Ask HN: Selling other people's goods through my online store

2 points

10 years ago

(NY, USA) After 4 years, we're finally building a shopping cart to sell goods through our site - for now, just t-shirts, hoodies, mugs, etc... with our logo on it but the purpose of the store was to sell a book my partner wrote last year.

The book and the garments are a no brainer - their our goods, we'll collect and pay tax on the sales and thats fine.

The problem comes in that my partner wants to sell other people's books, without having to pay tax on it.

He had originally thought that we would just link to their book on their site and they can deal with the sale - in which I rebutted - I wouldn't put it in the store then - the store implies we're selling something. If it's just a link to somewhere else, it should go on a different page.

I came up with 2 options -

1 - find out who does the sellers printing - and make a payment directly to them when my customers check out - then, our bank account doesn't reflect the purchase and we don't need to deal with taxes - we've become a gateway per say.

2 - process the payment myself - then pay the seller the exact amount (taking no profit - just to drive traffic to my site) - then in the tax man's eyes - it's a wash.

Any other ideas on how to deal with this?

Are there any CC gateways that can take an API call and split the purchase money into multiple accounts?

I suppose I could have the seller setup an account at stripe.com (CC gateway I'm using) and just make another API call and fund them that way? I don't forsee selling more then a dozen 3rd party books.