Chec(kout) - Sell anything, anywhere. A platform for longtail ecommerce. (opens in new tab)

Underwriting merchants and get verified by Visa/MasterCard as a payment service provider is a bitch. Aggregating credit cards is a heavily regulated area - but most of these sites are unaware of this issue.

We initially started on Stripe, and got told what we were doing was unregulated/not allowed on stripe, so we then grabbed a coffee with them and learnt about this process.

In fact I was grabbing coffee with Sahil (Gumroad) a few months ago and they've just run into this issue themselves - which they are starting to solve. so you'll probably notice them asking you for more information to underwrite you, unless they find a way around this.

That's also why we ask users to go through an activate process.

Then all the billing/charging services came along. Recurly, Chargify, Spreedly, CheddarGetter, etc. These made billing and charging your own customers easier. They never really handled "products" but I think they paved the way a bit by showing that having easy APIs is important.

Now you have services like Stripe. So, you can do recurring billing and individual charges. You can let your customers setup their own accounts (via Stripe Connect) but still keep the business logic in your app. This also takes care of the disbursements/payout issue and puts the onus of chargebacks on the user. The API is easy. PCI compliance is not as much of a problem. Transaction fees are in line with PayPal (but our BrainTree fees are lower). You can build a tool like this, a marketplace like Etsy, a crowdfunding site, etc. ... If you look through Stripe posts on HN, the biggest gripe is always international payments. I built www.bngal.com because it was easy and fun.

It will be interesting to see what's next ... possibly integration with in-person payment systems (like Square) or maybe cardless payments (linked to bank account?).

I started working on Chec in late 2010/early 2011, before groad launched. (https://www.facebook.com/checkoutbyswipe, if you wanna trace down to the day that page was setup) - It's a long story between then and today.

Short Version - University in England -> AngelPad Incubator -> Raised large seed -> Founder Split -> Had to rebuild new company.

We're a platform for long tail merchants. So for example - you'd sell the psd your not going to use in your app on gumroad, but you'd sell the final app through chec. - if that helps. - we also only charge 3.5% and can do a lot more with downloads + handle physical products.

We position ourselves between Gumroad & Shopify (if they did payments).

on a side note - me and sahil know each other well. Back in april 2011 when Chec was called Kout I actually reached out to him to join Kout after he launch groad on hackernews. He said "you've already built the software why do you need me" but we've kept in touch and occasionally get coffee and discuss the space.

Link based selling has been around for years. 2checkout, 1shoppingcart, paypal, ejunkie, quixly etc have been at it for a while. I came up with the idea for Chec after i ended up throwing a PayPal checkout in an iframe for a info product i was selling.

P.S - if anybody is wondering about the 2 year gap between launching - that story will come to light shortly.

Also, ampersands are common in company names. (Procter & Gamble, etc)

In the future, we plan on adding widgets that will work within our application that will cater to some of the cases you pointed out. Some of these widgets will include date/time charging (tutor offering hours/days of work) and subscription based charging (SaaS service you mentioned). Of course, we're not limited to just that.

As for the PSD, we host the file for you so all you need to do is upload the PSD and after the checkout process, the buyer can immediately download it.

For now, you can view the video under the "Beautiful Checkout" section on the main page. It will show you a sample page and flow of the checkout.

But we've got a lot to do here.