Bookmark This! December 12, 2008 posted by Nigel

Tiny Checkout – very cool little online checkout service

tinycheckout small1 Tiny Checkout very cool little online checkout service

Tiny Checkout is a clever little solution to an old problem. How can you quickly set up a payment checkout for a small ticket item like an e-book, shareware program or music track or similar? Sure you can sign up for a full shopping cart service (expensive) or grab an open source script (cheap but complex) or even roll up your sleeves and create your own Paypal page if you’re geeky. But now there’s an even quicker way.

Just pop over to this service, enter in your Paypal email address, the name and price of the product and any post payment instructions and bingo, you’ve got yourself a nice little web link to your own hosted Paypal payment page. It’s totally basic, and yet totally useful.

I’m not hugely fond of the final landing page for the checkout because I think the developers have made the advert for the service too in your face (it should be a discrete advert at the bottom of *your* shopping cart checkout) but apart from that it’s got some real appeal and I can see it getting popular with kids selling all kinds of things. It’s even got a regular subscription option, which is a nice touch. Nice one.

Do you want to provide your customers with a short url for checkouts and payments? Use the form below to create easy and fast payment options…We ensure that your payments are secure, and will reach you. We provide an easy method for you to bill your customers. You can even use this system to post downloadable files, and make sure the only ones who see the URL are paying customers.

Tags: tiny+checkout, shopping+cart, ecommerce, paypal

About the Author:

Nigel is the managing editor of the Red Ferret, as well as a freelance columnist for the Sunday Times newspaper in London. Loves tech and fancies himself as a bit of a futurist, but then don't we all?

Nigel – who has written 5153 posts on The Red Ferret Journal.

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li

Hi,
fine “tiny checkout” where can I find it?
http://www.redferret.net Nigel

D’oh, thanks. Missing link now corrected. :-)
Pax

Nice find! Seems really useful.

Aside from the massive advertising overpowering the pay now page (something you mentioned), a couple of phrases on the page, I think, need to be reworked.

1. Hey There!

2. This page has a secret message that will be shown to you after you purchase.

It would be a great touch to the site if modifications to these texts could be made by the seller in the advanced area section.

PS: There’s no contact info on the site (created a few days ago, 12-03-08 and expiring in a single year). GoDaddy reports DomainsByProxy.com for anonymity. Probably not serious, I just don’t know enough about PayPal or the collection of paypal email addresses to judge whether something bad can happen here. I’m not ‘yelling Wolf’ – just ignorant.

If someone knows more about this kind of stuff, please comment:-) Thanks!
Nigel

@Pax – yeah I did tell them that landing page was too over the top with the advertising. It’s going to be hard to convince people to use a shopping cart which so obviously comes from a third party service. Re the security aspects, agreed, but these are the guys that did tinypaste, (http://tinypaste.com/) so they’ve been around for a little bit. :-)
Pax

Thanks, Nigel:-)

The developers are probably already thinking about adding new features, as well as implementing additional pages on the site. I did look over tinypaste.com and noted their privacy policy:

Privacy: “Assume any data you post to this server will be publicly visible and remain forever.”

Terms: “We reserve the right to do whatever we want with any submitted data without limitation.”

Hopefully they’ll address issues of privacy on tinycheckout and listen to other user concerns because the idea (and implementation) behind this site is good enough to sell itself. Perhaps the worse that might happen with such an open (your email belongs to us) policy is to resell to advertisers.
fatjoez

good concept

but as you said

lame advertising