
Ask HN: Selling other people's goods through my online store - lsiunsuex
(NY, USA) After 4 years, we&#x27;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.<p>The book and the garments are a no brainer - their our goods, we&#x27;ll collect and pay tax on the sales and thats fine.<p>The problem comes in that my partner wants to sell other people&#x27;s books, without having to pay tax on it.<p>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&#x27;t put it in the store then - the store implies we&#x27;re selling something. If it&#x27;s just a link to somewhere else, it should go on a different page.<p>I came up with 2 options -<p>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&#x27;t reflect the purchase and we don&#x27;t need to deal with taxes - we&#x27;ve become a gateway per say.<p>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&#x27;s eyes - it&#x27;s a wash.<p>Any other ideas on how to deal with this?<p>Are there any CC gateways that can take an API call and split the purchase money into multiple accounts?<p>I suppose I could have the seller setup an account at stripe.com (CC gateway I&#x27;m using) and just make another API call and fund them that way? I don&#x27;t forsee selling more then a dozen 3rd party books.
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zer00eyz
Your missing another, potentially large cost, shipping and handling.

Buying the books even at retail (with your tax ID) might be a better option
for you and the customer, to avoid the cost of shipping.

It sound like the few hundred bucks in inventory cost isn't going to be a deal
breaker for you.

