Re: New specs: Web Payments, Web Commerce and Payment Intents

On 03/10/2012 06:10 AM, Andrew Durham wrote:
> The only danger to the promisor in this case is that he won't get
> enough to complete his project or fulfill his obligation to the rest
> of the promisees. So I can think of four remedies:
>
> 1. The crowdfunding site could guarantee successful projects against
> this contingency out of an account funded by the percentage it takes
> of successful projects
> 2. Crowdfunding sites could recommend to promisors to add a certain
> amount to their goal in case this happens based on internal failure
> statitistics and in case it would be fatal to the project. It is
> probably very small amount of cases and a small percentage increase
> that is required.
> 3. You could allow for a second class of promisees called guarantors
> whose accounts would only be debited if the first class failed to meet
> the com:minimumAmount. They would be like fairy godmothers of the
> crowdfunding world, only called upon when really needed.
> 4. Not sure, but PayPal's approach seems different than Amazon's, and
> web payments could follow it. A promisee is actually charged at the
> moment of promising. Only when funds are paid is the amount added to
> the project's "total collected amount. If funds are insufficient, then
> a promisee has time to add them. No one gets misled. If the project
> fails, the money is refunded.

Another possibility is to allow the promisor to specify a secondary (and 
hidden) goal amount. In order for a campaign to be successful (trigger a 
collection of funds) two conditions must be true:

1. An amount X must have been promised by the deadline.
2. An amount Y, that is <= X, must be collectible by the deadline. The 
amount Y could be auto-populated on a user interface for promisors using 
a percentage of X based on an educated guess (eventual statistics 
gathered by the system).

This would help mitigate against the (hopefully rare) case of many 
promisees or several large promisees promising more funds than they have 
on the campaign deadline.

Btw, IMO, the terms promisor and promisee are flipped in the spec.

-- 
Dave Longley
CTO
Digital Bazaar, Inc.

Received on Saturday, 10 March 2012 23:35:42 UTC