Ask HN: Is this legal?

[d3x]

I created a site that lets people pick items on amazon and crowdfund them.

Lots of sites take donations so I figured this was not a big deal but yesterday someone told me that I am basically acting like escrow or layaway for amazon and if thats the case then I know they would have an issue with this.

I basically collect donations until the amount of money needed to complete the purchase is present and then the item is automatically purchased from amazon.com and shipped to the user that ordered it. Kind of like a kickstarter for stuff.

So my question is:

1. Is this legal?

2. Is this even worth perusing?

--Thx in advance

btw: the site is http://i.crowdfunded.it if the site does not work for some, sorry; amazon limits API calls and I am waiting on the to approve my additional associate tags so that I can have more than 2k queries an hour.

[bensack]

Check out PayPal's new adaptive payments (or other similar services). I agree with byoung2 (though I don't have expertise in this area) -- you can receive a preapproval to charge funds once you have the amount needed to purchase through Amazon.

You'll probably need to charge a service fee, since the amount you'll get from your payment processor will be assessed their service fees.

With all the buzz around X.commerce, I'd definitely check them out -- all sorts of promise for easy group payments coming from them in the last few months.

[byoung2]

The way Kickstarter does it is using Amazon payments. Once the number of pledged donations reaches the threshold, then everyone is charged. I think the problem arises when you charge them upfront and sit on the money.

[d3x → byoung2]

I just looked at that and its definitely the way to go...

--thx, going to make that change now