handling online merch sales transactions (was Re: merch vendors)

[Tony Sebro]

On 02/14/2013 03:05 PM, Bradley M. Kuhn wrote:
> If it's very important to the Evergreen Oversight Board that this be
> done post-haste for the upcoming event, Conservancy can try its best to
> make it happen in an extremely short time-frame, but I am really worried
> that it might negatively impact our ability to meet the existing
> commitments for the conference, which we're admittedly already behind on
> due to our limited staffing.
Hi, Amy:
Bradley and I have chatted about Conservancy's ability to receive online 
payments.  Apparently, Conservancy's current Google Checkout and PayPal 
accounts are limited to receiving donations, as per the terms of their 
respective ToS agreements.  As such, we can't use those accounts to 
handle merch sales.  I'm going to look into other solutions but, as 
Bradley said, we may not be able to have something in place in time for 
process advance orders for t-shirts before the Evergreen 2103 conference.

Now, as Bradley said, cash or Square for point-of-sale transactions 
would still be viable, even now.  Of course, that means that Evergreen 
would have to incur some risk by printing up shirts in advance of 
receiving payment.  Since this is (to my knowledge) Evergreen's first 
run of shirts, you might hedge your bets by creating a shirt design that 
could be resold at future conferences (or online, once we figure out the 
right way to accept payment), instead of, say, "Evergreen 2013" or 
something Vancouver-centric.

Best,
-Tony

-- 
Tony Sebro, General Counsel, Software Freedom Conservancy
+1-212-461-3245 x11
tony at sfconservancy.org
www.sfconservancy.org