This seems to be the season for new free services.
Oronjo.com is a service that provides payment processing for free. The idea is that you can sell either a file containing an ebook, audio, video, etc, or you can sell a page of content on your site. Oronjo takes care of storing the product you’re selling in a secure area of their own site, so nobody can access it until they have paid. Oronjo also takes care of payment processing, using either Paypal, Google Checkout, or with Oronjo credit. Presumably the Oronjo credit is gained by previously selling something.
Oronjo takes no fee for the service, so only the normal Paypal or Google Checkout fees apply. What’s the advantage to using Oronjo over doing it yourself?
Well, anyone can take payment with Paypal pretty easily. But setting up a secure storage location on your web host, so that people can’t download the product without paying for it, is harder. And integrating that secure space with payment processing is hard. All of that can be done, but if you’re just dipping your toes into the waters of selling your own products online, Oronjo provides a very easy, free way to give it a try.
If your products do well, you may very well want to set up payment processing yourself. That would open your possibilities to more payment processors, and give you complete control over it all.
If you’re the type that likes to donate to charity, Oronjo has the option to automatically donate the proceeds from certain products to a charity of your choice.
The whole idea behind Oronjo is to make it so easy for anyone to sell their digital products online that they can afford to charge less for them. You’re eliminating the middle-men, so can afford to make a little money from a lot of people. At least that’s the Oronjo way. You’re free, of course, to set whatever price you want.
Oronjo.com is a very nice service that should lower the bar considerably for people to try selling online.
Great Post Jay!
I’ve recently had a problem with product theft. I spent 6 hours trying to encrypt my PayPal buttons before finally giving up!
This looks like a great alternative. I’ll give tem a try right away!
Thanks and keep up the good work!
Jo Mark
I’m glad the post was timely for you! Getting Paypal just write isn’t the easiest thing in the world. Let us know how Oronjo works out for you.
How do you think they make money from their service? Or do you think it will be free now and will offer upgraded services after they build their user base.
I’m just thinking a good thing can’t be free forever. And I wouldn’t want to put all my faith in a service if they will go under in a year because of the lack of finance.
What do you think?
I’d say they’ll offer premium services later on for a fee, and use the 90/10 model that a lot of free services use, where the premium users support the free users.
Of course, if you make some sales using them now, and later on they turn out to charge more than you want for a feature you’d like to use, you can always put some of your profits into paying a techie to set it all up on your own site, and cut out the middleman.
Hi Jay,
Thank you very much for bringing Oronjo.com to the attention of your readers, we really appreciate this!
@Harmony: Jay is right, we will stay free for at least one year. Later on, we will use a 90/10 approach and ask a small fee for premium services. The services that have been free up to then, are most likely to stay free.
@Everyone: Oronjo.com is a new initiative, we did our best to make it as good as we can, but are very well aware that many things can probably be improved. If you have any suggestions, please share them with us, we will gladly make them better.
Best regards,
Ingmar de Lange
ingmar {at} oronjo . com
Founder Oronjo.com
Thanks for the review. I am at the very beginning stages of offering content for sale on my WP blog; guitar lessons as a matter of fact. I started to read through the terms and got tired, even though they are much more understandable that any I have ever try to read in the past. There is a part where they talk about having license to distribute submitted contributions. I am not sure what they mean by that. I know I don’t want to give up ownership of my info. I guess if I want to use them I will need to have them comment on that part of their terms.