Re: On handling choice in price indexing

On 11/16/2013 02:10 PM, Joseph Potvin wrote:
> Does anyone on this list have thoughts about this discussion via
> github project for payswarm between Dave Longley and I about the how
> to handle choice in price indexing?  Some wider peer review of the
> considerations we both raise would be helpful...
>
>https://github.com/web-payments/payswarm.com/issues/9#issuecomment-28631421

I think we're going to have to re-think the way we're doing dynamic
pricing in the PaySwarm stack. I don't know if continuously regenerating
pricing information by regenerating listings is a good approach.

For example, if you wanted pricing information to be valid
minute-to-minute as well as your listings to be distributed widely, you
don't leave much time for the listings to be in flight. That is, any
listing that needs to be valid on a minute-by-minute basis can only
really have a listing validity period of a minute. That doesn't allow
the listing to get distributed very widely before it becomes invalid.

Allowing the vendor to tie their price to an index of some sort would
allow the price to be discovered at the time of sale, rather than at the
time of listing creation. I realize that this would require some
re-thinking and it's impact would be non-trivial. That said, I think we
should look into it a bit more deeply. I share Joseph's concerns.

The downside with this approach is that the price will never be truly
known except at the time of sale. So, providing "current pricing"
information will be problematic because prices could change from a
microsecond to microsecond basis, as it does in high frequency trading.

Dave, I don't think the solution has to be that complex. My assumption
is that you just do a REST call to a URL to get the current price. This
is done by the payment processor at the time of sale, right before the
sale is processed. There are problems here, for example, if the price
deviates by more than a few percentage points from the one listed to the
buyer. We're going to have to put a decent bit of thought into the
solution and all of its side effects. I don't think we have an
acceptable solution w/ listing re-generation.

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny, G+: +Manu Sporny)
Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: Meritora - Web payments commercial launch
http://blog.meritora.com/launch/

Received on Sunday, 17 November 2013 20:29:40 UTC