this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2026
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The issue in the US with accepting payments on behalf of sellers is that you have to then collect sales tax which is different for every locality. Then you also have to issue tax forms to the sellers for sales over a certain amount. Which leaves us with sellers collecting payments on their own which means using something like PayPal or Bitcoin. You would just have to have people build trust through reviews and hope for the best. You could base the service in a random other country so that you wouldn't have a bunch of regulations to deal with and leave all the tax stuff up to the buyers and sellers. You'd probably run into issues with accepting credit cards though.
What about something like wero integration? Isn't that supposed to be peer-to-peer?
I get that the trust is another issue though. What happens when a person gets stiffed? Who's guaranteeing the purchase or vetting sellers?
On darknet markets they use an escrow account and admins act as mediators, so as long as you can show that you have a valid tracking number. The issue becomes when people try to scam you by selling you broken electronics or scam buyers pulling fraud returns. Weirdly this is common with VCRs on eBay. There's large resellers who buy good VCRs and steal parts out of them and return them. Then they resell on Amazon. I guess it comes back to having a karma system.