Interest in a PayPal based vending machine?
Posted: Thu May 12, 2016 4:45 pm
I'm going to release a PayPal based vending box on the Kitely Market soon.
It is being tested in my Chandlery store on Panthalassa, if you need supplies for building boats you could try out the vendors. Or just poke at them and not complete the transactions. Try them out at (hypergrid) grid.kitely.com:8002:Panthalassa or (Kitely directly) https://www.kitely.com/virtual-world/Ka ... anthalassa.
If you are interested in beta testing a PayPal vending box, contact me.
Paradoxically, a vending machine isn't much good on Kitely. This is because Kitely is a “filtered grid” and your customers are not allowed to hypergrid with anything bought in-world unless it is set to both COPY and TRANS. If you don't want to give COPY and TRANS to all your customers you are out of luck. (Unless all your customers spend all their time in Kitely anyway).
However, it turns out that I sell a class of products that are COPY and TRANS: Supplies for people to build into boats for sail\\\\sale. So I can use my own vending boxes to sell sails, binnacles, speedometers, outboard motors, etc.
On other grids besides Kitely, you can set out a vending machine, have people buy things from it, and they can take the products home with them even to other grids. Since many grids do not have an economy, I am hopeful that there will be a use for a vending box that can accept PayPal.
Of course, PayPal extracts a heavy cost for merchants to use it, USD$0.30 plus 2.9% per sale . And then I need to fund a server that mediates communication between the vendor boxes and PayPal. So I am adding an additional USD$0.20 on top of PayPal for this. I will use this money to buy beer\\\\\\\\ help pay the costs of keeping a server powered, cooled and connected to the Internet.
It is being tested in my Chandlery store on Panthalassa, if you need supplies for building boats you could try out the vendors. Or just poke at them and not complete the transactions. Try them out at (hypergrid) grid.kitely.com:8002:Panthalassa or (Kitely directly) https://www.kitely.com/virtual-world/Ka ... anthalassa.
If you are interested in beta testing a PayPal vending box, contact me.
Paradoxically, a vending machine isn't much good on Kitely. This is because Kitely is a “filtered grid” and your customers are not allowed to hypergrid with anything bought in-world unless it is set to both COPY and TRANS. If you don't want to give COPY and TRANS to all your customers you are out of luck. (Unless all your customers spend all their time in Kitely anyway).
However, it turns out that I sell a class of products that are COPY and TRANS: Supplies for people to build into boats for sail\\\\sale. So I can use my own vending boxes to sell sails, binnacles, speedometers, outboard motors, etc.
On other grids besides Kitely, you can set out a vending machine, have people buy things from it, and they can take the products home with them even to other grids. Since many grids do not have an economy, I am hopeful that there will be a use for a vending box that can accept PayPal.
Of course, PayPal extracts a heavy cost for merchants to use it, USD$0.30 plus 2.9% per sale . And then I need to fund a server that mediates communication between the vendor boxes and PayPal. So I am adding an additional USD$0.20 on top of PayPal for this. I will use this money to buy beer\\\\\\\\ help pay the costs of keeping a server powered, cooled and connected to the Internet.