If you’ve ever sold anything online in a serious way, you know that the crucial moment comes at “checkout.” Getting people to checkout is obviously important, but once you’ve led the horse to water, you want to be sure he actually drinks. In other words, checkout is where you want to make it really easy for people to pay.

People often refer to the online sales process as a “funnel” — the idea being that once your customers are in your realm, you’re connecting with them in increasingly targeted ways until they decide to make a purchase. They swirl around and down the funnel until they drop through the little spout at the bottom.

The spout? That’s checkout. This is where things need to be über-simple. No bits of apple peel or bread in there. In other words, No Distractions.

The world’s greatest example of an effective sales funnel and checkout process is Amazon. Next time you go there to buy something, pay close attention to every step of the process. And notice that when it comes time to pay, it is (at least compared to other possible checkout experiences online) really easy.

Now, if you’re a service professional, or collecting donations, or even just selling things online occasionally, the “checkout” process works differently. There is no “store” or “funnel” — there is just an invoice of some kind (usually) and your client or customer responding to the invoice by paying you.

But that doesn’t mean that you don’t have a checkout process just like any other business. Your checkout is the path between your client receiving the invoice and your client completing a payment to you. And that path is usually riddled with potholes and detours and slowdowns.

True, a lot of it is out of your control. For example, if your client is waiting to get paid so they can pay you, there’s not a whole lot you can do about it. But if your payment platform forces your clients to, say, create an account, and log into that account each time they have to pay you, and then your client forgets the login credientials you created for them, that’s on you. Or if your client is used to paying for everything with a credit card but you send an invoice that has to paid by check, you’re inserting an obstacle into your client’s flow that is going to result in delays getting paid.

In these ways and many more, consultants and freelancers and other service providers make it difficult for their  clients to pay them, which means that even if they do succeed in paying, they’re less likely to do so in a timely manner next time, because the system is a pain in the butt.

InspirePay was originally built as a way to give our merchant services clients a convenient, hassle-free way for their clients to pay them with credit cards online. Because many of them had endured complicated systems that actually made it harder for their clients to pay them, the whole idea with InspirePay was Zen-like simplicity. Cut out all distractions, get third-party brands out of the way of your brand, and make it really really easy for people to pay you. That is InspirePay.

The proof of this is, as they say, in the pudding. If you’ve got 3-5 minutes to spare, go set up an InspirePay account and try it out for yourself. Send yourself a request for $1 (which we recommend anyway to make sure it’s working), and while you’re paying yourself, think back to Amazon. Imagine that you are your customer, arriving to pay you. See? No distractions, clear ownership of the page, and no account to set up — just a simple form like they’ve seen a thousand times. We’ll sleep easier knowing you’ve been paid.

Investors and payments industry professionals are talking about InspirePay, a free software-as-service payment tool from Boulder, Colo.-based merchant acquirer Inspire Commerce Inc. Launched in December 2011, InspirePay reportedly enables online merchants to invoice and receive payments through any payment system the business chooses.

For instance, an online merchant can invoice a customer and, at the same time, give the customer payment options from a list that may include, but is not limited to, any credit card; the payment services of PayPal Inc. (including PayPal), Dwolla Corp. and Stripe Inc.; or the open source currency Bitcoin.

What it is

InspirePay is targeted at an audience similar to the one courted by Square Inc. – the micro-entrepreneur, the small new business, people doing consulting work and similar micro-businesses. According to Inspire Commerce, InspirePay is a free, secure, professional payment system for small online businesses that is also being used for peer-to-peer payments.

Mark Fischer, Inspire Commerce Chief Executive Officer, said Inspire Commerce is a certified B corporation, which means the company’s goal is not only to benefit clients and stockholders, but also to benefit the community in which it resides.

He noted that Inspire Commerce developed its business with a “boutique group of loyal merchants” who often share the company’s interest in helping the local community and that the company returns 10 percent of its revenue stream to nonprofits chosen by merchants through its For Benefit Merchant Program.

The idea

Fischer said InspirePay was developed when he grew tired of having to turn people away because their business was just not ready for merchant acquirer services. He found he was often referring people to PayPal as a solution when he knew the PayPal system probably would not be the best option for that business. Still, Fischer was also aware the PayPal option is an important one for online businesses – a lot of online payments are made with PayPal and businesses that have PayPal as an online option see an average 19 percent growth.

Fischer also believed entrepreneurs and professional service providers want a professional payment site dedicated to their business. “We saw a need to integrate all these different payment methods into one simple, intuitive user experience,” he said.

Options

So three years ago Inspire Commerce started building the software and opening it to selected merchant accounts. The system the company built was designed to be easy to set up; it gives merchants a customized payment page with logo, phone number, address and the ability to connect to the payment options a given merchant selects. And when a merchant wants to add another payment option, he or she can easily add it to the application.

“If I send you a payment request, then you (the one paying) should have options for how you want to pay me,” Fischer posted in a blog. “I’m not saying the system should allow you to pay me in every single way. If I – as the person requesting payment – don’t like AmEx, then I shouldn’t have to offer AmEx. But I should be able to offer it if I want to (and I do).”

Subsequently, Fischer told The Green Sheet, “This gives the micro-merchant a sandbox to play in to develop their business. We can monitor the account through our platform, and when the merchant is ready for a merchant account, we’ll feel good about selling those services to them. We’re a B corporation; we don’t want to sign anyone until we know we can benefit them.”

Monetization

According to Fischer, the trial model made money for the company. However, he said the public product launch “is not about monetization right now; it’s about building a kick-ass product.” He added that eventually the company will offer premium InspirePay products, which should increase revenue. Fischer also noted that in the short time since InspirePay’s public launch, the company has already had acquisition inquiries, and users, merchant accounts and money transfers are rapidly increasing.

When you think about ecommerce payments, you might think about entities like shopping carts and services like Google Wallet or PayPal. These kinds of features work when you operate an online store. But for lots of people, they just aren’t appropriate. If you need to send an invoice to get paid and you don’t have an online store, you can turn to a free payment service aggregator based in Boulder, Colorado called InspirePay that was launched December 20.

According to founder and CEO Mark Fischer, InspirePay’s first and free payment product enables an individual or business to create a “Pay Me” page that aggregates all of the payment services they already use. These can include a merchant account, the Stripe payment system, and the familiar online payment services PayPal, Google Wallet and Dwolla. It can be described as an “About Me” page of payments, he says.

“Ideal uses include any situation where pricing varies, such as wholesale sales or services linked to an invoice,” explains Fischer, who has been an online strategy consultant for the past twelve years, and has run the merchant services provider Inspire Commerce for more than four years. “People are already using it for more person to person situations as well, such as beer money, splitting a meal among friends, and even raising money for simple things like Christmas gifts for teachers where all of the parents are chipping in.”

Users who create an InspirePay page can quickly request payment by sending a link, such as https://inspirepay.com/mark/$50.00. When the recipient clicks on the link, he or she pays, and the sender of the link receives their $50. If a seller or service provider leaves the dollar amount off the link, the payment page asks the person paying to specify a dollar amount.

Fischer says InspirePay’s primary target market consists of individuals who want to be paid online but who don’t want to depend on a shopping cart system. Many of the service’s customers include graphic designers who do all of their business online. You can read Fischer’s vision in a June blog post entitled Electronic Payments Manifesto.

Users can make a link to their InspirePay page from their website or create a donation form that is integrated with an invoicing system such as QuickBooks or Peachtree Accounting. Users have to have a payment system in place before they start using InspirePay; the site is intended for individuals who use more than one system and want to present clients or customers with different payment options in a single location.

InspirePay will follow the initial free version with offerings in coming months that are more oriented toward businesses that have online storefronts with shopping carts. These will extend the system to third-party applications such as shopping carts and software as a service systems.

December 19, 2011 –

BOULDER – Startup company InspirePay will formally launch an Internet payment tool Tuesday, Dec. 20, that aggregates Internet commerce choices such as PayPal, Google Wallet and Dwolla in one place.

Boulder-based InspirePay’s Internet payment tool will be free to use, said Mark Fischer, founder and chief executive officer. In the future, the company plans to make money by rolling out premium versions of its services and charging for them, and from new merchant accounts, Fischer said.

The Internet payment tool will allow companies to make and receive payments through an online payment page that users can set up themselves, Fischer said.

“Aggregated under a fully open network with our powerful application programming interface, InspirePay makes it possible for anyone to set up a payment page, brand it, customize it and connect their payment methods,” Fischer said in a press statement.

The tool already is being used by customers such as Internet company WooCommerce in Cape Town, South Africa, attorney Lindasue Smollen in Boulder and nonprofit group B Lab in New York, Fischer said.

Internet payment systems currently in use commonly charge customers for every transaction. PayPal charges customers 3 percent per transaction, for example, while Dwolla and other small companies may charge from 25 cents to 50 cents per transaction.

InspirePay is backed by several investors, including local venture capital firm Tiforp Business Ventures LLC. Its webpage is www.inspirepay.com.

Over the years, Mike Abdy has sold real estate, founded a snow-plowing business and dabbled in day trading.

Today, Abdy runs a $3 million venture capital firm with large investments in two startups, one aiming to establish a new social network for musicians and the other to perhaps disrupt an online payment industry dominated by PayPal.

Oh, and the 19-year-old is a sophomore at the University of Colorado at Boulder majoring in sociology.

“I’m a little sporadic,” said Abdy, a New Jersey native. “When I got out to Boulder, I didn’t want to just do college the normal way — you know, take 16 credits and sit in the library . . . until 10 o’clock at night.”

Abdy is in a position to be a wunderkind of sorts thanks in large part to family connections.

Those ties have hooked him up with the likes of serial entrepreneur and promoter Jack Wishna, who was credited several years ago with encouraging pop legend Michael Jackson to return to the United States after living overseas for more than a year. There may also be a little bit of Doogie Howser, Donald Trump and Steve Jobs in Abdy.
“I’ve been surrounded by a lot of individuals in my life, whether it’s Donald Trump or Richard Branson, and probably when they were 19 years old, they had a lot of elements that you’d find in Michael,” Wishna said. “He can run circles around some of my executives that are 40 or 50 years old. He has a confidence about him.”
Wishna sits on the advisory board of Abdy’s Boulder-based Tiforp Business Ventures.

Two weeks into his freshman year at CU, Abdy received a call from a close friend who had inherited a few million dollars after the death of his father. Abdy flew to Los Angeles to console his friend and advise him on how to manage the money.

Abdy ended up creating Tiforp, using a portion of the inheritance as the seed capital for the venture capital business. His friend serves as an investor in Tiforp and wishes to remain private, Abdy said. His friend’s father owned an airplane chartering company in Switzerland, Abdy said.

Tiforp’s investment model will be to take fliers on startups.

“Risk isn’t a word in my vocabulary. I’m willing to take it,” said Abdy, whose family is in real estate development. “I’ve got nothing to lose. That’s kind of the way I invest.”
In addition to investments in a couple of iPhone apps, Tiforp has dropped $100,000 into Boulder-based InspirePay, which bills itself as a “doorway into the different payment options.”

“Every day, it seems like there are new payment methods coming out that I’ll call PayPal knockoffs,” said InspirePay chief executive Mark Fischer. “And so we’re looking at the industry and saying, ‘How can we be different?’ ”

InspirePay has developed a platform that aggregates all forms of electronic payment options, such as PayPal, Dwolla and Google Wallet. Merchants and nonprofits that sign up for the service receive a branded, online payments page that can accept payments from multiple options.

Tiforp also has an $850,000 investment in Rock City Club, a Las Vegas-based social music network started by Wishna.
“Where ‘American Idol’ and ‘The Voice’ and MySpace and all of those companies are looking for the needle in the haystack, and they let the haystack kind of just fend to themselves, we go after the haystack,” Wishna said. Artists and bands pay a subscription of $12.95 a month to create a hub on the website where they can share their music. In addition to providing musicians with a platform to distribute their music, Rock City Club can connect them with partner music producers, Wishna said.
The company is currently beta testing its site and plans to launch in January.

As for Tiforp, Abdy said he will operate it as a “social virtual connection incubator.” The company will make investments based on business plans submitted through a website that’s slated to roll out next year. It’s a model that’s left some scratching their heads. When told of the system, one established venture capitalist said he’s “never heard of anything like this.” “I don’t want to just grab 3,000 square feet on Pearl Street and incorporate a VC (venture capital) firm and throw checks at technology companies,” Abdy said. “We’re going to do it a different way. We’re going to have an online hub where we’re going to make actual investments through a virtual enterprise.”

Inspire Commerce, a Boulder-based merchant services provider, is launching a new Internet payment tool, InspirePay, next month. The Camera recently spoke with the company’s founder and CEO, Mark Fischer.

1. What is InspirePay?

InspirePay is a software-as-service application that lets merchants request, receive and make payments online. Our system is an integrator exchange that allows a business, through one point, to log on, set up all the ways they can be paid — PayPal or Google Wallet or Dwolla for instance — and then allows an individual or application, depending on how they integrate with us, to go and make a payment.

2. Why did you develop this service?

We saw a huge under-served market online — the micro merchants who can’t afford a merchant account but who want to request payment online. A lot of companies specialize in moving money, or in being the next PayPal. We saw a need to integrate all these different payment methods into one simple, intuitive user experience.

3. How is it set up?

We designed the whole system to be ridiculously simple — it takes five minutes to set up. You customize the page with a logo, phone number, address and from there you just connect the ways you would be paid. If a new payment plan becomes available, all you have to do is add it to the application. It’s a doorway to the processing world.

4. What is the target market for InspirePay?

We designed InspirePay for the micro entrepreneur, the person just starting out, the person doing consulting work, or even the person who’s a little more established but wants to move into digital money request.

5. Is there a fee for this service?

For the most part it’s free — the majority of the people accessing it will be using the free version. Then there’s a premium version that allows for more flexibility integrating it into other applications and customizing more than one page.

August 3, 2011 –

BOULDER – Ecommerce company Inspire Commerce will launch an Internet payment tool, InspirePay, in September, company founder Mark Fischer said Tuesday.

The InspirePay tool is similar to PayPal, a well-known Internet payment system site that has about 1 million users per month. The new tool is software that aggregates all Internet payment systems onto one Web page so customers can choose which one they want to use. The basic InspirePay site will be free, Fischer said, but also will offer a “premium” version, for which merchants will pay fees.

In general, Inspire Commerce will make money from the premium versions, from gateway services offered to merchants as part of the system, and from new merchant accounts, Fischer said.

Since transaction systems on the Internet charge users different prices, choice is important, Fischer said. PayPal charges 3 percent, for example, while Dwolla and other small companies may charge 25 cents to 50 cents per transaction.

In addition, the new software can integrate existing software code easily, allowing any online “shopping cart” or “buy now” button to accept payments from multiple payment methods without modifying computer code, according to a press statement about the new tool.

Investors include Adriaan Pienaar, founder of WooThemes, a WordPress theme provider based in Capetown, South Africa, and dojo4, a web-development company in Boulder. InspireCommerce plans to have $500,000 raised to support the new product before launching it, Fischer said.

Inspire Commerce reported revenue of $560,000 in 2010. Local clients include Boulder Farmers Market, Nick ‘n Willy’s Pizza and Nap Inc.’s Boba Baby Carrier. National Clients include B Corp., New Leaf Paper, Singlebrook Technologies and Atayne LLC apparel company.

Inspire Commerce calls itself a “for-benefit” corporation that donates 10 percent of its net revenue to nonprofit groups. The company also is a member of the “1% for the Planet” business group, which donates 1 percent of revenue to environmental groups, the Boulder Independent Business Alliance and the Carbon Fund.

June 22, 2011
St. Julien Hotel Boulder, CO

Mark Fischer, Inspire Pay CEO, will be speaking on the panel of ‘Small is Beautiful: Cracking Elusive Angel Capital Networks’ along with:
Bill Shutkin, Director, Avacaipa Ventures;
Scott Leonard, CEO, Indigenous Designs;
Daniel Epstein, President, Unreasonable Institute

For more information, and to register, visit the LOHAS site.

I should be able to pay someone online as easily as reaching in my wallet and handing them a buck. I should be able to get paid just as easily, so that the people paying me feel like they’re paying me, not some third party. And most of all, while being totally secure, this transaction needs to be frictionless and allow for choice – if you want to use Dwolla, and not PayPal, if I want to use my credit card and not join some crazy new closed payment network. I should be able to do that.

Simple… Today, if I consult with you for an hour, and I need to request a payment, the process is complicated. With PayPal, I go online, log in, navigate to the invoice page, I have to send an email from the system rather than sending it from my personalized email with my branded invoice… and then the fun begins. You get an email from PayPal (is it real, or is it spam?). Then you go to the site and don’t have a PayPal account. Now what?  You send me an email, telling me you don’t take PayPal, I log back into the PayPal system, cancel the money request, go to Google Wallet, and the circle continues.

Why can’t I just, from anywhere, send you an effortless request for payment that gives you real options when you land on the payment page? Options like Google Wallet, or Amazon Payments, or PayPal, or your credit card? How about Dwolla, Zong, Bitcoin, or any other system that lets people integrate their open API? It should be as easy as sending you a link: https://inspirepay.com/pay/inspire/$100. You click, you land, you see my page, you choose your payment method, and you pay. So simple. Why can’t it be that simple?

Options… In my opinion, options – real, useful options – are critical to the frictionless exchange of money. First of all, you need to have the option to choose a payment method you trust. If you’ve been using PayPal or Dwolla, and you’re comfortable with their world, then Google Wallet might not have any appeal to you. On the other hand, you should have the option to choose a payment method you’ve never used before if that’s the one your people prefer.

If I send you a payment request, then YOU (the one paying) should have options for how you want to pay me. I’m not saying the system should allow you to pay me in every single way. If I – as the person requesting payment – don’t like AMEX, then I shouldn’t have to offer AMEX. But I should be able to offer it if I want to (and I do).

Unique… I admit it, I’m vain. Not in a narcissistic way, but I like to see my brands, and my unique self expressed online. I think we all like this to some degree — to be seen and understood. And not just to be seen and understood, but to be seen, understood, and trusted. I like the idea of you paying me on a page that reflects my own, unique, expression. You paying me or my brand just comes across as professional. Have you ever gone to a website that looks nice, until you go to pay, and then you only have one option—some third party unbranded checkout flow? How often have you stopped the payment thinking the company was unprofessional, or even fraudulent? It happens more often than you would think. When you force a person to go on a round trip to pay using a single payment network, you are doing two things for sure; looking unprofessional, and losing a ton of transactions.

Developers… I’m not ragging on PayPal — they’re great. But I have a challenge for you: See if your clients are more successful and happy if you code to a single payment solution, or to a hub that opens to an entire world of online payment options, which can scale infinitely with their needs. Is it in your client’s best interest to write an API connection to a dead end where the only option is for your client to stick with that partner forever (being at the mercy of a financial processor is never good when it comes to fees, customer support, API changes, etc.) or is it in your client’s best interest to code to an API that provides unlimited growth and options? I think you should be able to code to a single API, and from that one location, have the API manage a connection to EVERY SINGLE PAYMENT OPTION AVAILABLE! As a business owner, internet addict and ecommerce fanboy, I want an API that is:

1. a doorway to all payment methods, whether they’re a Fortune 500 company or a cool new tech startup.
2. an integration where I can code once, and from that point forward, manage all current and future payment options, without having to rewrite a single line of code.

That’s it. I want something simple, I want “options for the people™”, I want a way to express my unique brand/self. All this, and I want a development API that is so simple that once it’s done, I’m free forever into the future to choose and offer whatever payment options I want.

That’s our mission. We’re building this thing! (And we’re launching it this summer.)

UPDATE

We launched in late December 2011.  We decided to launch early, with a minimal product that would allow customers to start using the system immediately.  Feedback has been fantastic.  New features are being added every week.