We went through a pretty messy founder split which will probably come to light in full later on.
in short.
Chec's the original - you can probably tell by how consistant our product is compared. The old cofounder ran off with the corporation and didnt follow through on his agreement to transfer the assets over, after i was asked to stand down and incorporate a new entity - so i had to rebuild the company from the old room back in england.
And the way tailoring works is. We detect were the user clicked the link from (using the headers) then tailor the landing page to leverage that source.
I.e. clicked via FB? Let try and use fb connect to prepopulate the checkout, provide an incentive to share this page if they're influential. etc..
Inline Social Payments on Facebook (checkouts in customers newsfeeds)
Social Deals - Based on influence or demographics
And a powerful merchant backend.
as well as a few smaller features around.
Groad is primarily built to deal with digital files, we can handle any type of good.
and that's just in v1. we've got a lot to do, and you'll see us differentiate more in the future.
It might be easier to give the stories behind the idea to help.
So, i created this initially for myself. As a teenager i had resale rights to a DVD info product, and made a couple thousand a month selling it.
I hated the checkout process of 2checkout, 1shoppingcart, ejunkie, and others. So I ended up throwing a paypal checkout in an iframe and creating a post hook script to manage the order.
I wanted a simple, clean, yet powerful app to manage everything, so i made one. The first version of this was built in 2010.
I had one professional/full product to sell and i sold it in fairly high volume, and I didnt need a fully fledged store, i just had a single product to sell. Over time i created more and more minisites to sell different types of info products so i could have some passive income whilst i was at school.
Gumroads story
Sahil created an icon on photoshop that he wasnt going to use, but thought other people would find value in it so he wanted a service that let him sell his "value" to his followers (if that makes sense).
Gumroad allows people to sell their small snippets of value. (primarily digital).
Chec allows smaller merchants to start selling online who have no need for a front end store. Merchants like mmfixed.com etc..
Most of these sites will go down due to one big hurdle. Payments.
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.
Link based selling has been around for years. 2checkout, 1shoppingcart, ejunkie etc...
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 provide region specific shipping options for physical products, and will be doing tight integrations with UPS, Fedex, RoyalMail apis to help you with fulfilling physical items.
You can, I was just trying to get across the usage cases/types of products.
We've had one user crowd fund for a childs trustfund through us.
Dudes in europe selling rare coffee beans.
Contracts invoicing for their time through the platform.
The generic digital sales cds/ebooks/etc
We cover a wide spectrum of products.
We're trying to create a framework/platform for longtail ecommerce. Not just a platform for people who want to sell digital things they create.
There is definitely overlap between us and groad, but its not our primary focus, for certain things you want to sell its just quicker to sell via them, and thats cool.
Building Commerce.js - https://commercejs.com