Freshplum Goes After Small Businesses With A Dead Simple, Stripe-Enabled Shopping Cart

Freshplum, an analytics startup for online retailers that was founded by a former Facebook product manager, is going after small to medium businesses with an easy way for anyone to add a shopping cart to their site. Helium is based off a product that another company in the Y Combinator network, payments startup Stripe, launched a few weeks ago. Stripe recently launched a product called Connect that makes it easy for any business to enable its customers to perform direct transactions without having to wait weeks for approval by a payments processor. Freshplum’s founder Sam Odio says that while the developer community appreciates Stripe for its simple API, it’s not really that easy to use for non-technical business owners. “Stripe is a great product. We’re big fans of the company. The only problem is that for a small business, it’s actually pretty difficult to integrate,” he said. “You need to have programming experience. You need to set up a back-end to store the order data, and you need to set up a shopping cart front-end and pass that order information to Stripe. So Helium is essentially a front-end for Stripe.” With Helium, you add a line of JavaScript and then another line of code wherever you want a “Buy Now” button. You’ll get a dashboard that shows you recent orders and lets you easily add items. While Stripe could go ahead and build a comparable product for small- to medium-sized businesses, Odio says that hopefully Freshplum will be moving fast enough that by the time they do, his offering will have sophisticated retail analytics to offer customers. Freshplum’s core business is in analytics that help retailers optimize on pricing, so that they don’t charge too much or too little for their products. They already have a product in beta for the very biggest online retailers that’s generating revenue. Helium is for the lower-end of the market. Odio says this group might include a blogger looking to sell content, or musicians that are selling unreleased tracks. Freshplum will take a 2 percent share of revenue on top of Stripe’s 2.9 percent and 30 cents per transaction. He says that makes it roughly equal to Gumroad’s 5 percent plus 25 cents per transaction. The company has raised $1.4 million in funding from investors including Google Ventures, Charles River Ventures, NEA, Y Combinator, former Gmail product manager Gabor Cselle, CRV’s George Zachary, Reddit

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