I'm looking for a payment system that's ideal for very small payments, think between $1 to $5 per charge.
I'm looking for a payment system that's ideal for very small payments, think between $1 to $5 per charge. As a POC, I'm thinking about just using Stripe, but the 30 cent flat fee on $1 is not sustainable in the long run.
The costs associated with the service I'm making are negligible, but I don't like the idea of having ~30% of my take being eaten by a payment system. I could switch the way I'm thinking about payment and sweep payments into a single charge, but that has some implications on the value proposition of the idea.
Thanks!
Aaron
#payment-systems #payment #ecommerce
Hey :) It depends what you're wanting to do, do you want to just take payments? We actually touched on something that I think you might find interesting - Have a read and let me know what you think here. https://paddle.com/blog/what-is-merchant-of-record/
Let me know what you think
I’m thinking of a credits system. Buy a pack of 5000 credits for $5. Then use usage based pricing charging 1 credit per action. If you implement this then it would be easy to setup a free trial of 500 credits. It has pros and cons of course.
Perhaps more detail on the value prop would help the community provide creative solutions. Stripe seems to be the best option, but I see what you mean about giving them 30%! Is there any way to batch the payments before sending to Stripe so that you get charged once?
I'm thinking about a spin on https://gofuckingdoit.com/, except when the user breaks the agreement between myself and said user, I want the monetary pain to be inflicted immediately. I want you to feel me tearing at your wallet as you break the rules. I think reverse monetary incentives are a great way to break bad habits. I'm actually primarily interested in using this myself because I have tons of terrible digital habits that need to be broken.
@mnmlst mentioned tokens above, but I think that abstracts the pain in a way that would allow you to continue to infringe on the rules w/ little reflection as to what is happening. I don't want the user to think about the platform, I want them to think about their wallet.
Cool idea! I've been a longtime user of Stickk.com, and more recently, Beeminder, because I also need some negative financial incentives to help me get to it.
And, I can see how it would be hard to bundle these payments. However, I wonder if maybe it isn't worth worrying about too much at this point? This seems like a problem that you'll be happy to have several months after launching if the site is very successful. There are several scenarios in which the 30% won't matter very much, in which case it's best not to spend much time thinking about it up front. Of course, there are dismal, failure-type scenarios, but I'm actually thinking that even if you do launch and get a bunch of users (I'm rooting for you!), if you're successful enough at scaring users into sticking to their goals, you won't charge them very often. So you might be making little enough money that it won't matter very much whether you take home 70% or 85% of it. At the end of the day, it just might not warrant vary much time and effort on your part trying to optimize your take.
Instead, it might make sense to optimize for other things, at least at first. Developer convenience is a big one. If Stripe is the easiest thing to implement, it might make sense to just use that. Then, if your site is wildly successful and you find that you are charging people often, you can consider switching to some other payment provider.
This is a good point, I often get stuck in the over planning phase before executing an MVP. I'll probably try to code out the greater system first in a couple days before even thinking about integrating payment.
Edit, I was just looking at Sticck, my god they need to make their tour page a single page... ~1 second load times between each slide of plain text.
Yah, I think they coded it up to illustrate some points to go along with a book they were writing. Dan Ariely is one of the site's founders, and his books on behavioral economics are really good! But it looks like they haven't worked on the project since. Beeminder, on the other hand, seems to have a lot more attention and care behind it.