Friday, September 26, 2008

Tipjoy: "now you can!" (sell digital content)

We've found ourselves having to explain the differences between PayPal and Tipjoy several times in the last few days. Obviously we need to be clearer. How's this:


Tipjoy...
...lets you keep more of your earnings for yourself. We aggregate
payments and take a small fee, and so you get to keep a lot more of
your money when you sell through Tipjoy than if you sell through
PayPal.
...provides a much better experience for your customers. Buying with
Tipjoy is one click and doesn't take your customers away from your
page, unlike PayPal's 9+ click process which takes your users away
from your site.
...encourages your customers to share your content with their
friends, through feeds to social networks like Twitter and FriendFeed,
RSS feeds, and emails.


Here are some more details on PayPal's fee structure vs. Tipjoy's:
PayPal takes 2.9% of your earnings, plus $0.30.

The reason PayPal is structured like this is that it is designed for
selling very expensive goods, like cars, jewelery, and vintage toys.
If you want to sell a $500 necklace, you get to keep $485.20, or 97%
of your earnings. That's great!

But you can't charge $500 for MP3s, blog posts, and virtual roses.
Probably you're going to charge some amount between 1 and 99 cents.
And for that, PayPal really doesn't meet your needs. For example, if
you earn $2 with PayPal, you have to pay them $.36. You only get to
keep $1.64. That's only 82% of your total earnings.

Tipjoy is designed to sell virtual goods. Goods which cost how ever
little (or much) you want.

At Tipjoy, we do payment aggregation. Which basically just means that
people say they're going to buy a bunch of stuff from all sorts of
different merchants, and then they pay for it all at once, in a single
transaction. By grouping the payments together, the fees are divided
across a much larger amount of money, and each merchant's individual
fees get much smaller. So much smaller, that even with our 3%
commission, you still keep more of your money with Tipjoy than with
PayPal. The larger people's bill is when they pay it, the smaller
your fees are. Currently, the typical Tipjoy bill amount is $5. This
means that when you take $2 out of your Tipjoy account, you can expect
to actually keep 86.5% of it, or $1.73. And it only gets better from
there: as people buy more with Tipjoy, and their bills get closer to
$10, you'll get to keep 89.5% of your $2. When they're closer to $20,
you'll get to keep 91.4%.


Make great content and sell it for cheap. Make it easy for your
customers to buy. Make it fun and social. With Tipjoy, now you can.

2 Comments:

At September 26, 2008 at 7:10 AM , Blogger Ivan said...

Overhead we can believe in

 
At December 8, 2008 at 10:48 AM , Blogger fewill said...

When I first saw this service I liked it because it had a voluntary component to it that made it unique. In other words, I could consume the blog entry and it it was meaningful for me, I could let the author know with a tip (a monetary message of appreciation).

Hopefully this monetary message will encourage additional meaningful blog entries.

Could the value of these monetary messages exceed earnings for a blogger from revenues from other sources (e.g. advertising)? What would that mean for the web?

 

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