That is a very good point! Thank you! I figured someone would find a constructive way to argue why something might be better than something else and you are that person. This would kind of speak to the idea of crypto which I dont really like on first sight but it would at least give the ability to audit, right?
Comment on Can we please make a viable (federated!) amazon alternative? I have an idea!
PugJesus@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I know that Federation is exciting, but all these ideas for federated services are really missing the reason why the Fediverse’s current bits are successful - because they have low moral hazard.
When you get into economics and meatspace relationships, moral hazard skyrockets.
haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com 1 day ago
PugJesus@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Crypto doesn’t really solve any of the problems that a payment processor wouldn’t also solve, unfortunately.
haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com 1 day ago
yeah, thats right as well. and at least to my knowledge it would not be better to the environment either. one thing at a time. federated payment is for next week. :)
I would probably just use stripe and charge the customer and spread the money to the company in question. this is what you do as a normal business as well btw. You probably need to make your terms and the shop so that customer and the law knows that you are just a storefront for others as well as your own product. but aside from that I dont see a huge issue there.
x4740N@lemm.ee 1 day ago
What is “meatspace”
PugJesus@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Real life. The offline world. Grassvile.
BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Accepting payments and creating “contracts” over the Fediverse is no bueno at the current time. I think it would require some kind of 3rd party, almost PayPal-esque (PayPal has its own controversy) service that would create the obligation and associated penalties that come with an online transaction. Could be the instance itself but as you said that’s a risk most instance owners wouldn’t take.
PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 1 day ago
Accepting payments isn’t some kind of wild adventure that will inevitably doom your operation. People do it all the time, you can set up a Stripe account in a few minutes. You could, if you wanted (and you would probably want to go this route at least initially), require people to have a Stripe account or something and get paid directly from the buyer without you being involved. And then just charge a flat fee to the merchants or something, if you wanted to make the whole thing sustainable.
Stripe is well-equipped to deal with issues of taxes, fraud, refunds, and so on for micro-level businesses. Once you get into accepting payments and re-disbursing them to people, you’ve opened up a whole can of worms which probably means you should be spending a couple thousand dollars on lawyers and accountants to make sure it’s all on the up-and-up, but even then, it’s not unsolvable. It’s kind of a pain in the ass, that’s all. Jim Bob’s Towing with his 2 pillhead employees manages to do it every day. It’s how Jim Bob financed his boat. It’s fine.
BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Exactly, you probably want a 3rd party to handle the money exchange part. Doesn’t mean a Fedi app can’t facilitate everything else.
haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com 1 day ago
I’m in pretty strong agreement with you. Then again, i run a business and am a reseller for a couple companies. It isn’t exactly rocket science. Company A has product, I note their price, make my own price, send offer to company B. They accept or decline. if the customer has any problems with the product, they either come to me or to the manufacturer. Imho its not much different than a unified storefron would be. Also you can put the sellers name in the storefront like ebay, amazon, ali express etc. the customer knows that its not you who actually sells the product. I think we’re making this a lot more complicated than it needs to be.
PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 1 day ago
Yeah. I think a lot of the people in these comments are people just not experienced with business who assume that it is scary and impossible. There are certain aspects that are hairy if you don’t know what you’re getting into, but the whole system is designed to make it pretty easy. On the whole pie chart of “pain in the ass aspects,” there are some pretty big slices in places, but “I have to set up a Stripe account oh no” is not one of them lol. That one is a tiny tiny sliver.
Even if you decide to collect payments yourself and do payouts to merchants yourself, like a little Etsy or Amazon, dealing with the headaches involved with sending and receiving the cash will still be a minority of your problems. Although they will jump up to being significant.
I kind of want to express interest for getting involved with this thing with you, since I do think it’s a really good idea, but IDK if I really want to take it on. I do think it’s a really good idea, though. Basically add the “operated by actual humans” aspect to online e-commerce as it is being added for online social media.
catloaf@lemm.ee 1 day ago
Sure, but the type of people looking to use federated selling platforms are unlikely to want to use something like Stripe
PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 1 day ago
Then they are being silly.
I actually don’t think that would be an issue in practice, given how alarmingly eager Fediverse instance operators are to get in bed with Cloudflare and AWS. But, if you are accepting payments, you are for the forseeable future going to be working with some kind of financial processor, and Stripe is far from the worse of the bunch as far as that is concerned.