And there’s a draft of me again ;-) . Not that someone will use the following in practice, but it is an idea. If you want to use it, just put my name somewhere.

Well here it is: The problem with safe trading at the internet is that you never know if your ordered product arrives or that you never know if you’ll receive your money.

So, this idea is about consumer – consumer trading using telephone or e-mail, where the product will be send using regular mail. At this moment this is mostly done at clean trust (or with cash on delivery, but that costs 1% of the sum in The Netherlands), but it’s not something you should and can trust.

That’s where my idea comes in: a go-between. In fact it’s the trading company. Let’s assume that the sender is the producer of the product and the receiver the consumer. To start the trade, the producer sends the product to the go-between. The consumer, meanwhile, sends the money to the same go-between. The sum of money also has a small fee for the go-between and twice the transport costs if the go-between doesn’t deliver himself.

The go-between waits for both to arrive and then forwards them. If one of both doesn’t arrive in, let’s say, two weeks, the product or money is send back to it’s owner and the trade will be canceled. The person who didn’t send it’s stuff to the go-between will receive a bill (or it will be held in).

Well, maybe something like this already exists, but it’s quite genius for big parcels.

This post earlier appeared in Dutch on my previous weblog.