Uniiverse wants to make it easier for you to sell yourself, in a good way.
The startup released a Direct Payments feature today which allows anyone to set up peer-to-peer payments for activities and services on their personal website or blog. A yoga teacher can sell Saturday classes in a park or a food blogger can sell tickets to a cooking class. They can customize the date of the event, type of tickets, and pricing, as well as send customized invites, manage bookings and collect information about attendees.
Uniiverse is a marketplace that connects people in the real world over shared experiences. Sellers post classes, events, expertise, available space or tools etc… for people in the community to take advantage of. This includes anything from a workshop on playing the piano to finding people to play soccer with on weekends. The goal is to encourage people to engage in the real world, while also providing people with a channel to make money doing what they love.
“Uniiverse was founded on the belief that human interactions are getting too virtual,” said cofounder and CEO Craig Follett to VentureBeat. “We want to remedy this by enabling people to discover unique things to do. Small businesses and individuals who offer any kind of activity or service can use Direct Payments to integrate payments forms and booking directly on their site or blog. Direct Payments decentralizes the sharing economy, by moving it beyond centralized marketplaces.”
The sharing economy has erupted over the past few years to connect people who need something to people who have it. Also referred to as “collaborative consumption,” the idea is to make the most of un or underused resources by offering them in an online marketplace. AirBnB changed the landscape for travel accommodation by giving people the opportunity to stay in other people’s homes rather than hotels. Ridesharing companies like Zipcar, Lyft, Uber, and Sidecar are doing this with transportation; TaskRabbit, Postmates, and Exec find people to take cares of your tasks, chores, and errands; Skillshare connects people with teachers to develop real-world skills; and marketplaces like Vayable connect people over travel experiences.
These platforms are not only useful for consumers, who can easily find an affordable place to stay, a ride home, or someone to build their Ikea furniture, but also for the service providers who can use them to make (or subsidize) a living. Uniiverse’s Direct Payments helps people directly sell their services to consumers (without using a middleman or requiring the visitor to leave the site) by enabling s credit card payments and peer-to-peer transactions. Follett said that companies like Gumroad, Ribbon, and Shoplocket enable people to directly sell products online which decentralizes e-commerce, while PayPal, Stripe, Balanced, and Braintree build developer tools for payment processing. Uniiverse is taking comparable technology, and applying it to the services/events sector.
The Toronto-based company launched in early 2012 and now has 11 employees. Its marketplace includes over 26,000 event organizers and service providers in over 400 cities around the world. However two-sided marketplaces are tough to build and consumers are fickle. By entering the world of payments, Uniiverse is testing out another way to facilitate offline commerce (and ensure the company’s survival). The company will take a small commission to the buyer at the time of the purchase, but there is no set up or monthly fees. it is optimized for mobile and accepts all major credit cards.
Uniiverse has raised $1.25 million in funding from Real Ventures, as well as angel investors.
Filed under: Business, Entrepreneur
Robert Weber 23 Jul, 2013
enclosure: http://venturebeat.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/uniiverse-direct_payments_product_in_action.png?w=160
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Source: http://venturebeat.com/2013/07/22/uniiverse-releases-direct-payments-so-anyone-can-sell-tickets-to-anything/
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