. This is a genius way to bypass the iTunes Store and Kindle
Book Store.

~~~
CompiledCode
It reminds me of gumroad.com

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minimaxir
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.

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ArekDymalski
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.

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mark_sz
I love the idea. It works like Bandcamp, but its for all type of files and it
takes smaller cut (5% instead of 10%).

Well done.

~~~
adamnemecek
Bandcamp takes 15% until you hit $10,000 in sales, then scales back to 10%.

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andrewroycarter
I'm working on a pebble app- May use this to distribute it until a non crappy
pebble store comes out!

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nikunjk
This looks freakishly similar to Gumroad. Even the 'I want this' button seems
copied.

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deweller
I wonder what that muchacho file is. Anyone know?

~~~
daniula
As far remember Muchacho is a font file:
[http://www.behance.net/gallery/Muchacho-Free-
Font/8042679](http://www.behance.net/gallery/Muchacho-Free-Font/8042679)

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arcticf0x
How to verify the stuff we buy is legit?

