👋 everyone,

Meet TinyMerch, our 2017 PH Hackathon Submission.

TinyMerch is an embeddable ecommerce platform and our entry to the 2017 ProductHunt Global Hackathon.

The Problem We’re Solving

Selling physical products comes with a full set of headaches: printing, inventory, overhead, maintenance, shipping and returns. It usually means rebuilding your site or sending customers to a separate platform with monthly fees. Simply put, it’s a big commitment.

TinyMerch solves this. You don’t have to change your website. You never pay a subscription fee. You don’t have to worry about inventory or shipping. We process orders, get the products printed on-demand, ship them to your customers, and send you profits monthly. 💸

Our Place in the Market

Most ecommerce platforms are built for larger companies. TinyMerch is built for the little guys: content creators 📽️, artists 👨‍🎨, bands 🎸, and small businesses 🏪. For these users, selling merch shouldn’t be a full-time job, and TinyMerch is designed to make the process as fast and easy as possible. No other platform combines fully-managed printing and fulfillment with an embeddable store that lives directly on your site, all for free.

How It Works

Getting started is easy. Choose from our selection of products and upload your own custom designs. We generate high-resolution print files and make your product instantly available for purchase in your store. Paste a small embed script onto your website, and customers can purchase the products you just designed. Choose to receive profits monthly, or donate those profits directly to a charity.

Under the Hood

This month we built an embeddable storefront that handles purchases, a dashboard app for creating products and customizing your store, and a marketing site at tinymerch.com.

We use a lot of cool tech 🤖, but here’s the core stuff that makes it happen:

• ⚛️ React: frontend framework that powers our dashboard and embed widget.

• 🔥 Firebase: our real-time database, Firebase Storage for file upload, and Firebase Functions for event-based server architecture.

• 💳 Stripe: Atlas for the business, Stripe Elements for secure payment processing, and Stripe Connect for transferring profits securely to sellers.

• 👕 Printful: the API-based printing and fulfillment service we integrate with for handling orders.

Building interest and finding our first users

• We gave a talk at a conference at a local coworking space to get early feedback on the idea and find beta testers.

• Won the 48-hour Node Knockout hackathon in the middle of the ProductHunt hackathon (hackathonception!). This was a crash-course in integrating with Printful and validating that the idea was technically feasible. We used this as an opportunity to get feedback and find customers interested in custom physical products.

• Reached out to local charities to offer a way for our users to donate their profits. We’re in talks with more charities and hope to add them to our partner list soon.

• Connected with local artists and designers to get our first real TinyMerch users.

• Live-tweeted our hackathon design and development progress this month.

Try TinyMerch To see a store in action, check out our TinyMerch Demo Store.

Want to create your own TinyMerch store? Get started now and have a store on your site selling 💯 original content in a matter of minutes!

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✌️ Best, The TinyMerch Team