RetailBot

[markm]

Because trying to accept bitcoins instead of whatever currency one normally retails things for is so ridiculously fraught with various hoops one has to jump through and maybe even daytrading one has to get into just to let someone give you $x.xx using bitcoins instead of using $ directly, I have been trying to figure out how a bot might be able to accomplush the feat instead of trying to make a retailer do it themselves using hours they probably should be using to do retailing instead of to do arcane forex stuff involving bitcoins.

How does the following sketch of a potential algorithm sound?:

- Do not offer to sell anything until enough DSM (DropShipperacceptedMoney) are on hand to cover the dropshipping of the product.

- Upon obtaining any currency of a kind a dropshipper will accept ("DSM"), select from dropshipables where cost is less than DSM on hand.

(The object of this is to avoid accepting any orders that we'd be unable to fill if we failed to sell customer's offered bitcoins.)

- Announce the availability of one of the products found by the select, if it found any. If not wait for more DSM to somehow become on hand.

- Upon receiving an inquiry as to price of the announced to be available product, look up current conversion rate of bitcoin into DSM, convert, and warn inquirer that price might already have changed depending on market conditions so better buy quick or inquire price again.

- Upon recieving bitcoins, sell them for DSM and go back to select from dropshippables step.

(If we recieved them from a customer, in re a product, order the dropshipping of the product, duh.)

- Now we know how much some of our DSM actually cost us in bitcoins. This could be useful to know when we get back to the look up price step, as we could plug it into the how one determines conversion rate. One could use the conversion rate one actually got one's current inventory of  DSM at to moderate in some way - exactly what way might be very debatable. Maybe always use whichever conversion is better for the retailer, the past one or the current market one?

Is that about it for the basics?

Then of course things like "do you want to gimme some bitcoin up front to automatically buy this product for you if ever I see it can be gotten for the amount of bitcoins you want to gimme up front to work with?"

-MarkM-

[slush]

Because trying to accept bitcoins instead of whatever currency one normally retails things for is so ridiculously fraught with various hoops one has to jump through and maybe even daytrading one has to get into just to let someone give you $x.xx using bitcoins instead of using $ directly, I have been trying to figure out how a bot might be able to accomplush the feat instead of trying to make a retailer do it themselves using hours they probably should be using to do retailing instead of to do arcane forex stuff involving bitcoins.

Heh, interesting topic, but I totally didn't catch the rest of the post. Am I alone?