Stripe: Relay

[efuquen]

We've been looking at a few other players to do exactly this, i.e. TwoTaps (https://twotap.com/) and Cosmic Cart (https://cosmiccart.com/). The big problem we've seen is:

1) Having pricing and inventory data keep up to date.

2) Reliability and speed, TwoTaps has robots that fill in an order on retailers sites and checkout is slow as a result. Aside from the ugliness of it, I'm sure a lot of retailers don't like this process or necessarily are approving it.

3) Lack of wide number of retailers. Cosmic Cart does direct integration but the the numbers of partners they have right now is severely limited, Target being the big one.

Getting these direct partnerships integrations is hard, but to make this really compelling you really want a wide range of retailers. It will be interesting to see if Stripe, with the relationships it already has, will be able to do a better job of this and getting retailers to buy into losing the control of the full shopping experience.

[spolu]

Very thoughtful analysis! (Stripe engineer working on Relay here)

Getting retailers on-board is definitely core to the success of Relay. As announced today Saks and the SAP Hybris platform are live on Relay and we're working with numerous other retailers as we speak.

For apps, getting retailers to sell on their platform is a huge pain (custom integration to their APIs and payment systems) convincing them to do so. For retailers as well it's a pain. They have to create technical integrations with as many channel out there. That's why we think Relay make sense. We help both side of the equation.

Also, the relationship between a retailer and a channel app in Relay is opt-in today. This is literally a Stripe Connect (think OAuth) connection. But once a channel is onboard, it's nothing more than clicking a button for a Relay retailer to start selling there.

Also I wouldn't say they are losing control on the full shopping experience, they're merely enabling a better one on mobile. When you think of the shopping experience, a lot happen after the purchase (support, shipping, loyalty) as well and I think there are new experiences to create there, especially once the customer receive the receipt from the retailer.

[sradu]

Founder of Two Tap here. It takes an average of three minutes to send the order to the retailer via our platform. On the frontend we use a similar model to Amazon where tell the shopper we're confirming her purchase and handle the process in the background. It's working great for Amazon, and it works great for us for a thousand merchants.

Retailers are incredibly happy by the fact that they don't have to do a complicated integration where they have to maintain a new piece of infrastructure for potentially getting less than 1% of their orders.

That being said, we're huge fans of Stripe. Always have been. John Collison was our mentor during YC. We're looking forward to seeing how they handle the challenges in the space.

[razvanr]

Also founder of Two Tap here. Just to clarify on the above:

1. Pricing and inventory are realtime with Two Tap -- taken live from the merchant site when a shopping session is started. If only a size S is available on the merchant site then that's what we make available for shoppers in our carts. Merchants don't have to do any integration or manage this process.

2. Reliability has been a non problem for a while, we have a guarantee that we don't lose orders. And the process to confirm orders is async like Amazon -- step 1: we've received your order; step 2: your order is confirmed.

3. Two Tap supports over 1000 retailer integrations.

Thanks for looking into the space!

[jodah]

Agree that the challenge is in obtaining partnerships, but not every retailer needs full control of the shopping experience, especially on mobile. And that's the win - alleviating the need for every retailer to solve the same technical problem.

[agency]

Somewhat unfortunately name conflict with https://facebook.github.io/relay/

[arasmussen]

At first glance I thought this was going to be a blog post about Stripe using Facebook's Relay internally...

[elsurudo]

Meh, there are only so many words. The two things are in quite different segments, so it should be fine.

[dublinben]

The animations on this page were not well tested. They run at about 0.5 fps in Firefox, but are completely smooth in Chrome.

[interdrift]

Firefox here. Awful lag.

[acjohnson55]

Experienced the same thing. Nearly had to kill my browser to unfreeze it, but fortunately I eventually got a Cmd+[ in there to get out.

[cuonic]

Amazingly slow, all page movement lags, even closing the tab requires some patience.

[ryanSrich]

People use other browsers than Chrome?

Kidding - but in all seriousness it's very hard to test in FireFox. I constantly find that things run super smooth in Chrome and then I test in FireFox and everything dies.

[nathancahill]

As another data point, FF Dev Edition averages 52fps. FF 40 is much worse at 40fps.

[steeve]

super slow here in chrome :(

[BinaryIdiot]

Blog post: https://stripe.com/blog/relay

This is interesting. How does this work with Apple not allowing purchases unless they go through them?

Edit: deleted the part where I confused square for stripe. My bad =/

[spolu]

Hi! Stripe engineer here. On Apple apps, if you're integrating Relay, you're encouraged to use Apple Pay for seamless transactions! Apple is perfectly fine with that if this is not an in-app virtual good purchase.

Also as pointed earlier Patrick (pc on HN) != Twitter CEO :)

[callumprentice]

Forgive my stupidity but can someone explain why this is so neat?

I see examples that appear to be a links from a Tweet to a product buying page. Is that what's new?

I'm obviously missing something or maybe just not clever enough to get it... Thanks in advance.

[awfycooper]

If you view this tweet: https://twitter.com/WarbyParker/status/643472513297682432

You should see a buy button within the tweet itself allowing you to buy the product directly from the tweet.

[tomasien]

The amazing thing about this to me is realizing how massively undervalued Stripe is if things like Relay are actually successful. The networks effects created by Relay would be massive.

[pbreit]

"Massively undervalued" at $5b?

Stuff like this generally doesn't work because shoppers are less comfortable this far out of context. But I would never bet against Stripe.

[callmeed]

This is pretty cool (I'm working on an ecommerce app now). What I'm not clear on is this:

Can apps selling relay products get a cut of the sale?

What incentive is there for a "product discovery app" (or whatever) to sell other products? Can they define some sort of fee %?

UPDATE: Chatted with Stripe on IRC and they clarified that there's currently no way to share sales revenue or let apps define a % commission.

[spolu]

(Stripe Engineer working on Relay here)

Indeed there is no way to do so at the moment. But we have that on our radar and we'd like to construct something that makes sense for apps and sellers.

Some questions related to that: How would you see it working? Isn't ads the new affiliation in the app world?

[psadri]

I believe Two Tap can work with existing affiliate links.

[enos_feedler]

I was looking for this in the API but couldn't find it.

[sharoonthomas]

Does not seem like this works off the box. One of our customers tweeted with a stipe buyable product link [1] (from stripe relay) and the buy buttons are not there on twitter.

Support from stripe on this has not been great either with one of their support staff confirming and the other asking us to write to twitter about it.

Has anyone else had success with buyable tweets and stripe relay ?

[1] https://twitter.com/lienielsen/status/646708462043402240

[noahr]

What's the difference between Relay and the Enterprise version of Shopify?

[spolu]

(Hi Stripe Engineer here)

Relay is a way for merchants to route products to channels. We certainly don't want to replace Shopify (with whom we're pretty close) but just give merchants an easy way to expose product information to apps and accepts orders directly from there. In particular, Relay will not provide you with store front, or complex shipping and taxes calculations and integrations.

Ideally Relay should work seamlessly with Shopify, and Shopify users should be able to start selling on Twitter and other apps directly from Shopify through Relay without even necessarily hearing the name Relay (as it is ~the case with their payments currently processed by us)

[function_seven]

tomasien: For some reason your comment is being marked as a [dupe], even though it's the only one of yours in this thread. There's another deleted thread[1]. What's going on here?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10216136

[tomasien]

I started a thread on this the same time this thread started. When I saw this one rising to the top I deleted it - I thought duplicate submissions were supposed to get merged in automatically and counted as upvotes instead of separate threads but I guess that didn't happen. I copied my comment from there to here.

[sctb]

We unkilled the comment in this thread.

[spolu]

Feel free to repost your comment here!

[williwu]

We've made an mobile shop on iOS with integration to Shopify. We are planning to open source it once we release our own shop. Let me know if anyone is interested in trying it out.