

Chec(kout) - Sell anything, anywhere. A platform for longtail ecommerce. - devan
http://trychec.com

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marknutter
Not really related to the product idea (there've been a raft of gumroad-type
services launching lately), but has anyone else noticed the absolute explosion
in blurred background images in designs these days? I swear the vast majority
of new startup landing pages involve a highly blurred background of some kind.

~~~
ultimoo
It makes the landing page similar to a photo captured with an expensive lens
on a high quality camera, where the foreground (text and logos, in this case)
is in crisp focus, whereas the background is said to be in
[bokeh](<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokeh>).

~~~
marknutter
Yeah, I just realized that myself as I was looking through a bunch of sites
that use the effect. I think it's a great trend, for sure, but it's just been
popping up everywhere.

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brador
Seems like we get a site like this every few days. Are they making crazy money
or is there some other reason everyones is making one? Are they just really
easy to make? Maybe because payment process disruption has occurred? What's
up?

~~~
devan
Most of these sites will go down due to one big hurdle. Payments.

Underwriting merchants and get verified by Visa/MasterCard as a payment
service provider is a bitch. Aggregating credit cards is a heavily regulated
area - but most of these sites are unaware of this issue.

We initially started on Stripe, and got told what we were doing was
unregulated/not allowed on stripe, so we then grabbed a coffee with them and
learnt about this process.

In fact I was grabbing coffee with Sahil (Gumroad) a few months ago and
they've just run into this issue themselves - which they are starting to
solve. so you'll probably notice them asking you for more information to
underwrite you, unless they find a way around this.

That's also why we ask users to go through an activate process.

~~~
fatbat
Interesting. Does using Stripe Connect bypass this restriction since you are
not actually handling any money? Or am I misunderstanding things? Questionable
site name, but well done! :) Cheers

~~~
devan
yup they do, thats why sites like spacebox.io & shoplocket are fine, but
others are (probably) just illegally aggregating.

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sylvinus
My 0.02c: you should change the name. If you already have to append "(kout)"
to explain it to hackers, it will be 10x more difficult marketing it to a
larger crowd. Or you can start printing stickers that read "you know, without
the 'k'" ;-)

Apart from this, great design!

~~~
liquidise
$0.02 or 2¢ =P

~~~
tgrass
It is possible he values his thoughts less than the traditional two cents.

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sim0n
In what ways is this different to Gumroad [1]?

[1] <http://gumroad.com>

~~~
devan
Gumroad's a platform for people who want to sell digital things they create
and has a 5% fee.

We're a platform for long tail merchants. So for example - you'd sell the psd
your not going to use in your app on gumroad, but you'd sell the final app
through chec. - if that helps. - we also only charge 3.5% and can do a lot
more with downloads + handle physical products.

We position ourselves between Gumroad & Shopify (if they did payments).

on a side note - me and sahil know each other well. Back in april 2011 when
Chec was called Kout I actually reached out to him to join Kout after he
launch groad on hackernews. He said "you've already built the software why do
you need me" but we've kept in touch and occasionally get coffee and discuss
the space.

Link based selling has been around for years. 2checkout, 1shoppingcart,
paypal, ejunkie, quixly etc have been at it for a while. I came up with the
idea for Chec after i ended up throwing a PayPal checkout in an iframe for a
info product i was selling.

P.S - if anybody is wondering about the 2 year gap between launching - that
story will come to light shortly.

~~~
gurvinder
The example you gave with PSD and app is not clear to me. Can't I sell my app
through Gumroad ?

~~~
devan
You can, I was just trying to get across the usage cases/types of products.

We've had one user crowd fund for a childs trustfund through us. Dudes in
europe selling rare coffee beans. Contracts invoicing for their time through
the platform. The generic digital sales cds/ebooks/etc

We cover a wide spectrum of products.

We're trying to create a framework/platform for longtail ecommerce. Not just a
platform for people who want to sell digital things they create.

There is definitely overlap between us and groad, but its not our primary
focus, for certain things you want to sell its just quicker to sell via them,
and thats cool.

~~~
sjs382
You seem to be throwing the word "long tail" into the answer, but I still
don't understand what makes Chec different/better than Gumroad for selling
"long tail" items. I can sell both my app and my PSDs through both Gumroad and
Chec. I really don't see a difference other than the fact that you can set
fixed shipping prices. Maybe Gumroad doesn't support Paypal?

Can you compare and contrast the two in a meaningful way?

What can I do with Chec that I can't do with Gumroad? And for that matter,
what does Gumroad do that Chec doesn't (yet) do?

~~~
devan
In terms of features

3.5% fee compared to 5%

PayPal Integration (for your customers who feel safer using them)

Physical Product Handling

Access Windows for digital sales (<https://trychec.com/assets/img/anything-
digital.png>)

Inline Social Payments on Facebook (checkouts in customers newsfeeds)

Social Deals - Based on influence or demographics

And a powerful merchant backend.

as well as a few smaller features around.

Groad is primarily built to deal with digital files, we can handle any type of
good.

and that's just in v1. we've got a lot to do, and you'll see us differentiate
more in the future.

It might be easier to give the stories behind the idea to help.

So, i created this initially for myself. As a teenager i had resale rights to
a DVD info product, and made a couple thousand a month selling it.

I hated the checkout process of 2checkout, 1shoppingcart, ejunkie, and others.
So I ended up throwing a paypal checkout in an iframe and creating a post hook
script to manage the order.

I wanted a simple, clean, yet powerful app to manage everything, so i made
one. The first version of this was built in 2010.

I had one professional/full product to sell and i sold it in fairly high
volume, and I didnt need a fully fledged store, i just had a single product to
sell. Over time i created more and more minisites to sell different types of
info products so i could have some passive income whilst i was at school.

Gumroads story

Sahil created an icon on photoshop that he wasnt going to use, but thought
other people would find value in it so he wanted a service that let him sell
his "value" to his followers (if that makes sense).

Gumroad allows people to sell their small snippets of value. (primarily
digital).

Chec allows smaller merchants to start selling online who have no need for a
front end store. Merchants like mmfixed.com etc..

Is that a little clearer? :)

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MichalBures
TL;DR Use UTF for Seller's name.

Looks like a bit better Gumroad. Design is nice, blah blah blah. Why I'm
writing is this: when activating account what the hell is supposed to be
Seller's Name?

This annoying popup keeps telling me "Must contain only letters, numbers, or -
( ) , . ' &". I must say I haven't seen many names with numbers or ampersands
in it. If it's meant to be a username, than ok but say it specifically. If
it's really meant to be a name - it's 2013 for Ozzie's sake, use the damn UTF.

~~~
sjs382
[http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-
programmers-b...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-
believe-about-names/)

Also, ampersands are common in company names. (Procter & Gamble, etc)

~~~
devan
We thought we fixed that bug. might just be some left over JS validation.
we'll get into it.

~~~
MichalBures
Thank you :)

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zaidrahman
Who is your competitor? PayPal, Gumroad, Shopify, Stripe, Square?

How would Chec work for the following cases:

* A non-profit selling shirts to raise funds.

* A freelancer charging for his work. Essentially, a money transfer.

* A SaaS style service charging $5 a month.

* Charging for a PSD.

~~~
yookd
Like Devan stated below - "We position ourselves between Gumroad & Shopify (if
they did payments)".

In the future, we plan on adding widgets that will work within our application
that will cater to some of the cases you pointed out. Some of these widgets
will include date/time charging (tutor offering hours/days of work) and
subscription based charging (SaaS service you mentioned). Of course, we're not
limited to just that.

As for the PSD, we host the file for you so all you need to do is upload the
PSD and after the checkout process, the buyer can immediately download it.

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autoreverse
Congrats on the launch - looks cool.

Do you support withdrawal of funds to non-US bank accounts?

Can't see this in the FAQ.

Likewise there don't seem to be any limitations on seller location. Are there
any?

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lysol
It'd be cool if there was some option to post stuff to Craigslist or auto-
format copy/markup for Craigslist, but that's just me asking for my own Pony.
I like the look and ease of listing stuff.

~~~
devan
We looked into posting directly to Craigslist for you, but its against their
T&C. :(

~~~
jyu
Checkout how airbnb does this. It's technically not posting directly, but
directing user to the right page and populating the post information in a nice
looking format. T&C compliant :)

~~~
mlebel
Yardsale (app) does an awesome job of posting to Craigslist as well.

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ecaroth
Love your site design - great use of whitespace and big, bold images! It would
be nice to see a sample of a cart/page before signing up so you know what your
"shop" will look like..

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ante_annum
The site is impossible to use on mobile.

~~~
devan
yeah, we're working on that! we rushed the marketing site.

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robinjfisher
Just an FYI, your layout has about 10% white space on the right hand side when
viewed on iPad mini. Caused by the card fan lower down the page.

~~~
devan
Yeah just noticed that one, same in IOS. Working on fixing it up.

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cristinacordova
Just an FYI, the A/B testing link here is broken: <https://trychec.com/ab-
testing>

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lingben
as is the blog link: <https://trychec.com/blog>

~~~
jkolko
as is the company blog link: <http://madebyswipe.com/blog>

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sjs382
It says that you handle physical products and delivery. How do you do this? Or
do you just offer delivery for digital item sales?

~~~
devan
We provide region specific shipping options for physical products, and will be
doing tight integrations with UPS, Fedex, RoyalMail apis to help you with
fulfilling physical items.

~~~
freshhawk
Do you have an eta on that integration? That sounds very interesting and the
type of service we are already researching.

~~~
devan
I'd say within 6 weeks? We're a tiny team (2 devs). I'd love to speak to you
about it and see what you'd like to see implemented.

drop me an email at devan [at] madebyswipe.com

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abdophoto
This is really great. Perfect for things like Craigslist. Think you video
could be a lot better. Keep up the awesome work, though.

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pogosian
It doesn't seem to work. I created product, but when I click "Secure Checkout"
button on product page nothing happens.

~~~
devan
can you link me to the product checkout?

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rgbrgb
What is longtail ecommerce?

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sv123
Is there a way to order more than one product at a time?

~~~
devan
We're working on that.

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arkitaip
How do you handle charge backs and fraud?

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devan
heuristics & 3 strikes with chargebacks and we lock your account.

But we've got a lot to do here.

~~~
Amarandei
It seems a bit harsh. The seller has no control over the chargebacks and you
actually 'punish' the seller for them and not the buyer. Digital files
chargebacks are more common than you think. How do you decide if the
chargeback should receive a strike in the even that the buyer simple doesn't
answer any contact requests(happened to me more then once). I've also had
buyers lie about the purchase when in fact I had IP and email proof that they
wore actually the ones buying but the chargeback was submitted(and approved)
because they said they wore not the ones who made the transaction. Is anyone
else using this 3 strike rule?

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qdawg
This is awesome! Good job!

