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Agree that the challenge is in obtaining partnerships, but not every retailer needs full control of the shopping experience, especially on mobile. And that's th

by jodah 11y ago

Agree that the challenge is in obtaining partnerships, but not every retailer needs full control of the shopping experience, especially on mobile. And that's the win - alleviating the need for every retailer to solve the same technical problem.

jusben1369 11y ago
The challenge for the developer is twofold; 1) Understanding the real time availability of the inventory at the retail partner and 2) Supporting the payment provider of the retailer. In the desktop world this was solved by a straight up affiliate redirect. You arrived at the retailer page and saw your product in a shopping cart or close to it. Of course if inventory was poorly synced you occasionally got an error. This is still pretty common with things like airline metasearch services where the cheap ticket can be gone. Either way inventory was managed. Then you entered your payment method on the retailer site and it was processed by their backend processor. In the mobile world with mobile optimized apps those redirects don't work. So app developers want to make the payment experience feel like it's happening "within the app" Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and others all then had to solve for the inventory + payments challenge. Defaulting to Stripe can be problematic if the retailer already has a different payment processor relationship in place. By solving for the inventory piece I suspect Stripe is hoping to help drive momentum around overcoming the processor objections. Full disclosure I work at Spreedly where we help solve for the payment dilemma (not inventory) by allowing developers to work with a wide range of payment processors and/or affiliate API's.
- spolu 11y ago
  re Inventory: we want to provide live product availability information to the developer through our API. We encourage app developers to GET latest product info from our API before even rendering a potential Buy Now button. To make that possible we keep product information extra-fresh from big retailers, and even update it on the fly when we see orders failing because the product is out of stock. re Payments/Processor: So that's where it gets interesting. We have constructed for Pinterest a full payment distribution infrastructure to send payment information securely to large retailers or their processors. This infrastructure will also be used by Relay. Doing so, we believe we bring a ton of value to the ecosystem. But I'm sure you agree with that given your focus!
  - jusben1369 11y ago
    Congrats on the big day btw!
- Animats 11y ago
  In other words, since the app system doesn't have links like browsers, a whole new system is needed to emulate them.
  - jusben1369 11y ago
    Well they could push out and invoke a browser session which is how it was done initially and is still sometimes done. But yes conversion is poor.

by jodah 11y ago

jusben1369 11y ago

The challenge for the developer is twofold; 1) Understanding the real time availability of the inventory at the retail partner and 2) Supporting the payment provider of the retailer. In the desktop world this was solved by a straight up affiliate redirect. You arrived at the retailer page and saw your product in a shopping cart or close to it. Of course if inventory was poorly synced you occasionally got an error. This is still pretty common with things like airline metasearch services where the cheap ticket can be gone. Either way inventory was managed. Then you entered your payment method on the retailer site and it was processed by their backend processor. In the mobile world with mobile optimized apps those redirects don't work. So app developers want to make the payment experience feel like it's happening "within the app" Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and others all then had to solve for the inventory + payments challenge. Defaulting to Stripe can be problematic if the retailer already has a different payment processor relationship in place. By solving for the inventory piece I suspect Stripe is hoping to help drive momentum around overcoming the processor objections. Full disclosure I work at Spreedly where we help solve for the payment dilemma (not inventory) by allowing developers to work with a wide range of payment processors and/or affiliate API's.

spolu 11y ago
re Inventory: we want to provide live product availability information to the developer through our API. We encourage app developers to GET latest product info from our API before even rendering a potential Buy Now button. To make that possible we keep product information extra-fresh from big retailers, and even update it on the fly when we see orders failing because the product is out of stock. re Payments/Processor: So that's where it gets interesting. We have constructed for Pinterest a full payment distribution infrastructure to send payment information securely to large retailers or their processors. This infrastructure will also be used by Relay. Doing so, we believe we bring a ton of value to the ecosystem. But I'm sure you agree with that given your focus!
- jusben1369 11y ago
  Congrats on the big day btw!
Animats 11y ago
In other words, since the app system doesn't have links like browsers, a whole new system is needed to emulate them.
- jusben1369 11y ago
  Well they could push out and invoke a browser session which is how it was done initially and is still sometimes done. But yes conversion is poor.