The blog of Candy Japan, a subscription service sending Japanese sweets abroad, covering its business, fraud problems, and yearly results.
HN commenters bring it up as an example of a small subscription business, and link its posts on credit card fraud and year in review.
Awesome! You're obviously not struggling, but before long it might be worth reworking the site's aesthetic and branding? I honestly don't know at all how much it matters, but I'm gonna throw out some unsolicited design critique in case it's helpful.
- Tragically, King did sink their teeth into the word "candy", so using it in a candy-color outlined gradient logotype strongly evokes mobile games. May not matter, but it sends a mixed message.
- Only use the good photography. If you're shooting in a studio now, you can cycle out all the iPhone shots, which are contributing to a kind of "man-of-the-people candy blog" vibe, versus a "place that will send me awesome candy" vibe.
Images like this: http://www.japanstyle.info/wordpress/wp-content/images//20110908_ame01.jpg make me curious and hungry, images like this: http://www.candyjapan.com/static/japanese-candy.jpg remind me of being told to check Halloween candy for razors.
- Lead with the photography. Right now, if I don't already have an idea of what "japanese candy" is, I'm not excited. It's cliche, but even just changing the title text to lightly shadowed white and sticking full-width high quality candy photos behind it in a carousel would be way more engaging.
- Consider folding the "Are you still active?" section into the title pitch. If this is a concern people have, you don't want them to have to scroll through the rest of the page to resolve it. Could be worth testing something like "Order now to be included in the…
My only complaint is the "dark pattern" of not listing prices. There are prominent calls-to-action to enter your email address and sign up. I don't want to enter my email address unless I want to sign up, which is dependent on the price.
"example@example.com" now has an email from Candy Japan, and I obviously can't click on the verification link there.
After some digging, I found https://www.candyjapan.com/gift, which lists prices:
24 shipments! ($348.00, sent over one year)
Dozen shipments ($174.00, sent over six months)
Eight shipments ($116.00, sent over four months)
Four shipments ($58.00, sent over two months)
Two shipments ($29.00, sent over one month)
Doing the math, it's $14.50 per box. Even though many levels are listed, there is no quantity discount, which is not obvious - I'm not good at multiplying 29 or 14.5 by powers of 2 in my head. If it was $20 or $30/month, that would be a little different.
Some more digging with a disposable email finally brought me to https://www.candyjapan.com/subscribe, which shows that it's still $29/month whether gifting or subscribing. Furthermore, anyone can go to that page and see the price. No, the tiny "subscribe" link on the main page under the comic does not link there - it's an anchor to the email entry point.
Perhaps A/B testing says differently, but I would like the business a lot more if there was a big label, above the fold, on the main page, that said "$14.50 per box" or "$29 per month".
This is one of the greatest motivations for young and budding entrepreneurs. Even more so than aspiring speeches or conference talks.
I'd like to thank everyone that posted links and revealed your numbers. People usually don't do that because it invites competition but it's amazing to see how nice and inviting the HN community is. I'm also AMAZED at the familiar faces. I've seen and bought a lot of code from some of you guys without realizing many of you visit HN.
Here's my crap:
http://dayonepp.com - Maybe $100/month (down season) then I think $500/month (up season) NOT passive. Lots of work. I handle fulfillment.
http://affordabl.es - $0, just launched
http://residentevilradio.com - $0, (ran Amazon affiliate links)
http://timeforzen.com - $0, needs redesign, will monetize later this year.
BTW, where's http://CandyJapan.com guy? Last I heard he told us his project was successful at around $3,500/month in revenue.
The problems with aggregated payments go far beyond just ensuring someone can pay hosting and card processing fees. Who will take chargeback risk? Handle KYC for payouts (especially since many garage bands won’t have business entities)? Handle fraud at scale, including fraud rings using your service to validate stolen credit cards?
https://www.candyjapan.com/behind-the-scenes/candy-japan-hit-with-credit-card-fraud is an old (2015) but still relevant illustration of this.
Centralizing payments requires human monitoring and capital cushions. With services like Stripe this can be cheaper, but still requires nontrivial resources.
https://tomotcha.com/ — a Japanese tea subscription service. Although we had to suspend our activities for the better part of 2022, we've been able to resume in January 2023.
Logistic is brutal in what is starting to look like a post globalization world: shipping fees are through the roof, delays are long, regulation (especially in the EU) is ever more stringent. COVID-19 pretty much killed bemmu's Candy Japan (https://www.candyjapan.com), and EU regulation just killed Candysan (https://candysan.com): they threw in the towel one week ago.
And yet we keep going... gross margin is around $800~$1000 per month.
It happens. Candy Japan gets a bit of discussion here on HN, and has a few posts about credit card fraud on the blog (eg https://www.candyjapan.com/behind-the-scenes/how-i-got-credit-card-fraud-somewhat-under-control). The basic premise is that credit card fraudsters use small online transactions to check if a card is valid before they use it for the big high value stuff, and the cost of those transactions to a small business can make it expensive to run.
That said, if you're just enabling features on a site the actual cost to you is effectively zero, so maybe it's not something to worry about.