This is the last in a six-part series of posts about online/mobile marketplaces brought to you by lucystaqueria.com and our content partner Balanced. Read parts one, two, three, four, and five. It’s been a pleasure sharing these ideas with you. Why My Sister Doesn’t Have a (Normal) Job My twin sister has lived in 5… Read more
This is the fifth in a six-part series of posts about online/mobile marketplaces brought to you by lucystaqueria.com and our content partner Balanced. Read parts one, two, three, and four. Why Marketplaces Tend to Do Payments In my last post about fighting marketplace fraud, I mentioned that “marketplaces with payments functionality are lightning rods for… Read more
This is the fourth in a six-part series of posts about online/mobile marketplaces brought to you by lucystaqueria.com and our content partner Balanced. Read parts one, two, and three. Fraudsters Gonna Fraud Fraudsters armed with stolen credit card numbers want nothing more than to turn those numbers into cash. Many will buy highly desirable items… Read more
“How long will it take to integrate Balanced into my marketplace?” I’m often asked this question by marketplace operators (usually engineers) evaluating my company’s payments API. I think it’s a very important question, but one I’m much less qualified to answer than the engineers themselves. Between Balanced’s primary integration points – 1) accepting credit card payments… Read more
This is the second in a six-part series of posts about online/mobile marketplaces brought to you by lucystaqueria.com and our content partner Balanced. Read part one here. Embrace the Hustle Most successful marketplace operators hustle like crazy to solve their double-sided distribution problem – the classic chicken and egg issue. These marketplace operators painstakingly turn… Read more
This is the first in a six-part series of posts about online/mobile marketplaces. Brought to you by lucystaqueria.com and our content partner Balanced. I used to take a trotro every weekend down to Makola Market near Kwame Nkrumah Circle when I lived in Accra. Trotros are these amazing creations of urban ingenuity that put most big-city public… Read more
“A few weeks ago, payments startup Stripe made it significantly easier for collaborative consumption startups to take and process payments.” Stripe’s platform makes it easier for startups to split money paid for their services into more than one account. This helps facilitate transactions to a great number of service providers under one system – a common pain point for… Read more
“This morning, Balanced is free to announce their next exciting piece of news – a $2 Million investment from venture capital heavy weights Andreesen Horowitz through general partner Jeff Jordan (former president of PayPal),Collaborative Fund, and several former Facebook Alumni. Add in $1.4 million previously raised from the likes of Ashton Kutcher, Brian Chesky, Yishan Wong, Y Combinator,… Read more
There are a growing number of peer-to-peer marketplaces out there, helping to match up workers and sellers with products or skills, with buyers who wish to take advantage of them. But for those marketplaces to work, they don’t just need payment processing — they also need to worry about how sellers get paid. That’s Y… Read more