TipiT.to

This weekend Paypal froze Wikileaks’s account impeding their efforts to get funded (the entire site had been turned into a big pledge drive to secure future operation). This is a common occurrence for merchants of all sorts.

We also think that Wikileaks performs an important function online and in any case they are a great cause to have on TipiT. I tweeted them and told them TipiT is very much available and one of the few donation services that does not use Paypal to transfer money (with obvious and non-obvious benefits). Not to mention that we are far more responsive.

After some initial trouble keeping up with the load was resolved (which turned out to be just a minor glitch), the tipjar and thermometer for Wikileaks is up and running on the site (tipjar). It seems that Paypal has unfrozen the Wikileaks account again (see The Register), but we continue to serve as a donations conduit for Wikileaks and hope to do so in the future.

Very unfortunately at a recent Plone conference Sree’s laptop got stolen. So to help him replace his laptop they setup a webpage to raise donations and they used a TipiT tipjar for the donations.

This is interesting and it is definitely a use case of TipiT but what is even more interesting is that TipiT isn’t the only service they setup to receive donations with. In fact the first link they have is for a cause on ChipIn. Now if you follow the links to both pages, you can see that TipiT has raised more than twice as much money for the same cause in a straight side-by-side test.

Just look at the screenshots:

Why is this the case?

Figuring out why this is the case requires some guesswork. I think we have the better albeit somewhat barebones donation system but the core of the difference is probably one vital factor: Paypal.

ChipIn uses Paypal as a payment processor and that will kill your conversion dead in its tracks. We know because we used Paypal and are intimately familiar with its integration options. Paypal offers a complete experience and for somebody who has an account already setup with an associated payment method, checkout is indeed very smooth. For somebody who doesn’t have that (which is still a very large part of the internet), the mental cost of setting all of that up just for one donation is too high.

Compare that to our checkout process which is just a form on our website where you enter your credit card number and the payment is processed directly. It’s not very hard to figure out that that is conceptually much more easy for a larger amount of people and therefore yields a higher conversion rate.

So important lesson: if you want to make donations really easy, it’s not enough to just integrate with a monolithic walled garden payment processor. Make it really easy.

It’s been a bit quiet around here. We’re self-funded so sometimes we need to do other things to make money. Nevertheless we’re busy with a ton of things for Tipit.to and a tiny one for this blog post is Feedburner integration.

You can use the following link as a FeedFlare:
https://tipit.to/pages/tipitFeedFlare.xml

That will automatically create a link to tip the domain of the accompanying feed item. If you do not own the domain of your blog, you can use the following:

https://tipit.to/pages/tipitFeedFlare.xml/tipjarname

to point to the tipjar name the tips should go to.

Note: To add a FeedFlare in Feedburner go to the Optimize tab of your feed and in the FeedFlare service add the appropriate URL.

We hope you like it and if you have any other integrations which you feel we should be working on, do not hesitate to let us know.

One of the big features that we have been working on for the last couple of weeks is integrating Tipit.to’s flow with Twitter. We think Twitter despite its many outages is an important messaging platform and it is possible to build very useful applications on top of it.

What you can do is to go to your settings page and link your Twitter account to your Tipit.to account. After you’ve done this, you can:

1. Make Tipit.to send you tweets when you get tipped and send tweets out in your name whenever you tip somebody.
   
2. You can use the twitter messaging service to make tips to tipjars, sites and even to twitter users using the following commands:
   d tipit tipjarname 50 Have a nice day!
   or
   d tipit @twittername 50 Thanks for the updates!
   So it’s “d tipit TARGET AMOUNT MESSAGE” where the message is optional. Not too hard to remember and quite powerful. 

   You can send these messages from the Twitter website, a client or even from your mobile phone. So that means that tipping can go offline and if you know the tipjar name, you can tip whatever you want whenever you want it.

One important thing to note is that our interface to Twitter is best effort and limited more by Twitter’s stability than our own. We do our best to relay your message and in the event that something goes wrong we will both notify you and queue your request to try again after a reasonable pause.

We think that Twitter integration brings two important things to tipping. A more fluid way of making tips and publishing your tips to your Twitter audience, so that tipping can go wider faster. And a way to take the concept of tipping offline using any mobile phone’s SMS capability to interface to Twitter.

From now on I’ll blog the updates to tipit.to.

Messaging

You can now message anybody that tipped you, and anyone with a profile. The ability to mail thank you notes has been asked for more than once. I added some abuse protection, but we’ll have to see if I have to go a step further and allow users to block all mail sent via tipit.to
The ability to tip unclaimed tipjar owners will be added shortly.

One place where you can find the messaging icon is where you would expect it, on your tips received page:

You’re then presented with an web based e-mail send form:

We hope you like it.

Comments

Comments on tips were sort of private; they didn’t show up on your profile page, for example. In retrospect, if you can see the tip, you might as well see the comment too. So, from now on, comments are always displayed along with the tip.

Popular tipjars

The new front page algorithm introduced last week is working fine, though I think I’ll increase the factor that makes tips count less and less over time; it seems a bit too static for now.
Also more data will be added to the display of popular tipjars.

It looks like the ability to tip arbitrary tipjars has taken off judging from the front page. Most of these tipjars have not been claimed yet, but if you know the owners of the sites or would like them to claim the tipjar and put it on their site, send them an e-mail to let them know.

We have been busy developing usability enhancements and new features to the Tipit.to website over the last week. Let us know of anything that would make your life as a tipper or tip receiver easier.

We are displaying tips given by users and tips received by tipjars as well as tip intentions. This way you can track interesting people and tipjars on the site much easier.

You can now verify a domain tipjar using e-mail. We noticed that uploading a file or editing the <head> of your page was too complex for most users, so we’ve added the option to verify your domain by sending an e-mail to either one of the trusted e-mail addresses: webmaster@, info@ or admin@.

There’s stil a lot in the pipeline. Tell us your wishes and comments.

After the launch this Wednesday, we saw we needed to add some features and clarification here and there. Both based on your feedback and on what we had lying around ourselves.

First the frontpage with the statistics for popular sites has been added. Because we are in the early stages now and don’t have many real tips yet, we have chosen to list tip intentions in the statistical views of the site.
We are still debating how far we should weigh intentions, but the plan is to show them for now but phase them out in the near future. People tipping large bogus tips, will immediately get notifications that they should pay up.

Further we are going to add more lists with interesting data through various places so that you can browse through the site and have something to look at. And a nice way to find and add friends will be added.

In the mean time, keep the feedback and the tips coming.