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I sell urns online and my website just has an email link. No shopping cart. A brick-and-mortor urn shop would never have a shopping cart, so why would a virtual

• numbsafari 1y ago
  As in urns for ashes, not Universal Resource Names.
  • jagged-chisel 1y ago
    urns, not URNs
• 90s_dev 1y ago
  > if you squint and look closely you'll find interesting people doing interesting things all around you Yep :)
• gotaqmyfriends 1y ago
  How does the woodworking company ensure payment? Does the specialized nature ensure only "real" customers buy? Is there a trusted relationship? A threat of legal action? I know the other way around is basically the norm: how does one know the company, the seller, will actually provide the product after paying. But the prevailing culture, currently, is that companies in this regard are trustworthy and customers are not. It's a bit debatable but it makes sense.
  • bradly 1y ago
    > How does the woodworking company ensure payment? Does the specialized nature ensure only "real" customers buy? Yes, I believe it does. These are highly specific brass tacks for making oval shaker boxes. There are very few manufactures of a proper #2 brass tack these days, so I would very much want to stay on the good side and any suppliers. I think they said in their faq that twice they haven't been paid in 20 years or something like that. Their online "store" appears to be down right now–hopefully they are still in business. edit: It appears John passed in 2023 :( https://blog.lostartpress.com/2023/02/07/john-wilson-1939-2023-the-shaker-box-king/ https://blog.lostartpress.com/2023/02/07/john-wilson-1939-20...
    • gotaqmyfriends 1y ago
      Sad to hear. Thanks for the info.
  • ccppurcell 1y ago
    They have your address and it would be illegal not to pay. But also if the products have little to no resale value, are good quality and replaced relatively frequently, then such a company is worth its weight in gold. Even if you "get away with it" you can obviously never do business with them again.
  • brazzy 1y ago
    Not sure about the US, but in my country that's how mail order used to work for decades, and it's still pretty common to offer that payment option, though usually with some restrictions (e.g. not for your first order). Most people are not scammers and will pay simply because it's the right thing to do.If your margins are decent, you can just eat the loss to some scammers as the cost of doing business. Especially if there's no real resale market for your product.
    • DrillShopper 1y ago
      Cash on delivery (COD) used to be popular in the US for a lot of the mail order junk on television in the 70s to early 80s. The rise of the credit card for normal people was a cause of its decline because people now had a reliable way to pay over the phone when ordering said junk. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash_on_delivery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash_on_delivery
      • brazzy 1y ago
        COD still protects against fraud by having the delivery company collect the money before handing over the order. With the "pay the bill later" it's entirely up to the recipient whether they decide to pay. Some will even just forget it with no ill intent.
• Aurornis 1y ago
  > I've purchased specialized woodworking tools online that simply involved filling out a form. I later received the parts with an invoice to send payment. You can simply not pay if you choose not to. People romanticize businesses like this but there’s a reason you’re not posting the link. It only works when it’s for a small group of people who are in the know and refer trusted buyers. It’s also trivial to set up any number of different online purchase options that would avoid all of the problems with this for a nearly trivial fee. I guess I’ve spent enough time dealing with things like non-payment or doing work for trades that never arrive that I just don’t romanticize this stuff any more.
  • bradly 1y ago
    > People romanticize businesses like this but there’s a reason you’re not posting the link You are correct that I was a worried about an HN hug of orders for brass tacks. > I guess I’ve spent enough time dealing with things like non-payment or doing work for trades that never arrive that I just don’t romanticize this stuff any more. In this case there isn't much of a choice. When the last manufacture of brass tacks closed down, John bought the machinery and is the only place I know of to get proper shaker-style brass tacks in the US. I wanted the tacks, so I had no choice in the method of payment. I understand your sentiment but it was perfectly normal to pump gas before paying in the U.S. for a very long time and still is in many places. In other cities it is unheard of. Restaurants we can still eat before paying, but not many other places still give consumers much trust.
    • Aurornis 1y ago
      > I understand your sentiment but it was perfectly normal to pump gas before paying in the U.S. for a very long time and still is in many places. I had a friend who worked at a gas station in high school. Filing police reports for people who filled up and left without paying was a standard part of operations. This was in a nice area, too. Often people just forgot and drove away. They had recourse because they had security cameras and people had license plates. The cities where you’re forced to pay inside first probably have police departments that don’t respond to non-payment as gas stations. If someone showed up with a gas can or something they were instructed to shut off the pump and make them come inside to pay. It wasn’t as much of an honor system as it seems if you’re not familiar with it. You can’t have a pay-later business without an amount of non-payment, which has to be compensated by higher prices (which other customers shoulder). These are all choices a vendor can make. Something like this usually lasts right up until the secret gets out to a wider audience where the people who don’t care about social norms have no problem abusing a system left wide open.
• phillsav 1y ago
  In your case, perhaps a shopping cart could increase conversion, perhaps not. While an e-commerce solution is not always needed, there’s a good chance that a very simple shop cart facility will convert more than an email link, for certain types of products.
• cortesoft 1y ago
  > There are so many way to do commerce both on and offline and if you squint and look closely you'll find interesting people doing interesting things all around you. Why do I want "interesting" ways to buy things? I want to be able to buy what I want quickly and reliably. I don't get the benefit of making me try to figure out how to buy something I want
  • Juliate 1y ago
    Why wouldn't you want interesting experiences options, from time to time? Why wouldn't you appreciate getting out of the (often) dull (sometimes) frictionless select-order-pay-receive-use-store-forget-discard purchase experience?
  • bradly 1y ago
    > Why do I want "interesting" ways to buy things? I want to be able to buy what I want quickly and reliably. I don't get the benefit of making me try to figure out how to buy something I want Understandable view, but try thinking it from the producers point of view. They want to create an sell in the way that makes sense for themselves and their goals. There are all different types of people with all different types of goals, so it is really awesome when there is all different types of commerce going on. It isn't about eliminating something, but the freedom to make something and sell it on your terms.
• Cthulhu_ 1y ago
  > You can simply not pay if you choose not to. It's only a matter of time before this seller falls victim to a scammer - once they're found. I used to work for a book publisher who started doing their own e-commerce, and at the time one of the payment methods was a "pay later" one that predated the internet ("acceptgiro"). It only took a few months (if that) after the first sites went live that someone placed an order for a few hundred euros worth of books and had it delivered at a storage unit address. We scrapped the pay later payment option for orders over a certain amount then, and I'm sure later on the pay later option was removed entirely in favor of pay in advance methods. There's newer pay later schemes now (Klarna IIRC) but the risk and debt collection falls to this payment provider. Of course, they got in legal trouble recently because they're a loan / credit company but didn't present the user with the right legalese for that.
  • cess11 1y ago
    That's just business, you need to price in disturbances like an important customer going bankrupt or switching suppliers or some customers refusing to pay for other reasons, and do a risk assessment before supplying on large orders. It's one of the earliest lessons you'll learn from starting a company. Another close one is to not waste time on failed sales and annoying customers, replacing them with new customers is usually more profitable and enjoyable.
  • bradly 1y ago
    Unfortunately, fraud is a part of business. During my time at Intuit, Apple, and Shopify fraud was a huge part of everything I worked on. When I was a teenager working at a gas station people would just run out the door with a 24 pack of beer.
  • thesuitonym 1y ago
    In another post it was revealed that the owner passed away in 2023. While I'm as certain as you that there was some level of abuse, it doesn't seem to have been enough to make him change his ways. Consider also that if you have a plumber, electrician, or some other tradesperson come to your house, you don't pay them until after they have done the work. You could choose not to pay them, but they have your address, and you'll never be able to do business with them again. On a small enough scale, this is all you need to prevent abuse.
• joshvm 1y ago
  > I've purchased specialized woodworking tools online that simply involved filling out a form. I later received the parts with an invoice to send payment. You can simply not pay if you choose not to. Payment after receipt is very common in Switzerland, but fraud is presumably rare. Your name would probably go on the debtors register and that's the sort of bad credit history you don't want to have. At some point the police/debt collection is involved, they get sent to whatever the address is and so on. For the average person it's not worth burning your name and address for a free spokeshave.
  • kiney 1y ago
    also kinda common in germany. Used to be much more common, but you still see it, especially in b2b, even for high value items
    • immibis 1y ago
      You see delayed payment everywhere in b2b - "net-30" for example. There was a story posted on HN once about a business saving money by prepaying. Some guy was working for a restaurant and saved 70% (yes, over two thirds) on their meat by, instead of ordering each day and settling on net-30 as they had been doing and as is typical, calling up their meat vendor and committing to a certain minimum order every day and paying for it right then. Because cash flow is that important to some businesses. The vendor said they'd never had a customer so good before, and yet it wasn't such a big deal for the restaurant. (Yes, they tend to run on thin margins, well, now their margins are a little bit fatter and they can afford to have mispredicted their meat usage a little, and still come out ahead). It's the same as Hetzner vs AWS. You buy AWS, you can ramp up and down your bill any time, but you're overpaying by a huge multiple (can even be 10x-100x). If you get your servers from any traditional provider that's updated their price in the last five years, they'll bill you monthly for your server, and there's a setup cost of approximately one month, and you can't scale up without a week latency or down without two months, but you get the same amount of server for an incredibly low price (if you're accustomed to AWS) which - if you're not running a workload as bursty as Amazon on Christmas Day - lets you overprovision enough to more than make up for the inflexibility.
• kingofheroes 1y ago
  Two local businesses I frequent (one for baked goods and another for coffee beans) use mailing lists for membership and ordering. Only "drawback", if it even is one, is they rely on word-of-mouth because I had no idea they existed until I saw them mentioned in a thread on a local subreddit.
• stronglikedan 1y ago
  There are plenty of people who don't want to interact with anyone when making a purchase (me included), and you are losing that business, even if it is only a small part.
• okaram 1y ago
  There's so many different people, and it's hard to know if that's made you lose customers. I would immediately discard any website that makes me send an email to order.
  • chipsrafferty 1y ago
    Me too. I don't want to be signed up for some email spam, and I don't want to initiate a conversation about buying something if I don't already have enough information about it to want to buy it.