Joined: 09 Jul 2003
Posts: 37583
Location: Seattle, WA
Posted: 08/01/13 12:38
With Jamroom 5 finally being released, some of you have noticed that in Jamroom 5 we are now using a 3rd party "cart" service called "FoxyCart" for the payment system:
FoxyCart is not a free service, and so for those sites that want to sell media, but may only make a dollar or 2 a month, the $15 a month fee ($20 if you only go monthly) for FoxyCart is going to be a concern for selling items through Jamroom.
I wanted to take the time go through the reasons why we made the decision to go with FoxyCart, and some ideas of what we can possibly do to help those sites that don't want to use FoxyCart.
As many of you know that have used JR4, JR4 supported PayPal and a few other payment processors. With JR5 we began looking for frameworks that would make it possible for Jamroom to support a wider variety of payment processing solutions. The number one request for custom work over the years has been "can you create a payment plugin for XX system? We're not in one of the countries that is supported by PayPal", or "we hate PayPal and won't use them - can you support merchant XX?". So going in to JR5 we knew we had to come up with a solution that made it so we could support a much wider variety of payment processors - a very significant portion of all Jamroom sales have been to countries outside of the US and Western Europe.
This is where FoxyCart came in - not only do they support a TON of merchant processors ("gateways"):
but they also offer full subscription support AND coupons - regardless if the gateway you want to use supports them or not. This allows you as a site owner to change your gateway backend whenever you want without having to change a single line of code in your Jamroom.
With the shopping cart being Javascript based, it allows for (almost) automatic integration into any JR5 skin, as well as allows the cart to work with any 3rd party module that stores/creates items.
There is a dedicated team behind FoxyCart that can help you with any payment issues - they are constantly adding new support. They are focused 100% on the checkout and cart portion to make sure it is always working.
So those I think are some of the big benefits FoxyCart offers, and why I think if you are running a larger site it is the perfect solution. But that still doesn't help those sites that want to offer media sales to their users, but may not generate much in the way of sales each month to offset the FoxyCart costs - what can we do to help those sites?
Here's some things we have been thinking of:
since these sites most likely are not looking to make money from these sales, but instead just want to be able to offer it to their users, what about a simple "buy it now" button that sends the payment directly to the artist? The downside to this is that the site users would be required to have a PayPal account. However this would be the easiest want to add PayPal IPN support for those sites that want it. It would not include subscriptions, a cart or coupons, which would make it easier to develop and support.
What about a PayPal "donation" form - users can donate money to a profile (or the site) to help offset costs.
Another idea we've been thinking of is to offer Foxycart service through the Jamroom Network - i.e. we'd pay for FoxyCart and sites could sell through our FoxyCart account. The downside to this is that we'd need to maintain infrastructure for this, and we'd have to have some sort of payout system, which may not work with all sites. It also could run into issues related to fraud that may cause issues, so a lot of thought has to be done on this before anything could be offered.
So we are looking at some ideas to help out the smaller sites, so if you have any creative ideas you'd like to put forth, please add them here. One thing we are NOT planning on doing is a complete different set of payment modules specifically tailored to PayPal - FoxyCart already supports PayPal.
There have been some other threads related to this where the discussion has stirred up emotions to the point where there is a lot of angry posts going back and forth - I'm hoping to avoid that (posts like that will be deleted), and instead let's see if we can come up with a solution for those sites that want a solution other than the FoxyCart bundle.
With respect it is not fair to be charged a minimum of 'ANY' fee per month regardless of making or not making money. Sure, upgrades are essential & we must move on, but surely your customers of JR4 going to JR5 ought to have a choice & most importantly you said it above, one cannot expect a site to pay $15 when they earn $2 (if that).
Other gateways such as Avongate (which I use for software sales) only charges a commission if you sell. That is the ideal & easiest solution I believe. Foxycart should have a reasonable % on the sale.
This is holding us back even more after waiting so long for the JR5 Upgrade.
I would appreciate a solution ASP as this has really HIT us - especially when we are novice to php/IT & always pay (even to get UPGRADED). If there is no solution to the Foxycart problem we will be forced to shut down. I hate PayPal too, really bad, but they don't charge rain or shine, they get a %. There are no guarantees we will sell 'subscriptions'.
Please let us not debate this till the next Upgrade. Respect.
I'm with Kim on this one.
I would not have bought the 'special bungle $99 or the professional import $59 if I had known my only choice was Foxycart at $20 a month. I have now put JR5 in maintenance mode because I cannot use it. Very dissapointed.
Open latter to Brian: I keep reading your letter over & over again. We scraped up the money to buy JR4 & PAID to get uploaded & went along with what was best to do & spent money. We bought the module pack as soon as you put it out. We waited for JR5 like the 2nd coming & kept telling our users & future users that the best is yet to come.
There are really no choices in your letter (as I read & read it again) as you say '' One thing we are NOT planning on doing is a complete different set of payment modules specifically tailored to PayPal - FoxyCart already supports PayPal.''
Yes it does, but we have to PAY Foxycart $$$ to USE Paypal, when PAYPAL cost us nothing to begin with.
I have put my site on ''HOLD'' (God knows when it will go LIVE again) http://fatsafatsa.com/index.php?mode=notice
The letter I got from Foxycart was of no help at all - a machine could have replied for all I know.
We are stuck! Our sites laid to rest because we cannot afford the Foxycart fee (even if we could it is unfair).
So, I try to reach to your heart & not 'business' as I am sure you run a business & need all the deals you can get.
Time is against me for I waited so long for the UPGRADE to JR5 to move on - Now it's here & I am worst off than I started. Time is a Life & Death to me now - A solution must be found, yesterday, if possible:-)
Thank You.
Our sites laid to rest because we cannot afford the Foxycart fee.
Oh come on! your site isn't generating $15 a month in sales. Its not a sales site, realize that. Focus more on being a community site instead of trying to compete with iTunes.
The choice to use foxycart isn't because we make money from it, its because they already connect to all the payment gateways. saving us from having to write a gateway for each.
Most of the JR4 sites I've seen have been band heavy and fan weak. With JR5 we tried to get more fan interactions going, so if you give it a chance maybe you will be able to afford the $15 a month. Thats not such an extravagant goal.
Joined: 30 Aug 2005
Posts: 8792
Location: Ultrabubble
Posted: 08/02/13 02:20
Kim:
Other gateways such as Avongate (which I use for software sales) only charges a commission if you sell. That is the ideal & easiest solution I believe. Foxycart should have a reasonable % on the sale.
Interesting. Avangate charge 8% + $2.50 per sale which seems pretty high to me. There is also a 4.9% + $2.50 per sale scheme, but I can't figure out what the difference between the two schemes is (their pricing calculator doesn't work on FF mac - it errors because their analytics javascript is broken).
What is it (in your opinion) that they are offering for that commission which makes them the ideal solution?
_________________ Kulshi Mezian!
"Stranger from another planet, welcome to our hole. Just strap on your guitar and we'll play some rock and roll"
I don't like your reply or attitude. We are trying to generate some business from our site in the best way we can. I did not accuse you or anyone that you are makin' money from it. If you are, great for you.
It is unfair though to 'dump' this extra payment on us because you felt or feel you're doing good & not having to write so many scripts. Fine.
Why are we not given a choice?
Are you prepared to return all our money back & call it a day?
Perhaps if we had someone like yourself with the knowledge you posses we could overcome many obstacles, but we don't.
If, we knew, if we were told, perhaps we could have made different decisions.
Would you like to pay our foxycart fee of $15 every month?
To SteveX : They charge IF you SELL. IF. I don't mind paying 10% if I sell. My calculator calculates that I will PAY Foxycart for 10 months $150, if I sell or not!
Which calculator is better? Pay if you sell or not, or Pay WHEN you sell?
I am not knocking FOXYCART - as I said EARLIER, it's great, but we ought to pay when we sell. That's what I said in my 1st post - the 2nd was not complaining or hitting anyone on the head, it was to explain my thoughts more.
Thank you, I presume your developers - different breed of people. Respect. We are not all the same.
Joined: 30 Aug 2005
Posts: 8792
Location: Ultrabubble
Posted: 08/02/13 03:00
I guess you are right if you aren't selling anything.
Must say though, I'd be very wary of any payment processor which is unable to maintain their own sales site. Might be worth double checking that their javascript is actually working on your website at your point of sale - if it isn't working 100% that could explain why you aren't making any sales (ie it may not be possible for your customers to complete a purchase).
$2.50 per sale obviously wouldn't work for any Jamroom sites selling music at itunes rates, but a 10% commission on a "communal" foxycart account might. People could then move to their own foxycart account whenever that made commercial sense to their business.
_________________ Kulshi Mezian!
"Stranger from another planet, welcome to our hole. Just strap on your guitar and we'll play some rock and roll"
or pass it on to the bands. offer the ability to sell music from your site, in order to do that they need to pay $15/month via a subscription service. (all already part of foxycart.)
Leave foxycart in development mode until one of your bands purchases a subscription. At that point you have the $15/month covered. Take no extra % of the song sales. Just enough to cover the transaction fees.
Then build your site so that it has lots of fans who like to use it and sometimes buy songs. As long as the bands are selling enough to keep them paying the subscription fees for the month, then they are happy.
You can still offer the "sell your songs" option from your site.
And the bonus for you comes when you have 2 bands (or more perhaps...) that think your site is worth the investment of a subscription.
If $15/month is too much for the bands to pay to justify selling their songs on your site, then either the band doesn't think its songs are good enough to sell, or the band thinks your site doesn't have enough traffic to make a sale.
Either way that puts the onus back on you to increase the number and quality of the traffic to your site.
You're no better than the politicians - feeding us with all the words we want to hear then when you get what you want you pull the carpet from under our feet.
I do not possess your knowledge of figuring it all out & implementing your advice. I bought into JR4 because one did not require rocket science to use it.
Anyway, just as politicians, you are avoiding the point that this levy has been placed upon us with a gun to our head as a take it or leave it option, which, is no option at all.
I am bitter about it & bitter over your lack of social skills & understanding as I presumed you are 'developers' & we mere 'folk'.
Enough said as I can see none of you so far has shown any signs of 'helping'.
Foxycart wants payment for it's use & if we don't want to use it (only because of it's fee) then shut your site down.
Thank You..... Sleep well:-)
Joined: 20 Aug 2003
Posts: 5341
Location: Nottingham, UK
Posted: 08/02/13 05:17
Kim
Sorry that you are disappointed with the FoxyCart PP solution. It is something that has been discussed at length on the forums over the past months and we have always been upfront with our reasons for choosing it. I do believe that a third party developer will jump in with a dedicated PP module but in the meantime this thread is hopefully a discussion about an interim solution that we may be able to come up with.
Hope this helps
Pa
Joined: 09 Jul 2003
Posts: 37583
Location: Seattle, WA
Posted: 08/02/13 07:08
Kim:
Would you like to pay our foxycart fee of $15 every month?
I hear where you are coming from - I definitely do. Please don't think we don't care - we actually really do, and take feedback "to heart".
I'm going to step outside of my normal "Jamroom Brian" mode for a minute - please bear with me as this is my personal opinion (and a long post) - but it's one that is based on years of successfully selling and supporting various projects online. I want to offer some advice - you're free to take or leave it.
First up - the old saying "it takes money to make money" is true. If you want to be a successful business, but are not prepared to lay down $15 per month, then you've already lost the game. $15 is a tiny amount. You have to ask yourself - do I want to be successful? How much am I willing to spend to give myself the best shot at being successful? I see these posts over and over again about how the $25 a month hosting account is "just way too much and killing my business". I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but if $15 per month causes you to shutter your business - you do not have a business - you have a hobby.
Now there's nothing wrong with a hobby - in fact I personally think running a site has a hobby is a great way to go - when you try to run it as a business it will often rub your users the wrong way as you try to monetize them and you will kill any momentum you might have had to start with.
So here's my recommendation if you want to build a successful online business:
Figure out how much you are willing to lose before you start. If this is not in the tens of thousands of dollars (US) then I am going to suggest sticking with the hobby idea. It takes A LOT of money to build a real business - do you think Amazon would have let a $15 a month charge shutter them?
Buy VERY GOOD hosting. If you are spending less that $25 per month on hosting, you're hosting ios probably not up to it. You get what you pay for with hosting for sure.
Prepare to spend several hundred dollars per month (minimum) with Adwords advertising. Understand your audience and what they are looking for.
A successful business will not "run itself" - if you have read otherwise on the internet that you can "make thousands a day with no work" they are lying. There's no free passes in life, and running a business is hard work, on a daily basis.
Be prepared to LOSE ALL THE MONEY you had for your business and to fail. If you're not prepared to lose all your money and fail, again there is no shame in having a hobby instead of a business.
So when you tell me that $15 a month caused you to shutter your business, again I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you don't have a business - you have a hobby and need to treat it as such:
- ask your users for donations to keep the site running.
- Let them know you are running the site out of your own pocket.
- Let them know that if you can just get 5 users willing to spend $5 per month for a subscription you can keep the site open for them. If you can't get 5 people to give you $5 per month, and are not willing to fork it over out of your own pocket, shut down - it's not worth it.
The important thing here is that there is a different mindset between you and your users when you run your site as a business versus running your site as a hobby:
- in a business your customers expect things to be setup as they need, and for you to cover your costs however you need - how you do it that is not their concern. If you can't cover it or make it work, they will move on. Imagine walking into your corner store and they tell you they had to shut down since they couldn't pay the $15 per month (and it is much higher than that) Loomis charges to come pick up their cash. The cost of doing business is hidden from your customers since they don't care.
- with a hobby, you can be very transparent about running your site. You can openly let your users know how much it costs to do things, make appeals for help, etc. For most sites this is the way to go as you get very quick validation if your idea is a good idea. If none of your users are willing to help, then the service you are offering isn't worth it to them - it's that simple.
I know this is all stuff you have probably heard before, and if you disagree that's OK - I know there are going to be JR customers that are mad about the FoxyCart setup regardless of the benefits, and are going to insist that they are running a "real" business where this is going to break them, but my personal opinion is going to disagree with that 100%.
What I'm looking into right now is the first scenario in this thread - a buy it now button for those hobby sites that would like to allow their users to sell stuff from their profile, but the decision to use FoxyCart was the right decision for Jamroom and Jamroom's future - I would do it 100% exactly the same if we had to do it again.
There is also another scenario, revert to JR4.
In my business experience…..
When you do not address the customers requirements - you invariably loose the customer
