rorygibson's comments

Most editors have a plugin for "paredit" mode that auto-balances the parens for you.

(And code with 50 nested levels of parens is Bad Code, just like too much nesting in a C-like language)

Might as well jump in here - founder of Trolley [1] which lets you put a payment button on any website, which triggers a Stripe-powered shopping popup.

[1] - https://trolley.link

Hi hjek

I haven't put much active thought into the licensing of the Trolley widget JavaScript code... I'm keen to understand what you're looking for, and why the tag being Free Software is important in this case. Happy to chat - maybe drop me a line at [email protected] ?

You're quite right. We're working on a demo setup :)

FYI though - yes, you can choose whether to collect billing & shipping info at a per-product level.

The buyer and seller both get notified by email (and if you have the Stripe app as a seller, you'll get a push notif). The charge gets fully logged in the seller's Stripe account, with all metadata (so if you ever disconnect Trolley you don't lose anything about your customers)

Absolutely. PayPal's user experience is usually (though not exclusively) offsite though. Trolley gives you a Stripe Checkout-powered on-site checkout.

Right now, Trolley seems to appeal to people who want to do business with Stripe instead of PayPal.

In the future we may well add PayPal as a payment backend in between rolling out our added value like digital downloads, subscriptions and the other cool stuff we're planning :)

Hi galaxyLogic Right now we don't have download purchases, but for this use case (for a small startup or a bootstrapped company) I'd do it by taking payment and then emailing someone a license key. For low volumes it's totally achievable.

Drop me a line on [email protected] if you'd like to talk further, I'm interested to see what your project is, and how I can help.

Thanks for the feedback ksahin We'll be looking at digital downloads soon!

Thanks - that's good and well-reasoned advice.

I'm iterating rapidly on the idea - and in particular I'm happy to talk to customers about pricing plans that aren't currently listed on the landing page (if that means fixed fee and no transaction cost then that's doable)

tbh I'm not sure that Stripe appeals to the most cost-conscious entrepreneurs, and right now I am targeting those who want to test ideas rapidly, and who are likely to then find time / money to build out their own integration (which will mean I have a high degree of churn if I don't adapt. That's fine, it's all learning!

Again - thanks for all the time you've spent replying. Good luck with your project(s) too :)

Hi laurentl That is an excellent question - in fact it's exactly the one I'm trying to answer with this MVP of Trolley :)

Right now I've "launched" on HN and IndieHackers only, and I'm focussing on software, lean-startup folks to gather feedback.

Next up will be questions around digital downloads ("information products" and other things), so I'll need to engage more with those communities. I don't believe they're well served by Etsy, though they do have alternatives.

Right now it's all about learning where our product and markets best align - and the feedback I'm getting here today is enormously valuable. Thanks!

ClojureScript uses the Google Closure compiler under the hood.

From a quick dig around, looking at the Closure changelog, they introduced a polyfill of their own; I'm guessing this went in after CLJS built one, so now there are 2 in the compile / transpile chain.

One of the consequences of nothing in life being simple any more!

:)

Working on it :)

Hi Yes, we're looking at Braintree and Adyen for the future, but for MVP Stripe was by far the easiest starting point.

Thanks!

Hi Thanks for the feedback.

Inserting a button is part of what Trolley does.

But really what it's doing is stopping you having to build / host the back end server and code that handles the tokenised payment exchange for Stripe (Stripe - and all other similar payment processors require there to be some non-front end code to handle secure token exchange)

So I'm hoping that 2% works out better than managing a server and potentially hiring a developer to build you some code if you can't write it yourself :)

I'm still feeling out prices... 2% was the starting point because it's in line with services that sort-of compete (Celery, SnipCart and so on)

Totally take your points about digital asset delivery - it's on the backlog.

Thanks again!

Hi Trolley is essentially a front-end to Stripe (in Stripe terms we're a Platform working with Standard account).

That means that it works where Stripe works, and the money flows to your bank account through Stripe.

https://stripe.com/gb/payments

(Trolley never sees your card details or touches your money; the only pieces of Personal Information we ever see are email addresses and shipping names & addresses.)

What Trolley adds on top of Stripe is that we handle the integration code for you so you don't need a server or to pay for a back end developer, and we make it super easy to put a payment button on any website that triggers the whole process :-)

Hi @justkez

Definitely, yes. Right now we're focussing on making Trolley as lightweight and easy to get started as possible, before pulling in more features.

I'm really interested in your feedback on how Trolley stacks up against its' competitors; if you had some time to drop me a line on [email protected] I'd love to talk to you in more detail.

Our pricing is also MVP so if you think there's something I'd have to do there to win business from you (or people in your position) then I'm keen to understand that too. I'm already aware of use cases like agencies building sites for their clients that might need an alternate pricing model :-)

Checkout is great - but it'not enough to sell online on its own (I think my comment above that explains this posted just after yours, so you may not have seen it :-)

Trolley requires and uses Stripe Checkout, but it's there to make it easier and faster to sell - especially if you want a static HTML site - than checkout alone.

Hey,

Trolley actually uses Checkout in the UI, so we don't compete directly.

What Trolley gives you is - you don't need a server!

If you use Checkout yourself, adding the widget to your front end is really easy - but you also need to provide some code in the backend that processes your form submission and then does the token exchange with Stripe to actually make the charge on the customer's account.

That means you either need to be on some kind of all-in-one e-commerce suite, use WordPress and some plugins (and either host it yourself or pay someone to) or build and run some infrastructure of your own (heroku, DO, EC2, maybe FaaS if that's your thing)

Think of Trolley as a Stripe backend-as-a-service with a useful UI feature :-)

(I'm already looking at digital downloads as a feature, too :-)

That's a good suggestion, thank you!