By - Seth Fiegerman
Category - Lube Stickers
Posted By - http://tinyurl.com/LubeStickers
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| Lube Stickers |
Several startups
have launched in the past year with the goal of helping businesses and
individual sellers process payments on social networks like Facebook and
Twitter. Now, one startup is going a step further by creating the first
streamlined solution for payments across these and other social
platforms.
Ribbon, a payments service, came out of stealth in November and
unveiled a tool that lets sellers create a special link to a one-page
checkout that can be copy and pasted directly into the Twitter news
feed. Any Twitter user interested in purchasing the item can preview a
description and video of it in the tweet and then click on the link to
make the purchase. Ribbon handles the rest, including processing the
payment for the seller and e-mailing a receipt to the customer.
On Tuesday, Ribbon introduced a similar option for processing
payments in the Facebook news feed. As with the Twitter option, sellers
just paste the Ribbon link into a Facebook post and it will direct
customers straight to the checkout page where they can purchase the item
with one click The startup plans to roll out this feature for YouTube
next and hopes to expand it to other social networks like Pinterest in
the future.
The big selling point for Ribbon's service is that sellers can copy
and paste the same link into posts on any of these social networks and
it will automatically customize the checkout experience.
"The idea is to make buying and selling frictionless so that it
happens on whatever platform the user is already on, rather than pushing
him somewhere else and losing him," Hany Rashwan, Ribbon's co-founder
and CEO, told Mashable. "All you do as a seller is just copy and paste."
Since the service launched publicly last year, Hany says it has
attracted sellers ranging from musicians selling songs and tickets to
Etsy and Craigslist users selling physical goods. While Hany says his
company isn't directly competing against these websites, he admits that
part of the goal of Ribbon is to "cut your middle man out and sell
directly to your fans and followers through your own channels."
Ribbon, as it exists today, is a bit different than the original plan
Hany had for the company. When Hany was first accepted into the
AngelPad startup accelerator program in the fall of 2011, the goal was
to build a "simpler version of Shopify," an ecommerce platform that lets
users create their own online stores. After a few months, though, Hany
and his team shifted to focus on the problem that others like Soldsie
and Chirpify have attempted to solve: how to monetize your following on
various websites. As Hany puts it, "The problem is I've cultivated an
online following on Twitter, or on my own website, but I'm not empowered
to monetize my own users."
Ribbon announced this week that it has raised a $1.6 million seed
round led by Draper Associates to solve that problem. This is on top of
the $120,000 that Ribbon raised through AngelPad.
The startup generates revenue by taking a 5% cut of every purchase and charging a $0.30 fee per transaction.
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