The company blog of WePay, a Y Combinator-backed online payments startup, with posts on startup advice, company culture, and hiring.
HN commenters mention WePay as a simple payments option with good support, especially for group payments, and compare its fees to PayPal, Google, and Stripe.
Quick thoughts:
- You've clearly put a lot of effort into this. You seem to have a big collection of useful features. Congrats on that.
- I checked out the site before reading your post. I didn't really get what it was about -- something to do with bands or something. You wrote in your post, "It takes care of all the boring, tedious number-crunching aspects to being a professional in the industry." That kind of concise tagline is missing from your site. I would put all those boxes with features and stuff below the fold and summarize your service above the fold with a heading and maybe a short paragraph. E.g., https://www.wepay.com/
- The video, which should be featured more prominently, is way too long. It's clear you put a lot of work into all the features, but it's too much to show off all at once. Give a "big picture" view of the service and skip over the details. I'd aim for no longer than 1-3 minutes, the shorter the better. The video's job is to give people a taste, and get them excited.
- I tried going back to the site after writing some stuff here. It immediately took me to the video page and I didn't know how to get back to the homepage. Really confusing.
- I now see that when I click on "Bands" it gives me more of an overview video. I didn't expect that. That video still has a lot of details. Needs more summarizing to tell you what you're seeing and why it's the solution to your problems.
- The design could use some spunk. It may be handling "boring,…
This is indeed more focused on some of the ideas you liked most. But I think one lesson learned from Tipjoy is that merchant acquisition is the hard part about making a payments system. Increasing conversion rates is nice, lower overhead from micropayments is nice, but does is drive higher revenue? You have to prove that (or something else, like great customer service) to sell to merchants.
I also think this focus on pay later doesn't necessarily work for those new to the system (i.e. everyone that matters) who could still be apprehensive and hesitant to commit to a transaction.
The use of reputation isn't new. Spare Change had a system of reputation for those who reversed transactions. They let merchants block those with low reputations. A fun anecdote is that they needed to make a reverse-reverse transaction for those that wanted the reputation back.
But let me bring it back to merchant acquisition. Amazon and Google are both having a hard time with this too. People don't want to spend development resources on a new payment processor unless they really, really need to.
That's why solutions like http://wepay.com are awesome, because they have a payment product designed for a sizable niche that really could use their services.
(I work for Gluejar on unglue.it) We've struggled with the issue of finding the right payment processor. We went originally with PayPal, but 7 months after we submitted our application, we still don't have a decision (see http://blog.unglue.it/2012/05/03/unglue-it-payment-options-amazon-vs-paypal/). Amazon FPS was easy to get started with, and we got what seemed to be approval very quickly. So it was a bit surprising to then get shut down by Amazon after running for a while and demonstrating unglue.it works in practice.
We'd love to hear of alternative payment systems. I'm looking at using subscriptions in https://www.braintreepayments.com/docs/python/subscriptions/ to simulate conditional payments. http://www.quora.com/Online-and-Mobile-Payments/What-payment-solutions-besides-Amazon-can-be-used-for-crowdfunding leads to https://www.wepay.com/ and https://www.balancedpayments.com/ I'd love to hear of people's experiences with these payment systems and any others we should look at for unglue.it
Hm, I am not sure WePay is ready to be making these kind of gestures. I thought I would take a quick look to see if it would be a viable option to receive payments in the UK.
Their FAQ page (https://www.wepay.com/about/faq) features a nice little graphic of questions being asked from all over the world. Great, I thought - one thing PayPal was a bit rubbish at to start with was international payments - WePay must have cracked it.
Down we go to question 13 (https://www.wepay.com/about/faq#thirteen) and we see that no, WePay doesn't accept international payments!
I would rather try and unfreeze my money than not receive any at all.
If you're living inside the PHP world, I'd take a look at Phing ( http://www.phing.info/trac/ ). It's very similar to Apache Ant and uses a XML file to describe the build tasks (include/exclude files, copy, tar, SCP, run PHPUnit tests, etc.) and can easily be extended using PHP (we use the rsync extension). It takes a little while to get everything up and running, but once you've got it (and well tests) it'd pretty much bulletproof.
Also worth taking a look at WePay's blog post on how they do deployments: http://blog.wepay.com/2010/11/30/weploy-wepays-deployment-tool/
About a year ago WePay had an excellent blog entry that discussed this exact problem. Look to item 2 in http://www.wepay.com/blog/2010/03/11/5-things-i-%E2%80%9Cknew%E2%80%9D-or-should-have-known-before-starting-a-company-but-didnt-fully-understand-until-now/q to see what it says about finding a technical co-founder.
The biggest takeaway if you're a non-technical person is that you're facing an uphill battle, and it explains why this is.