Feedback for a SAAS product idea
I am trying to build platform for selling digital or physical products. What do you think about creating platform for listing products? Note: You cannot have customization what shopify and other ecommerce platforms have.
Features:
- Unlimited product listing
- No monthly subscription fees
- Easily share product urls or store link on social media
- User does not need to have any account on platform. Just click buy now button -> enter shipping address -> make payment
- Platform will only charge 3% commission on every product sold. No other hidden charges or no payments for product listing.
Reason behind such idea:
I have seen small business owners facing these challenges:
- They don't use any ecommerce platform because of monthly subscription cost & mnay get stuck in managing themes/UI stuff etc.
- I found that small business owners contact on instagram or FB via DM and then entire conversation takes place from payments to shipping address to order tracking. This is lengthy procedure.
Any suggestions or feedback?
Good idea, But there are some problems with this model.
Any sale happens on your platform you’re making money of it with commissions in place and with that comes some liabilities.
Anybody does fraudulent transactions or sell any illegal goods/substance, sell copyrighted content you’re in a big trouble.
And the laws of the illegal goods and substances are different in different countries.
It gets difficult if you’re a indie dev and building a global product.
Buyers of those sellers on your platform who may want to get a refund or any other complaints will reach out to you..
you have to have policies and customer support in place to handle these queries.
To handle frauds & scammers you need to have fraud protection measures and you need to maintain fraudulent transactions to less than 1% out of your total transactions and if you don’t most of the payment gateways will ban your payment gateway account right away. (Stripe did this to us)
Instead i’d suggest you to give out payment gateway integrations and let customers handle payments through their own account. That way you can still operate platform on zero commissions and may be charge a subscription for them to use the platform and to pay your bills.
I guess that’s why most of the platforms who cater to small businesses do operate in this model.
I am going to use this:
So users will connect their payment account
The fifth point applies to this.
Even with this setup.. still the money is being routed from your payment gateway account to your sellers account.
Instead i’d suggest just give an option for sellers to choose any payment gateway they want and enter their api keys from their payment gateway account and start receiving payments directly from their customers instead you routing it from your account to theirs.
Great idea