Happy Friday!

Last week I wrote about security and privacy and touched on the money side of things. This week I have to adjust that.

When it comes to how money and payments are handled, I was attempting to leverage a third-party called Stripe to let folks pay farmers directly.

Then, this week as I was setting up the payment buttons and hooking everything together, something dawned on me.

Your shopping cart will be full of things that are sold by many different farmers.

I know that sounds super obvious, but there aren't many apps that have the problem of you trying to check out with multiple businesses' products in them. This would be a bit like going to a restaurant, but everything you eat is from other restaurants. When it comes time to pay, you want to pay for one bill and be done with it, not pay each individual restaurant each time.

Unfortunately, paying each restaurant each time is the sort of easy way to build it. For shoppers, it'd look like having to click a pay button and enter payment details for every different farmer.

No thanks.

So in order to make it so your checkout is one button to pay for everything, the money will technically move to my Stripe account before it is automatically paid out to the farmers.

The word automatically is pretty important here. When you check out, I can tell Stripe where all the money should eventually wind up, and it will automatically move it to them as soon as the payments clear. So while in a very technical sense, the money is first sent to me, Stripe moves it out as soon as possible.

I never wanted your payments to move through my business. I wanted you to pay farmers directly. Sadly the only way to do that is to make it so you have to do a checkout for each and every farmer, or I do one check out, and it moves to my business until it clears and is automatically transferred.

There is an upside here, though. I'm still investigating how exactly this works, but because the money will clear in my business first, this should greatly simplify how I can handle refund requests and disputes.

Pretty boring email update this week, but I thought it was important to be very clear about the change here.

If you have any questions, let me know!

Sincerely,

Ryan