I don't see us competing with Stripe. If you're a developer and have the time to write and maintain a payment solution around Stripe, then Forge definitely isn't for you.
We're going after the people who don't want to code all of that themselves and just want to sell something and get money deposited into their bank account.
That's certainly a valid point. We're trying to convey that you're forging a lasting online business and doing the hard work to be independent from a corporate job.
If the name turns out to be losing us business, then we'll have to address it.
Absolutely. If you're doing enough business, that 2% really adds up. At that point, it is financially worth it for you to build your own backend payment solution using Stripe or Balanced to save money.
But when you're first starting out selling something, it's a huge capital investment to build that payment processing code on top of Stripe/Balanced, likely $5,000+ if you do it right. We're trying to make it as easy as possible to get started.
You are correct. We are more expensive than Stripe if you're just looking at money.
But we look at it from a time and capital perspective. With Stripe, you have to code and maintain your own payment solution on the backend and your own checkout form. You also have to worry about a million other things like emailing your customers when they place an order, and handling refunds. If you don't have the coding skills to build that yourself, you have to hire an expensive developer to build and maintain that for you.
If that extra 2% cost savings is worth it to endure the hassle above, then Forge isn't for you. We're aiming at people who don't want to deal with all that and would rather concentrate on growing their business doing things like launching a new product and marketing their current ones.
Those are both great questions. We're aiming Forge at people who cannot write their own backend payment processor to use Stripe, and only know basic HTML. If you have the skills and the time to code and maintain payment processing and a checkout form, then Forge isn't for you. We're aiming it at non-techies who want to sell something online.
PayPal certainly has its advantages, but we're trying to solve two main problems: the checkout experience and the withdrawing of funds. The checkout experience on PayPal has 5 or 6 steps and redirects you away from the merchant's site to complete a payment. Ours is on one page and is embedded directly in the merchant's site. Click "buy product", checkout form pops down, fill out 6 or so fields and click "buy now." Done.
Also, we automatically deposit your profits into your bank account every Friday. Our goal is to get this down to the next-day. You sell something Tuesday morning, ship it Tuesday afternoon, and the money is in your bank account on Wednesday morning.
I didn't mean that programmers and "people who barely understand HTML" were the same person. Sorry for the confusion.
We're aiming Forge at people who can't code their own website from scratch, not really you or me. These non-techies can manage a Wordpress install or a Squarespace site, and just want to sell something online.
I think that selling online shouldn't be about the logistics of running a website and handling payments. It's more of a product and marketing problem. Forge takes away some (but not all) of the technical hurdles of selling things online.
We're aiming to solve the problems of the non-techie market. People who just want to sell something online shouldn't be worrying about payment gateways, payment processors or designing a checkout process. Forge handles that.
With Stripe, it's fairly easy for a programmer to write their own payment processing backend and build a checkout process for it. We're not trying to serve the people that have the development skills to use Stripe. We're going after the people who use PayPal Buy Now buttons.
I don't think filling in a form online will ever be glamorous. The thing I strive for when designing a form is that it is usable by anyone and instantly recognizable as a form.
This is a great plugin, but consider the consequences of using non-browser-default form elements and the potential to confuse your less technical customers.