7 ms·
Show HN: Trolley lets you take payments from your static site
- jamieweb 8y agoThis looks really good. Few questions: 1. Would this be able to support subscription/recurring payments? E.g. for SaaS. 2. Do you have a versioned release of the JavaScript file so that Subresource Integrity (SRI) can be used? 3. Could you document the origins that the JavaScript file loads content of different types from, so that it would be easy to lock this down using a Content Security Policy? Thanks.
- rorygibson 8y agoGreat feedback, thank you! We don't support subscriptions today - but we're actively working on it. Single-item payments is our MVP but subscriptions are next. Documentation is .... um, "light" at the moment. Right now, you should be able to use connect-src,img-src,script-src all "https://svr.trolley.link" https://svr.trolley.link" We also depend upon Stripe Checkout, so you should add the attributes for their stuff too ( https://stripe.com/docs/security https://stripe.com/docs/security ) Don't have a versioned release right now, which is a gap. Thanks for pointing it out, I'll sort it :-)
- rorygibson 8y agoMaker here... I designed this to be a simple Stripe-backend-as-a-service for people who want to take money fast without having to roll any backend code. e.g. landing pages that take a deposit for your product (KickStarter style)
- p-ross 8y agoLooks sweet, what are the key differences between this and Stripe Checkout? https://stripe.com/checkout https://stripe.com/checkout
- rorygibson 8y agoHey, Trolley actually uses Checkout in the UI, so we don't compete directly. What Trolley gives you is - you don't need a server! If you use Checkout yourself, adding the widget to your front end is really easy - but you also need to provide some code in the backend that processes your form submission and then does the token exchange with Stripe to actually make the charge on the customer's account. That means you either need to be on some kind of all-in-one e-commerce suite, use WordPress and some plugins (and either host it yourself or pay someone to) or build and run some infrastructure of your own (heroku, DO, EC2, maybe FaaS if that's your thing) Think of Trolley as a Stripe backend-as-a-service with a useful UI feature :-)
- kweks 8y agoCorrect, I immediately thought of Stripe Checkout, which is very nice.
- rorygibson 8y agoCheckout is great - but it'not enough to sell online on its own (I think my comment above that explains this posted just after yours, so you may not have seen it :-) Trolley requires and uses Stripe Checkout, but it's there to make it easier and faster to sell - especially if you want a static HTML site - than checkout alone.
- soulchild37 8y agoJust a suggestion, place a demo pay button on the homepage so visitor can know what it looks like without registering an account. Might probably gain more interest and conversion rate.
- rorygibson 8y agoThat's a good suggestion, thank you!
- kamyarg 8y agoyes, was trying to find a demo button ctrl+f'in for "demo" and "try it"
- wolfgang42 8y agoAlso, what options are available on the backend? Will the buyer be asked for a billing address? Can I turn this off? Can they be asked for a shipping address? What happens when someone buys something? Do they get an email? Do I get an email? I'd consider answering these questions either as documentation that goes through all of the options available on the backend and/or as a walkthrough of the complete process from signing up to getting an order. A demo Trolley account that's set up with a Stripe test key wouldn't be a bad idea either.
- rorygibson 8y agoYou're quite right. We're working on a demo setup :) FYI though - yes, you can choose whether to collect billing & shipping info at a per-product level. The buyer and seller both get notified by email (and if you have the Stripe app as a seller, you'll get a push notif). The charge gets fully logged in the seller's Stripe account, with all metadata (so if you ever disconnect Trolley you don't lose anything about your customers)
- ageitgey 8y agoJust my feedback: The 2% transaction fee on top of Stripe is a big turnoff for me. My main use would be selling digital files via Stripe (ebooks, etc). Other services like getdpd.com offer that as a cut-and-paste button for static sites at a fixed monthly price plus they handle hosting and delivering the files to the customer for that same fee. I'm not saying you need to try to target the same niche, I'm just offering one potential customer's feedback :-)
- rorygibson 8y agoHey That's good feedback, thanks. I'm definitely happy to talk to potential customers about alternate pricing models.... Basically the fee is a % field in the DB, if I wanted to reduce it, or zero it and work through invoicing or direct payments for individual customers, that's cool)l with me. If it's of interest, drop me a line on rg@trolley.link and we can work out a model that's better for your use case.
- rorygibson 8y ago(I'm already looking at digital downloads as a feature, too :-)
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- justkez 8y agoLooks interesting! We've deployed Snipcart on a few static/React sites to keep them self contained which offers a JS powered cart/checkout experience for the same 2% load on the payment fees. Do you see Trolley evolving to include a cart to allow multiple product purchases?
- rorygibson 8y agoHi @justkez Definitely, yes. Right now we're focussing on making Trolley as lightweight and easy to get started as possible, before pulling in more features. I'm really interested in your feedback on how Trolley stacks up against its' competitors; if you had some time to drop me a line on rg@trolley.link I'd love to talk to you in more detail. Our pricing is also MVP so if you think there's something I'd have to do there to win business from you (or people in your position) then I'm keen to understand that too. I'm already aware of use cases like agencies building sites for their clients that might need an alternate pricing model :-)
- qwerty456127 8y agoWhere does it send the money? What countries does it work in? Does it require any kind of identity verification papers?
- rorygibson 8y agoHi Trolley is essentially a front-end to Stripe (in Stripe terms we're a Platform working with Standard account). That means that it works where Stripe works, and the money flows to your bank account through Stripe. https://stripe.com/gb/payments https://stripe.com/gb/payments (Trolley never sees your card details or touches your money; the only pieces of Personal Information we ever see are email addresses and shipping names & addresses.) What Trolley adds on top of Stripe is that we handle the integration code for you so you don't need a server or to pay for a back end developer, and we make it super easy to put a payment button on any website that triggers the whole process :-)
- petercooper 8y agoCould you put a demo up, perhaps? Obviously, most people wouldn't actually go through the whole process and send money, but I'm just intrigued how it "feels".
- rorygibson 8y agoWorking on it :)
- yani 8y agoIt will be good to add more payment processors. I am already using Braintree and switching to Stripe is not something I would do.
- rorygibson 8y agoHi Yes, we're looking at Braintree and Adyen for the future, but for MVP Stripe was by far the easiest starting point. Thanks!
- JAdamMoore 8y agoSo is this another "Free for all your data" scam? Haven't we learn to not trade data for free service yet? Is everyone stupid?
- ddebernardy 8y agoMy $.02 FWIW: - Your 2% on top of Stripe's fees is off the charts IMO. Stripe charges $.30 + 2.9% and they're taking care of the actual payment. You're merely making it simpler to insert a button. - The difficulty in practice isn't creating a button to make the payment; it is what happens before and after the payment. Offer to host and automate the delivery of the access-restricted deliverable when it's digital (ebook, software, etc.). Work with Zapier and similar to offer integrations on their end. Provide your users with a way to run their own affiliate program. (Charge extra for that.)
- rorygibson 8y agoHi Thanks for the feedback. Inserting a button is part of what Trolley does. But really what it's doing is stopping you having to build / host the back end server and code that handles the tokenised payment exchange for Stripe (Stripe - and all other similar payment processors require there to be some non-front end code to handle secure token exchange) So I'm hoping that 2% works out better than managing a server and potentially hiring a developer to build you some code if you can't write it yourself :) I'm still feeling out prices... 2% was the starting point because it's in line with services that sort-of compete (Celery, SnipCart and so on) Totally take your points about digital asset delivery - it's on the backlog. Thanks again!
- ddebernardy 8y agoHaving done this a few times, integrating a payment processor you're unfamiliar with to a site takes a few hours when they don't provide a library and you're doing it for the first time. I might have misunderstood what you're offering, but to me it sounded like you were basically providing that as a hosted service. Stripe's API is reputably simple, and Stripe provides ready-made libraries to make your job even simpler. I can't imagine for a moment that using the ready-made library Stripe provides on Github takes more than an hour or two. So you're basically talking about a $10-50 job depending on how generous you feel when hiring an online code monkey or an adolescent down the street to do it for you. Free + 2% might work for some non-technical user who wants to experiment with selling a product right now without investing a penny. It won't the moment the idea takes off. You'll immediately look for something with a monthly recurring fee. The reason breaks down to psychology. When you sell a lot of stuff online, you only see the monthly recurring charge once. The transaction fees, by contrast, will be all over your statement. Sooner rather than later, you look at each and every single one, thinking: "Sigh, so much money being spent on this... Why am I paying for this again? Can't I use something else?" As an anecdote to illustrate the point further: where I live, banks charge a tax on transactions, and what essentially amounts to a tax on paying that tax to boot. It's tiny - under .1%. But cash transactions are, as you'd expect, commonplace - including for things like buying houses. At any rate, what I'm trying to get at here is that unless you're delivering something on top that is valuable enough to retain your users, you'll only be attracting users who are looking for a temporary solution to experiment with an idea. I'd expect them to churn the moment they see enough transactions that your extra fee associated with each one will prompt survey cheaper alternatives. One such value, by the way, is having most if not all of the things you want to use in one place, or good APIs and integrations to be able to use the 3rd party tools you want. This matters a lot too in practice. Maintaining and integrating several different poorly written self-hosted apps to run the cart, billing, delivery, affiliates, accounting, a few types of analytics, etc. is grueling. Integrating multiple hosted tools to do the same is also grueling - but less so, and it doesn't involve much maintenance. Being able to use new apps and services Zapier-or Segment-style is, by contrast, not grueling and extremely valuable. Anyway, good luck with your project!
- zuttton 8y agoHey Rory, can you add more gradients on more elements on the site? I don't think there is enough to proper be catching the gradient fad. thanks.
- rorygibson 8y ago:)
- dang 8y agoThis breaks the rules, both for Show HNs (https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html) and for HN itself (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Maybe you didn't mean it in a jerkish way, but it's hard to tell. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18083428 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18083428 and marked it off-topic.
- tzs 8y agoThe structure of the JavaScript is interesting. It looks like this: if(typeof Math.imul == "undefined" || (Math.imul(0xffffffff,5) == 0)) { Math.imul = function (a, b) { var ah = (a >>> 16) & 0xffff; var al = a & 0xffff; var bh = (b >>> 16) & 0xffff; var bl = b & 0xffff; // the shift by 0 fixes the sign on the high part // the final |0 converts the unsigned value into a signed value return ((al * bl) + (((ah * bl + al * bh) << 16) >>> 0)|0); } } [240k of minimized JavaScript generated by ClojureScript] The non-minimized code is just a copy/paste of the imul polyfill [1] from MDN. I'm curious why that is needed, since the ClojureScript seems to already have an imul polyfill included (the function named Ed in the minimized code). Is ClojureScript's polyfill broken? [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Math/imul#Polyfill https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
- rorygibson 8y agoClojureScript uses the Google Closure compiler under the hood. From a quick dig around, looking at the Closure changelog, they introduced a polyfill of their own; I'm guessing this went in after CLJS built one, so now there are 2 in the compile / transpile chain. One of the consequences of nothing in life being simple any more!
- CuteBrowser 8y agoNot simple? Maybe you're doing it wrong. Just make blockchain backend, run it as a serverless process on k8 and voila, can't be simpler.
- singularity2001 8y agoMy $.02: I am surprised people are so aversed against the idea of browser based micropayment. I think that's the one component missing from the internet; which could also save us from Amazon and ads. And make content creators richer. (No, Paypal does not count; for obvious reasons and too many clicks … 2?4?)
- StavrosK 8y agoSorry to hijack, but I've long had this idea, and possibly offer it to people here for stealing, but mainly want feedback on whether it'd be worth implementing: You, the creator, make some content available for download. You only require the visitor to give you an email address, optionally requiring validation. The visitor then downloads and consumes the content. After some amount of time, configurable by you, the visitor gets an email saying "hey, if you enjoyed my content, please click here to pay me the recommended $X, or ignore this email to be notified later, or click 'no thanks' to never be notified again". Basically, paying after the content was consumed, but not so much later that they've forgotten about it. What does everyone think?
- timdavila 8y agoI think it's a nice idea that would lead to very little revenue for the creator. You're making it easier to get the content free than to pay for it - is that the intention?
- StavrosK 8y agoIt's for content that's free/pay what you want. Not for content that's already behind a mandatory pay wall.
- bradfa 8y agoDoes Trolley also handle calculating sales taxes and integrating Stripe's sales tax on orders features? Or is there a 3rd party involved/recommended when using Trolley?
- duncancarroll 8y agoYou lost me at 2%
- wemdyjreichert 8y agoNice, but there are better options. Use flatmarket: https://github.com/christophercliff/flatmarket https://github.com/christophercliff/flatmarket The guy developing it was even nice enough to set up a heroku button; can be run for free: https://github.com/christophercliff/heroku-stripe-checkout https://github.com/christophercliff/heroku-stripe-checkout You'll still incur stripe charges, but no extra 2 percent.
- cindywu123 8y agoThis is a neat idea. I work with 250 caving clubs that each have individual websites (generally wordpress) and need a way to collect annual membership dues and one time donations. Most of these clubs have been around for decades, are not growing fast, but have a small very engaged membership. The only time these clubs work with developers is if a member happens to be one and volunteers the time. This really sucks for the member who happens to be the developer. (I stop telling people I can build stuff.) Most clubs are collecting cash or check in person and at best are using Paypal which sucks because of the off-site experience. I would never set a club up with Stripe because I know if I leave no one will be able to maintain the code, but I would try this out.