Stripe is an awesome way to take payments for virtual and physical goods. For anyone tired of having to run all payments through PayPal, it’s a breath of fresh air that makes payment processing easy and cheap. However, the service doesn’t offer an easy way to sell your products to customers. And while you can always code your own web store that works with Stripe, this takes time and money that could be used towards developing the product that you’re planning to sell.
If you find yourself in a situation like I’ve written above, you’re probably a perfect candidate for Spacebox: a product manager and payment acceptor that works with Stripe. It’s one of the simplest ways to sell your products — digital and physical alike — online.
What Does Spacebox Do?
This is an example of a standard Spacebox Space being used to sell a piece of software.
In a nutshell, Spacebox makes small webpages that allow you to sell products using Stripe’s payment service. These websites take the purchaser’s address, phone number, and any other information you’d like to request from said purchaser. You can even add photos to the listing to ensure your buyer understands what they’re purchasing. These listings, in Spacebox terms, are called “Spaces”. You can share your Spaces with friends and customers so they can buy your product. After someone purchases something from your Space, they’ll be returned to your website or other return site.
Beyond just helping you sell products, Spacebox also allows sellers to track their sales and refunds. Spacebox lets you track sales that come from both your Spaces and via your Virtual Terminals. Virtual Terminal sales are sales made using a USB credit card scanner, and require a Spacebox Pro or Platinum plan (more on that later) to use. You can view your sales and refunds per day, month, and week. If you’re a Google Analytics fanatic, you can take advantage of Analytics integration to easily track the statistics of your Spaces.
If you already have your own website and would like to use Spacebox to sell your products, you’re in luck! Spacebox offers an embed features that beautifully integrates with any existing webpage. The widget is compact yet it still allows buyers to make quick and easy purchases using their credit card. Installing the widget is simple as well as you just have to embed a few lines of HTML. It also looks very similar to a full-sized Space that is good for consistency’s sake .
Creating A Space With Spacebox
This is a snapshot of the Spacebox backend whilst creating a new Space.
Creating a Spacebox is surprisingly simple. First, you’ll have to sign up for a free Spacebox account and link your Stripe account to it. Once linked, return to your Spacebox dashboard and click on the Add Space button that is located towards the left-hand side of the window. You’ll now be prompted to fill in all of the required information to make a new Space. For instance, you have to name, price, and describe the product.
If you click into the Products tab, you can easily add different products to your Spacebox. This is useful for when you may want to sell different sizes of a product. For instance, if I was selling coffee beans, I could make separate product selections for a pound of beans and a half pound of beans and price them accordingly.
The Data tab allows you to request optional and required information from your customers. For instance, you can add required fields for an email address and a street address, but an optional field for a phone number. You can also specify which characters can be used in each field. For instance, I would set the phone number field to numbers only while I would set the street address to general text. There is also a separate selection for email addresses and alphanumerical symbols.
Once you’ve started selling more products on Spacebox, you can track your sales from the Payments tab. You can see how many sales you’ve generated as well as how much income you’ve made per day and week as well as the entirety of your Spacebox’s life.
Fees & Premium Spacebox Accounts
Once you start using Spacebox on a more regular basis, you may want to upgrade to either a Pro, Premium, or Platinum plan. All of these plans add different features to your account that allow you to sell different types of products. For instance, the Pro plan is the first tier of the Spacebox’s paid plans. This plan adds features that include the ability to both manually charge credit and debit cards as well as use a USB credit card scanner to charge them. Pro also lets you create an unlimited amount of “One-Time” payment Spaces while free accounts only give users two Spaces. When you upgrade to a Pro account, Spacebox will bill you monthly for 1% of each transaction made.
Premium is the next step above Pro. Premium members get all of the features included with Pro but also allows users to sell digital items from “One-Time” payment spaces. This helpful if you plan on selling music, eBooks, software, or other digital goods using a Spacebox Space. Subscribing to Spacebox’s Premium will run you $12 per month and 1% per transaction.
Platinum is the absolute best Spacebox account that is currently being offered. Platinum users get all of the features included with the Pro and Premium accounts but allows Spacebox users to create an unlimited number of Recurring payments. This helpful for those who want to make a digital magazine or similar service and collect payments monthly via Spacebox. Spacebox Platinum will run you $29 per month as well as 1% per transaction.
Conclusion
All in all, I think Spacebox is a great way to accept payments for products quickly and easily. Personally, I love how easy it is to create clean product pages with tons of detail and information collection without writing a single line of code. Once created, you can easily shoot your Spacebox links out to your Twitter and App.net followers to take easy payments for anything from coffee beans to audio files.
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