I'm with J'Karrah on this one. When I read Sel's post I had little "POTENTIAL LEGAL REPERCUSSIONS!" alarm bells go off in my head.
You could have a thread or a subsection of the forum where people can post stuff for sale or commission offers, limit it to members only and issue a disclaimer that the site is not responsible if someone doesn't get what they paid for. Draconity.org should definitely NOT be processing payments. OMG, I can't even begin to imagine the potential headache with privacy issues, and implementation, and all sorts of crap that would come with that.
We would never have been processing payments at all. The legalities of being a shop ourselves are things I raised with Sel a long time ago and we agreed that we didn't want to go down that route, what Sel is talking about here isn't a Draconity.org shop where members can post items to sell, it's more offering members here either the webspace or the option of using their own galleries for advertising their own products for sale. There was ALWAYS going to be a legal disclaimer stating that draconity.org is in no way responsible for any transactions taking place. Rest assured we're not sitting here throwing random ideas into the open without thinking them through beforehand.
All payments would be done in whatever way the individual member wanted, paypal is obviously the best way to do this so buyer and seller have peace of mind but it is up to the member as to what they offer as this site wouldn't have anything to do with that at all. We're basically offering the webspace and advertising (through the member base) that draconity.org can give, but none of the legal ramifications or help with actually selling the items. Think of us more like a webserver where this idea is concerned with a community attached to it.
I know Sel mentioned the one main shop option in his initial thread but that was never really an option due to the legalities involved, hence Sel pretty much saying that would be the crap option. I wouldn't have mentioned it at all but Sel likes to give everyone the headsup of what has been looked at, even if it's been decided against. However, if everyone had responded to this thread saying "Yeah we want option 1!" then we would have gone back to the idea and worked out what we would need to do to make sure everyone was covered and if it was indeed a feesable option financially. What we were trying to find though was something to add to the site so that every member could have their own personal shop, but there just isn't one that can be integrated into the forums.
I think having something like a "Shopping With Draconity.org" or "Members Sales and Services" topic would be a better way to go. Let people post links to their own websites or online stores, or post their contact information and pricing guidelines for commissions and such if they don't have their own site. The main thing would be disallowing posting links to shopping sites not specifically connected to members.
For example I could post a link to my CafePress shop or my website, but I could not post a link advertising some cool dragon collection I saw being offered by the Danbury Mint
As for the idea of a thread to advertise any personal shops that members have - sounds good but not as a way for people to keep updating with new products or offers they have on because it would get too cluttered and hard to remember if the shop you liked the look of was on page 2 or page 34 of the thread. Having a thread with a constantly updated first post may work though, where members can post links to their shops and the first post be updated with a list of the individual member name and their shop link? This is going WAY off what we wanted to do though and not actually offering members anything at all unless they already have a site and just want to advertise it. The creativity section of the forums does that already.
If there was some official draconity.org merchandise or something, I could see it being sold through Cafe Press or a similar company.
That's in the works but kind of way off yet. There's a lot more that needs doing with the site for the members first, like the possibility of their own shops, if they want a draconity.org email address, their own webspace (for whatever purpose), search box, local kin notifier, etc.
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Topic: Draconity.org Shops (technical) (Read 2161 times)
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