podingx

thanks! but the saas business isn't this site. more of a personal project i've been tinkering with.

Slow and steady growth through organic search + WOM. Haven't tried ads yet. Growing at $100-150 additional per month.

Crowdfunding / pre-orders is definitely part of the expected business process for HW startups to launch these days.

As the first pre-order platform, Celery has powered successes like Pebble and Boosted Boards and helped them get to the next stage of their business.

The transformation over the past few years has been unreal and today is such an exciting time to be a HW startup. We personally can't wait to see what kinds of HW companies emerge next.

Selling swag via crowdfunding is cool, but I’m surprised not more people are doing equity crowdfunding (or at least it's not as well publicized).

Given how much PR is done around big fundraising events, you would think that tech news sites would be all over any potentially hot startup closing a decent round on AngelList or FundersClub.

The checkout can be added to any page that allows you insert your own HTML/JS.

They could, but selling online is more than just collecting payments. There's order management, CRM, analytics, etc, which I think bring a lot of value to a seller.

Most sellers don't have the time or resources to pull all of that off in addition to having to focus on sales & marketing and product development.

All the sensitive card information is stored with Stripe

No connection. Just happen to have the same name.

Glad I could help. Feel free to shoot me an email (in my HN profile) if you have any specific questions.

Stripe handles this really well. We've been using them to power the payments piece for trycelery.com. No big gotchas so far based on my experience. If you wait too long to charge, you may run into an expired credit card.

I'd say the most important thing is to clearly communicate shipping/fulfillment timing to your customers, so they know what to expect.

Point noted and we'll be fixing this. Thanks for the input.

Thanks for the questions. We're working to update the FAQ and site to make all of this more clear. My personal belief is that there's more to commerce than just payments (order management, inventory management, analytics, supporting web and native mobile/tablet apps, etc). It may look simple now, but these are the types of challenges we're in the process of tackling.

75% of Kickstarter funded campaigns don't ship on time (research by Ethan Mollick from UPenn). Since my money is committed, I'm not sure if that gives me comfort either :)

Personally, I feel better knowing that I won't be charged at all until the item is shipped. And in the worst case, I would request a refund or issue a chargeback if I felt the seller was being "sketchy".

You could do it yourself, but there's a lot of people who don't have the technical knowledge to do so. This is my understanding from speaking with independent makers and builders (e.g., Kickstarter grads) over the past year. Payments is only one part of commerce. Our mission is to package everything together (order management, analytics, a commerce API, etc).

In the case of pre-ordering, Celery doesn't make any authorizations/holds upon the creation of the order. We use Stripe to make sure the card is valid and the charge is processed at a later time.

Celery does not store the credit cards and all payment information transferred is encrypted with SSL. The cards are held within Stripe's vault. Each seller uses their own Stripe token.

The chargebacks would affect the seller, since the payments are linked to their Stripe account. It's important that seller is able to actually ship the item if they decide to charge the buyer. Otherwise, they would need to refund or risk getting hit with chargebacks.

We're working with Boosted Boards to help them with their pre-orders: https://www.trycelery.com/p/boosted

Celery is our play on words (sellery), since we're trying to help sellers with e-commerce

Hey Chris, I'm one of the guys who worked on it. The company name is under Airbrite. We built an e-commerce API and Celery is powered off of it.

awesome!