P2P Marketplace for Services and Products

[Silnei L Andrade]

Does the e-commerce system already have this option or are you planning for the next updates to implement something similar to Sharetribe?

https://www.sharetribe.com/

It is not the same as a classified, it is a virtual store to rent or book services or sell products where the community gets a small percentage of the sale.

 

 

[bfarber]

With Commerce and Downloads, you can allow users to sell their products and services, and optionally retain a percentage of any commission for the site. We do that here in our marketplace using stock functionality.

[Silnei L Andrade]

@bfarber

Using these 2 tools, is there anything in them that I can adapt so that the user can book days at a camping site for example? Or that a user can put up for sale his used backpack?

[bfarber]

The system is more geared towards digital goods being distributed, or site-sponsored physical goods.

There are third party addons on the marketplace that facilitate user-to-user sales of items (i.e. "classifieds"), and we have some ideas rolling around internally to open up Commerce further.

[AlexWright]

2 hours ago, bfarber said:

There are third party addons on the marketplace that facilitate user-to-user sales of items (i.e. "classifieds"), and we have some ideas rolling around internally to open up Commerce further.

Holy gods yes! That would be fantastic!

[Cyboman]

3 hours ago, bfarber said:

and we have some ideas rolling around internally to open up Commerce further.

yes, please. Commerce, paid downloads, personal member stores, events business, points commerce, TAX per app and per app content category and accounting really require more attention for business customers. It hurts me having to realize most of these requirements in WordPress... I would love to do more community businesses directly with IPS instead of leading my members away to WordPress.

[AlexWright]

38 minutes ago, Cyboman said:

yes, please. Commerce, paid downloads, personal member stores, events business, points commerce, TAX per app and per app content category and accounting really require more attention for business customers. It hurts me having to realize most of these requirements in WordPress... I would love to do more community businesses directly with IPS instead of leading my members away to WordPress.

I agree. Also the ability to chose which payment gateways are available per-application too. One of my communities is in a weird spot with that at the moment.

[Cyboman]

4 hours ago, Lord Nowe said:

I agree. Also the ability to chose which payment gateways are available per-application too.

Examples:

• Paid Downloads: require special EU Taxing for worldwide sellers (digital goods), Paypal Isn't good to use for downloads imo as PayPal has a weird refund policy. I want to exclude Paypal there!
• Commerce: Mostly physical products, require national Taxing, BUT: memberships are a digital goods and require special EU Taxing. Physical products may use PayPal, digitals services like memberships not!
• Raffles: require gambling Taxing, Paypal prohibits selling raffles afaik, Paypal gateway must be excluded
• Classifieds: commercial classifieds categories require commercial taxing, private classifieds categories may not have taxing. P2P -> P should be allowed to choose their Taxing themselves.
• Points: selling points in commerce is a digital good which requires EU Taxing. selling them elsewhere probably don't require taxing at all. Virtual currencies as a real equivalent for money in IPS is almost impossible at this point of time
• Commission System: makes no difference if prices are taxed or not. But it should! As soon as you have mixed markets with taxed and not-taxed products, you get netto and brutto amounts transferred to your account credits. Everything mixed up! You think your members can press the "withdrawal" button now? NO! Then you tell your members, that the system is unable to do any business accounting and that they please should send in a paper invoice with each sales item on it. After that, you engage a secretary, who is recalculating paper invoices as the electronic system fails for this job.

You get the point?

^^ currently it's just not doable to lead a company with different IPS commerce features, that shall monetize in different markets. You have to use WordPress, especially if you require different commerce modules like the above mentioned.

Commerce is one of the most important features in every community software suite. Advertisements are paid worse year after year, members flee to Facebook and our sites modules cant handle legal monetizations.

I really really really hope, that IPS is considering the situation very well. As soon as everybody realizes, that they have to move their commerce to WordPress or whatever, there might be no way back. If I invest $10.000 in a professionally designed WordPress system, I won't feel to change back later and redevelop everything from ground up in IPS. Speed matters for business.

I love IPS and I want to do it with THEIR SOFTWARE. But the unaddressed commercial dangers force to look at different solutions, that are ready for global business!

[SammyS]

9 hours ago, bfarber said:

we have some ideas rolling around internally to open up Commerce further.

Yes please!

[Silnei L Andrade]

9 hours ago, bfarber said:

The system is more geared towards digital goods being distributed, or site-sponsored physical goods.

There are third party addons on the marketplace that facilitate user-to-user sales of items (i.e. "classifieds"), and we have some ideas rolling around internally to open up Commerce further.

We are starting a project to implement this in our community, because as mentioned one of the friends above, relying solely on advertising and programs like Google AdSense that every year has been paying less, is close to unfeasible our site and I see that this is a reality of many communities, not just our own.

We've researched and found systems like Sharetribe and Arcadier that charge you monthly for you to build a P2P system of stores.

https://www.sharetribe.com/

https://www.arcadier.com/

The problem with choosing a solution like this is that our users would have to create a second account to access this platforms.

It would be great to have this option directly on Invison because users would have direct access to this service without having to create a second access account.

I see that the Marketplace here already works very much like this systems, I believe that it would only need some adaptations, no?

[Joel R]

On 2/6/2018 at 5:38 PM, Silnei L Andrade said:

We are starting a project to implement this in our community, because as mentioned one of the friends above, relying solely on advertising and programs like Google AdSense that every year has been paying less, is close to unfeasible our site and I see that this is a reality of many communities, not just our own.

We've researched and found systems like Sharetribe and Arcadier that charge you monthly for you to build a P2P system of stores.

https://www.sharetribe.com/

https://www.arcadier.com/

The problem with choosing a solution like this is that our users would have to create a second account to access this platforms.

It would be great to have this option directly on Invison because users would have direct access to this service without having to create a second access account.

I see that the Marketplace here already works very much like this systems, I believe that it would only need some adaptations, no?

The Marketplace is IP.Downloads, which allows peer to peer selling of digital downloads.  This is already possible in vanilla Invision Community as long as you have IP.Downloads and IP.Commerce.  You enable paid files in your download settings and group permissions.  This does not work for physical products.

[Silnei L Andrade]

Yes I know. But it would be very interesting for many community if they tailored this so that it can be used as the sites of the examples above.

[Joel R]

I agree.  Clients have been requesting peer to peer selling for a long time, and makes sense for a community of users. 

[opentype]

But I believe most admins aren’t really aware of the legal consequences of becoming such a shopping portal. Classifieds (i.e. private announcements) are something very different than sales. 

[Silnei L Andrade]

This model in practice is similar to a classified, because the community is only an intermediary, the difference is that in this model there is a payment system and the community gets a small percentage of the sale. 5% for example. This can be used to sell products and services of any kind.

Regarding legal issues, this varies from country to country, but legally I believe it is the same as when a person sells some product or service directly to another in a classified.

[opentype]

Exactly, you are handling the sale and you want to make money with it. There is responsibility involved. You are the provider. You can’t just say: you guys figure it out if something goes wrong (chargebacks, lost deliveries, illegal activities and so on.)

Not to speak of the technical implementation. I can’t even begin to imagine how something like shipping would be handled, if any community user can ship any kind of product and any number of products from any point on the globe to every other country. There are of course many web stores that can pull this off, but they do nothing else and might invest millions in venture capital to develop all this. There is so much more involved than just to add a button for users to sell products. Technically and legally. 

[Joel R]

2 minutes ago, opentype said:

Exactly, you are handling the sale and you want to make money with it. There is responsibility involved. You are the provider. You can’t just say: you guys figure it out if something goes wrong (chargebacks, lost deliveries, illegal activities and so on.)

Not to speak of the technical implementation. I can’t even begin to imagine how something like shipping would be handled, if any community user can ship any kind of product and any number of products from any point on the globe to every other country. There are of course many web stores that can pull this off, but they do nothing else and might invest millions in venture capital to develop all this. There is so much more involved than just to add a button for users to sell products. Technically and legally. 

But isn't that responsibility the burden of the admin, not of IPS? 

It's our responsibility to know the legal guidance and laws surrounding the product, service, buyer protections, seller agreements, and shipping.  But it's not the problem of IPS which only needs to provide the technology to facilitate the transaction.  

This is just like their current IP.commerce, which doesn't take into account any of the Euro VAT.  

[opentype]

1 minute ago, Joel R said:

But isn't that responsibility the burden of the admin, not of IPS? 

Yes, that’s exactly what I meant when I said admins are probably not aware of the legal consequences. You can’t just flick a switch in Commerce – you would have to find qualified e-commerce lawyers first to set up your contracts with your sellers and things like that and you would have to be willing to permanently support your store, handling every dispute between buyers and sellers and so on. 

[Cyboman]

12 minutes ago, Joel R said:

But isn't that responsibility the burden of the admin, not of IPS? 

It's our responsibility to know the legal guidance and laws surrounding the product, service, buyer protections, seller agreements, and shipping.  But it's not the problem of IPS which only needs to provide the technology to facilitate the transaction.  

This is just like their current IP.commerce, which doesn't take into account any of the Euro VAT.  

The responsibility of IPS is imho, that IPS empowers their customers with "globally required" features they can use to achieve their own business model. Obviously the legal issues, warranty, dispute management... belong to the site admin. For most of this, you contact your lawyer. But your lawyer can't integrate a "checkmark field" for you, he only tells you that you require it in 25 different places for different statements. And not only you, all sellers in the whole european territory.

What I ask to be done by IPS (I know, my only possibility is to ask and wait... ), is integrating some minor optimizations.

For example

Button fields

-> if we could put a obligatory checkmark field in front of ANY button in the community, with a linked text, the community software would gain extremely power for legally correct contracting.

O     I have read the contract details (linke to xy contract) "required"
O     I acknowledge that a digital product is excluded from our refund policy, as the contract will be completed immediately "required"

[BUY NOW]    or    [CREATE NEW TOPIC]   ....

Account credits

-> As soon as it comes to withdrawals, we require more informations, like the tax percentage applied on each position. Withdrawals should have more accounting informations (exact items, their netto and brutto value, resident country), and this is as simple as adding some fields to an overview page with downloadable lists.

I suggested multiple times without response, to create an IPS Club "EU Trading" for such affairs. I would share my knowledge too. I have special custom plugins in action, and others code theirs too. Many advancements could be done as an empowered team. And the problems (that should be optimized in the core) could be communicated directly to IPS with a common voice.... All of this would lead to better results.

[Silnei L Andrade]

As it already works in the services mentioned above, IPS would only be the creator of the software, it would have no legal responsibility for the negotiations in the communities that buy the software.
Each site owner needs to create the terms of service as in any other web service there are legal responsibilities, obviously hiring a lawyer to create these terms according to the laws of the country of origin.

 

Legally I believe it would be like a small community fair. You, the forum owner will rent a space for small merchants and service providers to sell their products. In the services mentioned above, you have the option to choose between two types of payment. You can buy an annuity or monthly fee and the person sells your products in that space. That way the legal issue I believe would be equal to the owner of an event that rents space for marketers to sell their products at a fair.

In the case of commission per percentage of sale, those who sell do not pay anything to offer the products or services, only pay if the sale is made, in that case I do not remember anything that can be used as an example of use outside the internet, but it is something like sites like AIRBNB do for example.

Edited February 8, 2018 by Silnei L Andrade

[Morgin]

I'm obviously just speaking as a consumer, but there is also a point where you step back and realize IPS has a relatively small team for the scope of what they already support.

There are companies out there devoted entirely to being consumer to consumer storefronts. With the new OAuth features in 4.3, I'm somewhat inclined to argue that IPS would be better served by making it easy for us as customers to integrate with these other platforms (and to the extent IPS realizes there are some extremely popular integrations and builds in some specialized community-first features to enhance those integrations, that's great) and focus on the core community products that are key to IPS. Even with Commerce, IPS will never be (and shouldn't be trying to be) magento or shopify and simply don't have the resources to compete in that area of e-commerce. Expanding their offerings into p2p e-commerce will increase the complexity of the core offerings, and unless they can scale revenue and staff to match, would presumably slow down development of the other components.

If the future of IPS is a great community platform that seamlessly integrates with other more specialized software packages for various uses, I personally will be a happier customer than if they try to please everyone and end up stretching themselves too thin.

[AlexWright]

7 minutes ago, Morgin said:

I'm obviously just speaking as a consumer, but there is also a point where you step back and realize IPS has a relatively small team for the scope of what they already support.

There are companies out there devoted entirely to being consumer to consumer storefronts. With the new OAuth features in 4.3, I'm somewhat inclined to argue that IPS would be better served by making it easy for us as customers to integrate with these other platforms (and to the extent IPS realizes there are some extremely popular integrations and builds in some specialized community-first features to enhance those integrations, that's great) and focus on the core community products that are key to IPS. Even with Commerce, IPS will never be (and shouldn't be trying to be) magento or shopify and simply don't have the resources to compete in that area of e-commerce. Expanding their offerings into p2p e-commerce will increase the complexity of the core offerings, and unless they can scale revenue and staff to match, would presumably slow down development of the other components.

If the future of IPS is a great community platform that seamlessly integrates with other more specialized software packages for various uses, I personally will be a happier customer than if they try to please everyone and end up stretching themselves too thin.

Well said.

[Joel R]

I agree.  4.3 is what I'm calling the "Platform Update" with it's oAuth integration, WordPress integration, and REST API improvements.  It'll have a long and happy shelf life as it plays well with other systems and frameworks.  

[Morgin]

2 hours ago, Joel R said:

I agree.  4.3 is what I'm calling the "Platform Update" with it's oAuth integration, WordPress integration, and REST API improvements.  It'll have a long and happy shelf life as it plays well with other systems and frameworks.  

I was inspired by:

On 1/6/2018 at 2:32 PM, Joel R said:

Let me show you how:

• Want a Learning Management System (LMS)?  InvisionCommunity + WordPress + LearnDash
• Want eCommerce?  InvisionCommunity + WordPress + WooCommerce
• Want a Media system for videos and embeds? InvisionCommunity + WordPress + Envira 
• Want Order or Contact Forms? InvisionCommunity + WordPress + WPForms

[kmk]

On 2/6/2018 at 12:27 PM, Cyboman said:

yes, please. Commerce, paid downloads, personal member stores, events business, points commerce, TAX per app and per app content category and accounting really require more attention for business customers. It hurts me having to realize most of these requirements in WordPress... I would love to do more community businesses directly with IPS instead of leading my members away to WordPress.

please, IPS...world class