Commerce Business Plan

Executive Summary

Commerce aims to be the simple, ultra-low-cost e-commerce platform with an emphasis on managing accounts for you e.g. recurring payments, split billings, memberships etc.
Commerce provides extensive APIs that companies can use instead of build themselves.
We don't want people to have to sink huge costs (e.g. Shopify, Chargebee) just to be able to use a simple service for one-off or recurring payments.
Everyday Joes can simply rock up to our site, sign-up for RM1, and transact via credit card for a 3.5% + RM1 charge (can be further mitigated via nego for better rates with Stripe to perhaps 2.2% and RM0.50).
Heavy Users who could save on admin and tech fees:
- recurring food delivery services,
- part-time cleaners,
- part-time workers,
- freelancers,
- tuition teachers,
- parking management companies, with integration with their systems,
- publication companies with simple memberships
- gyms with simple memberships
- education institutions with simple tuition fees,
- vehicle rental companies e.g. cars, bikes, heavy equipment
- property rental companies e.g. managing rooms, apartments etc
- equipment rental companies e.g. industrial equipment
Users will be served via Stripe Connect Standard at no cost.
Sellers (basically an Organisation that provides products and services) will be served via Stripe Connect Custom @ RM6 per month and 0.25% + RM1.50 per payout.
We will negotiate with Stripe to have more favourable international fee arrangements for international Users.

Shopify does it well for products but not for managing recurring payments. Costs are USD29/79/299/month @ 2%/1%/0.5% transaction fees, plus ~USD60/month for a plugin for recurring payments with further transaction fees.
Chargebee costs USD249/549/month.

We intend to charge 3.5% + RM1 per transaction. This will be our only revenue stream from Commerce.
Stripe will charge us 3% + RM1 per transaction; hence our cut will just be 0.5%.
This would mean a ballpark figure of only RM5k per RM1m of transactions.
To comfortably cover costs, we would require monthly transactions to be upwards of RM10m for a RM50k per month of revenue.
International Users will experience different charges with respect to Stripe. There will be currency conversion costs.

Commerce may not be a good enough value-add for people to want to pay 3.5% per transaction. Hopefully we can negotiate that to 2% with Stripe.
- Apparently they give lower rates to higher transaction volume companies.
But she can serve as a way to manage all e-commerce activities in one place and hence be deserving of that 3.5% per transaction.
We may also have to figure out a way to batch transactions to save on that RM1 per charge.
Due to currency conversion costs we may want to structure the company to have a bank account in every country. Preferably Citibank for ease of transfer.

API throttling to prevent abuse.
Limits to number of products and services in the Catalogue until there is sufficient sales volume for Sellers.

Commerce will be the storefront, and Sourcerer will be the logistics, with the Baton system. With the Baton system, crossing international borders will require us to build our own graph for waterways or airplane travel between different map systems i.e. Baidu for China and Google Maps for the rest of the world.