> > I know it's not specifically a social network sort of thing, but it > > does enhance the user experience by offering crafty type folk an > > easy way to buy and sell their stuff [and the way the economy is > > going, we're going to be seeing more people doing that] > > That's one thing that I doubt we'll ever offer directly, simply > because the minute you start doing that you need to have some kind of > dispute-resolution mechanism (what happens when someone doesn't pay > for shipped goods, what happens when someone doesn't ship the goods > people paid for). LJ always had massive problems with LJ-based > auctions, where people conducted transactions one-on-one on LJ, it > went poorly, and then they expected LJ to arbitrate.
This is good to know. Have you considered that this might, itself be a business opportunity? If a usage incurs extra costs for the host (DWS), you could charge extra-and-then-a-bit for it. I don't actually think duplicating the services of Etsy and YahooStores is a great business plan -- it seems to me selling goods is pretty well handled offsite and I'm not immediately seeing the benefit of integrating tightly with a journaling platform (I welcome correction -- I don't often sell goods so don't pretend to know much about it). But if DWS starts integrating user-based commerce in any way, something you might consider is a "DWS Better Business Bureau" functionality: If you want to do business with your account (whatever that winds up meaning), you have to pay extra for the privilege (since it incurs costs to DWS to support this) and you get a little DWS BBB icon on your account indicating your status as a vendor. Moneys from the commerce fee go to professionally staffing a complaint resolution service; vendors who are found at fault and don't abide with the resolution they come to have their status degraded or yanked entirely. I don't know if it's financially viable -- are there enough people willing to pay enough to support the cost of running such a thing? But it might be interesting to explore at a later date. If LJ auctions are so popular, perhaps there would be sufficient demand. And perhaps, if DWS were interested in integrating with an external service (OpenID would make this possible) a third party could develop such a reputation server/adjudication service as an independent business. -- Siderea _______________________________________________ dw-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.dwscoalition.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dw-discuss
