Tinypay.me – quick and easy ecommerce
// April 17th, 2010 // Ecommerce
Tinypay.me is a very quick and simple way to sell stuff online, if (like me) you’d rather sell in your own online store than on eBay or online classifieds.
In one way or another I’ve been working on selling products online since ecommerce was born in the first internet boom of the last decade. At first it was incredibly hard, but one-by-one the barriers to entry have been crumbling and costs have been coming down.
In Australia, only two barriers remain: the relatively high cost of maintaining a merchant account with an Australian bank, and the relatively high cost of delivery, whether by Australia Post or courier, domestic or international.
Tinypay.me in action
Tinypay.me does an end-run around merchant account fees by processing your transactions through PayPal, which means you’re subject to PayPal fees per transaction, which are relatively high per-transaction (2.4% + $0.30 AUD per transaction on transactions up to $5,000) but at least you’re only paying when you sell something. A bank’s merchant account comes with monthly fees, transaction fees and a gateway or EFTPOS rental fee.
In addition to the PayPal fee, Tinypay.me charges 5% of the total sale price. That’s much higher than I’d like to see, but you’re paying for the convenience of having the world’s simplest ecommerce setup, making it no harder than publishing a photo to Facebook or publishing a blog post.
On Tinypay.me, someone as non-technical as your mum, armed with a few product images and a PayPal account, could have a product page up and ready to sell stuff in five minutes. It has easy sharing for social media and adding a product from your Tinypay.me to a web page or blog is as easy as copying and pasting a single line of HTML.
It even allows you to put a percentage of each sale towards a charity.
Only thing lacking I really care about is support for shipping tables (and I’d like to see the Tinypay.me fee more like 2-3%). Otherwise I think it rocks.
Now, please buy a Milkooler!
