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Sellbox – Sell your files from Dropbox and Google Drive with Paypal
- eberfreitas 13y agoThis is really useful for artists like musicians and so on... How do you plan to market it? What is the core audience?
- thrush 13y agoCompletely agreed. This is a genius way to bypass the iTunes Store and Kindle Book Store.
- CompiledCode 13y agoIt reminds me of gumroad.com
- joshmn 13y agoI have a client whose concept is to do exactly this. Expect to see some details about it. It's going to change everything, especially for indie bands.
- voltagex_ 13y agobandcamp.com does this far, far better. Sorry - I won't trust most musicians to encode their own files properly.
- draugadrotten 13y agoHigh 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 13y agoIt's a great option for low budget projects. I could see it working well for hobby or MVP projects.
- smarx 13y agoI 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 13y ago> Do the files remain in Dropbox/Drive, or do they get copied to Sellbox's storage? Good question.
- snoonan 13y agoThe 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 13y agoWell, 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 13y agoNo 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 13y agoInteresting...and I don't disagree. How would you like them to charge for a service like this?
- snoonan 13y agoSince they are charged a percent upstream, then they will have to pass that on to operate. So I would imagine they could pass on the percent component of cost with no markup, and then charge a flat fee (ex: $1). I'm assuming they are never stuck with the bill in a fraud case. If they are, then the price should include that risk component as a percentage as well.
- wavesounds 13y ago
- minimaxir 13y agoWhat 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.
- andrewmunsell 13y agoI'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/
- bryanh 13y agoVery nice! We wrote a blog post on doing this with Zapier: https://zapier.com/blog/the-ultimate-guide-to-selling-downloads-with-zapier/ https://zapier.com/blog/the-ultimate-guide-to-selling-downlo... except you can mix and match any payment, storage and email/notification system and start to augment it however you like.
- untilHellbanned 13y agoI 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".
- jackmaney 13y agoA 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).
- deweller 13y agoI wonder what that muchacho file is. Anyone know?
- daniula 13y agoAs 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
- dools 13y agoI 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 13y agoDropbox 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 13y agoI 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 13y agoAre 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).
- ricardo_ramirez 13y agoThe % 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 13y agoThose 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 13y agoThe % 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).
- mark_sz 13y agoI 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 13y agoBandcamp takes 15% until you hit $10,000 in sales, then scales back to 10%.
- hawkharris 13y agoCool 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-Communication https://sellboxhq.com/l/A6KW/How-Google-Cars-Will-Change-Com...
- samstave 13y agoIt 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.
- slaven 13y agoI 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).
- andrewroycarter 13y agoI'm working on a pebble app- May use this to distribute it until a non crappy pebble store comes out!
- nikunjk 13y agoThis looks freakishly similar to Gumroad. Even the 'I want this' button seems copied.
- arcticf0x 13y agoHow to verify the stuff we buy is legit?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- hrjet 13y agoThis 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).
- ArekDymalski 13y agoThat'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.