Hacker News Reader

Comment by davefp | Hacker News Reader

10,000 customers is very impressive. By comparison, Shopify has been running since 2006 and has just broken the 50,000 customer barrier.

That said, Tictail is currently a free service. From what I can tell, no-one's paid them a penny. The real test will be how many of their merchants stick around once the add-on pricing is (a) announced and (b) goes into effect in May.

EDIT: From their help section (http://help.tictail.com/customer/portal/articles/531368-how-...):

> Our ambition is to offer these add-ons at between 1€ - 5€ / month.

(full disclosure: I'm a Shopify employee.)

View on HN

Just wanna say you guys made a nice product as well.

I helped some friends start a store that has been growing nicely since 2009 I think and I can think of one major hiccup that affected us/them. The API part mostly gold as well.

What you miss out on seems to be that SEO optimization for shop-owners is hard with all kinds of weird liquid constructions going into the template for (just plain white hat) SEO in addition to the ones that are needed for user friendlyness.

Just today I was going through the shopify pricing page to figure out if there was any option that didn't have a fixed fee in return for a higher per-transaction fee. Why have you guys decided not to scale down more than 14$ a month? That's not a lot for any "real" stores but I've considering setting up an online store for some very low volume stuff and paying 168$ a year just to be online has always put me off. Tictail may very well be the answer to this.

There are a number of factors, but I think you answered your own question. I don't claim to speak for the company officially, but as I understand it personally our target market are the 'real' stores you mention who don't have a problem with $15/month.

I'm curious though, how high a transaction fee would you pay if you were on a free plan? Most merchants HATE percentage fees and want them gone completely. With that in mind we do our best to minimize them.

Maybe TicTail will be a huge success. My point is that even though they have 10,000 customers we should hold our judgement until they get their business model up and running properly. When the dust settles, we'll have a better idea of how they're doing.

Sure, I assumed that's what you were doing, not wasting your time on my marginal business. I just thought this wasn't your typical freemium business as even your free users would be generating revenue from the transactions and as soon as any of them start selling a bit more it would be very easy to upsell them. To answer your question I'd easily take a free version of your 14$ plan with a 5% fee instead of 2%. I assume most people would be fine taking that deal just to launch a store to validate a concept. If it works you get an upsell, if not they go try something else.

I was just annoyed as the only other option I knew about was self-hosting something like oscommerce. I can do the self-hosting just fine but I've heard bad things about it and it looks so bad... Then along comes TicTail and I'm excited again. Even though their easy payment option seems to be paypal...

To support Dave case here, we at Jumpseller, got over 5.000 stores after opening up with just our free plan.

Later we expanded our plans and focused only on paying customers.

There is a bit difference between people who are willing to pay 0USD and those willing to pay 1USD.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com