I have a side project http://racemetric.com for simple athletic race registration and credit card processing (just released). It's all written in Haskell and brand new. Any ideas about how to specifically drive traffic would be extremely helpful. The idea is to accept credit card registration payments within minutes instead of having to talk to sales people, get a merchant account, build a custom web page, etc.
Be really careful about handling payments properly - specifically, make sure you wait a while after the race day before transferring money to the organizers. Or only transfer money to them if you've actually met and verified them.
Otherwise you expose your company (make sure you are incorporated!) to significant financial risk. See the discussion here, which relates to why Paypal hates conference organizers:
Great suggestions. I've thought a lot about this area and feel I've struck a good balance for risk vs. low barrier to entry. People don't think about it but third party payment aggregation is extremely risky from a fraud perspective and many times that cost gets passed on to the users.
Unfortunately I don't think I can hold off on payment collection until after the race because organizers need the registration money to actually pay for the race facilities. Any suggestions there?
One idea would be to pay the race facilities directly, rather than paying the organizers. Now someone trying to rob you will need to set up 2 identities to do it...
As an active runner/triathlete, I can't stress enough how f*cked-up online registration processes for races are, and this app almost seems solve this. All I can wish you is the best of luck and I hope to signup to races via your app soon.
my 2 cents: I suggest you contact your local running clubs/athlete associations, and race organisers to help them out with this + remove the need to signup (give the user the option to do so during registration, but not before). This sector needs an Eventbrite for sport events. Best of luck.
Thanks for the feedback. That's exactly my goal. I currently have it so you can create a race w/o signing up. Shoot me an email (link on the bottom of the website) if you don't mind chatting a bit more? Thanks!
The worst thing about active.com is that they will spam you forever once they have your email address. There seems to be absolutely no working way to unsubscribe from their mailings.
Any more details on the software stack? I'm actually about to write an SAAS in Haskell. Are you using Yesod, Snap, Happstack, plain wai, or something else?
Any commentary on making your SAAS with Haskell, where you thought it helped, where you thought it hurt?
