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Ask HN: Micropayment platform to support businesses during Covid-19

1 points by mickotron ↗ HN
Hi All,

The economic outlook now and what seems likely in the future, does not look good for small business owners. Already their revenue is down significantly and some landlords are not willing to reduce rents to assist them to survive.

I want people to be able to help local businesses in their area even if I can't visit them due to lockdown, the business must close temporarily due to lockdown or related circumstances, or the consumers' reduction in income prevents them from visiting and spending money in-store.

Is there a currently available micropayment platform that can allow people to nominate a maximum contribution value ($)for a period (week, fortnight, month etc), and have that divided among several nominated businesses in that period? Say someone with reduced income that still wants to support their local businesses can have a fixed spend (certainty), and divide that among many receivers, with minimal friction.

This is in contrast to how a lot of these platforms operate, where the individual must seek and make payment to each individual recipient, usually at pre-defined amounts per receiver, bringing the total spend up and not allowing consumers to support multiple recipients due to the cost.

If there isn't such a platform currently existing, do you guys/gals think this is viable?

Edit: removed duplicate word.

3 comments

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verdverm
Are you advocating for donation platform?

I'd rather spend the money and get the service or good in response. If we are heading into a recession, it's time to conserve resources. Hopefully it's more of a reorg?

mickotron
Yes a donation platform. Yes everyone would prefer to get goods/services in exchange for their money. But this is to ensure the business' survival. I think if asked, most people would want their local restaurant, coffee shop, boutique store, corner store etc to stay in business. Potentially, similar to kickstarter, these businesses could provide some sort of reward system, which could translate to "IOU" goods/services when the economy and business picks up.

And yes I do agree that in these times, bad businesses need to be left to fail. However, this is different: for the public health good, governments in many countries are restricting movement of people, operating requirements for businesses, or even closing down some businesses for weeks/months at a time. It's not the fault of these business owners that this happens. Unfortunately for the good of the public health, they lose out, default on mortgages/loans, lay off staff, and exit to go on welfare (if available to them in their country). I think this is a reasonable alternative to that scenario.

verdverm
Ending excessive lock down and fearfulness seems like a better path forward to me. There is much more positive data coming out recently and we need to reevaluate the policies put in place by incompetent leadership in haste on bad info. Is it the people's fault for putting these people in power? Are we suffering the consequences of prior poor choices?

Kickstarter and Patreon already exist, why do we need a new platform?