If you have even a small bandwidth to maintain it over time, quick and simple solutions like an Excel template and a few custom scripts work great and often end up being more flexible as your end user is mostly working with raw data.
I've purchased specialized woodworking tools online that simply involved filling out a form. I later received the parts with an invoice to send payment. You can simply not pay if you choose not to.
There are so many way to do commerce both on and offline and if you squint and look closely you'll find interesting people doing interesting things all around you.
People romanticize businesses like this but there’s a reason you’re not posting the link. It only works when it’s for a small group of people who are in the know and refer trusted buyers.
It’s also trivial to set up any number of different online purchase options that would avoid all of the problems with this for a nearly trivial fee.
I guess I’ve spent enough time dealing with things like non-payment or doing work for trades that never arrive that I just don’t romanticize this stuff any more.
You are correct that I was a worried about an HN hug of orders for brass tacks.
> I guess I’ve spent enough time dealing with things like non-payment or doing work for trades that never arrive that I just don’t romanticize this stuff any more.
In this case there isn't much of a choice. When the last manufacture of brass tacks closed down, John bought the machinery and is the only place I know of to get proper shaker-style brass tacks in the US. I wanted the tacks, so I had no choice in the method of payment.
I understand your sentiment but it was perfectly normal to pump gas before paying in the U.S. for a very long time and still is in many places. In other cities it is unheard of. Restaurants we can still eat before paying, but not many other places still give consumers much trust.
I had a friend who worked at a gas station in high school. Filing police reports for people who filled up and left without paying was a standard part of operations.
This was in a nice area, too. Often people just forgot and drove away. They had recourse because they had security cameras and people had license plates. The cities where you’re forced to pay inside first probably have police departments that don’t respond to non-payment as gas stations.
If someone showed up with a gas can or something they were instructed to shut off the pump and make them come inside to pay. It wasn’t as much of an honor system as it seems if you’re not familiar with it.
You can’t have a pay-later business without an amount of non-payment, which has to be compensated by higher prices (which other customers shoulder).
These are all choices a vendor can make. Something like this usually lasts right up until the secret gets out to a wider audience where the people who don’t care about social norms have no problem abusing a system left wide open.
People who never experienced high-trust and customs societies cannot grasp why and how it works infinitely better than low-trust ones.
But granted, all it takes is a few determined bad faith actors to break high-trust, when they are not vehemently and swiftly rejected…
But we have created an environment where this kind of thing is unthinkable, not even because people won't do it, but because they will only create legal trouble for themselves if they try. So the modus operandi for your average citizen in Western societies in general and US in particular is to not get involved and leave it all to law enforcement.
This is why some things can’t be found/bought without hetting the right path/contacts.
Contrast with the typical restaurant.
Moreover, trespassers, in addition to pursuit, often get flagged in a shared « do not host » book file across hotel lines.
The business can just make less money than they would if everyone paid (which is, as you say, impossible). Costs and prices are linked in some markets, but it's not a natural law.
An interesting story behind those:
https://blog.lostartpress.com/2023/02/07/john-wilson-1939-20...
What you're insinuating is true, but more likely the reason they didn't post the link is that it's not relevant.
That's probably alien to HN and a lot of them may try to contact him, as if they have a possibility of becoming his customer, which they don't.
I know the other way around is basically the norm: how does one know the company, the seller, will actually provide the product after paying. But the prevailing culture, currently, is that companies in this regard are trustworthy and customers are not. It's a bit debatable but it makes sense.
Yes, I believe it does. These are highly specific brass tacks for making oval shaker boxes. There are very few manufactures of a proper #2 brass tack these days, so I would very much want to stay on the good side and any suppliers.
I think they said in their faq that twice they haven't been paid in 20 years or something like that. Their online "store" appears to be down right now–hopefully they are still in business.
edit: It appears John passed in 2023 :( https://blog.lostartpress.com/2023/02/07/john-wilson-1939-20...
Most people are not scammers and will pay simply because it's the right thing to do.If your margins are decent, you can just eat the loss to some scammers as the cost of doing business. Especially if there's no real resale market for your product.
With the "pay the bill later" it's entirely up to the recipient whether they decide to pay. Some will even just forget it with no ill intent.
While an e-commerce solution is not always needed, there’s a good chance that a very simple shop cart facility will convert more than an email link, for certain types of products.
Yep :)
Why do I want "interesting" ways to buy things? I want to be able to buy what I want quickly and reliably. I don't get the benefit of making me try to figure out how to buy something I want
Why wouldn't you appreciate getting out of the (often) dull (sometimes) frictionless select-order-pay-receive-use-store-forget-discard purchase experience?
Understandable view, but try thinking it from the producers point of view. They want to create an sell in the way that makes sense for themselves and their goals. There are all different types of people with all different types of goals, so it is really awesome when there is all different types of commerce going on. It isn't about eliminating something, but the freedom to make something and sell it on your terms.
It's only a matter of time before this seller falls victim to a scammer - once they're found. I used to work for a book publisher who started doing their own e-commerce, and at the time one of the payment methods was a "pay later" one that predated the internet ("acceptgiro"). It only took a few months (if that) after the first sites went live that someone placed an order for a few hundred euros worth of books and had it delivered at a storage unit address. We scrapped the pay later payment option for orders over a certain amount then, and I'm sure later on the pay later option was removed entirely in favor of pay in advance methods.
There's newer pay later schemes now (Klarna IIRC) but the risk and debt collection falls to this payment provider. Of course, they got in legal trouble recently because they're a loan / credit company but didn't present the user with the right legalese for that.
It's one of the earliest lessons you'll learn from starting a company. Another close one is to not waste time on failed sales and annoying customers, replacing them with new customers is usually more profitable and enjoyable.
Consider also that if you have a plumber, electrician, or some other tradesperson come to your house, you don't pay them until after they have done the work. You could choose not to pay them, but they have your address, and you'll never be able to do business with them again. On a small enough scale, this is all you need to prevent abuse.
Payment after receipt is very common in Switzerland, but fraud is presumably rare. Your name would probably go on the debtors register and that's the sort of bad credit history you don't want to have. At some point the police/debt collection is involved, they get sent to whatever the address is and so on. For the average person it's not worth burning your name and address for a free spokeshave.
There was a story posted on HN once about a business saving money by prepaying. Some guy was working for a restaurant and saved 70% (yes, over two thirds) on their meat by, instead of ordering each day and settling on net-30 as they had been doing and as is typical, calling up their meat vendor and committing to a certain minimum order every day and paying for it right then. Because cash flow is that important to some businesses. The vendor said they'd never had a customer so good before, and yet it wasn't such a big deal for the restaurant. (Yes, they tend to run on thin margins, well, now their margins are a little bit fatter and they can afford to have mispredicted their meat usage a little, and still come out ahead).
It's the same as Hetzner vs AWS. You buy AWS, you can ramp up and down your bill any time, but you're overpaying by a huge multiple (can even be 10x-100x). If you get your servers from any traditional provider that's updated their price in the last five years, they'll bill you monthly for your server, and there's a setup cost of approximately one month, and you can't scale up without a week latency or down without two months, but you get the same amount of server for an incredibly low price (if you're accustomed to AWS) which - if you're not running a workload as bursty as Amazon on Christmas Day - lets you overprovision enough to more than make up for the inflexibility.
I would immediately discard any website that makes me send an email to order.
Every business is basically a phone number that you can message. It does not matter if you buy a pizza or furniture, book a hotel or need someone to clean your sofa.
No website. No need to fill in forms. No platform fee.
But just because it works that way there, doesn't mean it's right. There's nothing about SEA that implies to me the pinnacle of operational efficiency.
Whilst cheap 'dumb' phones do still exist and are used, even low income earners in South East Asia tend to have a smart phone, and most of the business done as landgenoot says is conducted via Telegram, Facebook, or occasionally WhatsApp or Line.
There are also ways of paying using nothing but a phone number, but usually business is done on a smart phone where photos of products are are shared, delivery is arranged, and since COVID, most payments are done via QR codes that require a smart phone.
In my experience this is not only true of the cities, but also even out in the provinces.
Enabling customer self administration/configuration of a "B2B SaaS" system mandates some form of interaction. I would be surprised at how many would not expect "touching a browser" to do so.
> A vast majority of the hours I've spent building web sites & applications has been devoted to administrative-style UI/UX wherein we are ultimately giving the admin a way to mutate fields in a database somewhere such that the application behaves to the customer's expectations.
If there is no validation of information given nor system rules enforcement, then I would question the correctness of said sites/applications.
> In many situations, it is clearly 100x faster/easier/less bullshit to send the business a template of the configuration (Excel files) and then load+merge their results directly into the same SQL tables.
This approach obviates the value added by a system enforcing core software engineering concepts such as fitness of purpose, error detection/reporting, business workflows, and/or role-based access control.
In short, while letting customers send Excel files "and then load+merge their results directly into the same SQL tables" might sound nice, this does not scale and will certainly result in a failure state at some point.
We execute Python in our PG database and do testing through PGTAP.
Much of US banking operates almost entirely on this premise and has done so forever.
> error detection/reporting, business workflows, and/or role-based access control.
I'd take a look at the Nacha (ACH) operating rules if you have any doubt that sophisticated business workflows can be built on top of flat files and asynchronous transmission.
Not literally. Banks have a lot of automations. The reasons they’re not real-time has more to do with various regulations and technicalities of recourse, not because it’s someone doing semi-manual processing of everything at each bank.
Granted the only real security was the FTP username and password, but it was all internal and at the time (1990s) that was good enough.
I've had the same epiphany when I worked for a fintech startup that interacts with financial institutions. Having a website just isn't necessary for some of the day-to-day operations vs just sending CSV/Excel files back and forth for reconciliation, settlement, accounting purposes.
This doesn't end well when there are hundreds of thousands of "reconciliation, settlement, accounting purposes" to support.
>> This doesn't end well when there are hundreds of thousands of "reconciliation, settlement, accounting purposes" to support.
> It kind of does. You still have all the same backend logic, but now it doesn't have to run concurrently with a user interface.
Problem is, there is no self-administration capability when a feed file is the sole transaction mechanism. This can work when the volume is relatively small, say a few dozen customers, or if the Merchant is known to be sophisticated enough.
> You can take a queue of operations, process operations off the queue and send their results back. Isn't that a pretty reasonable way for a system to behave?
Not when there are capability requirements beyond batch processing, such as independent transaction research and/or manual corrections. Both are very common needs with Merchants lacking a dedicated system development department.
EDIT:
Consider a local bar or food truck which accepts credit/debit/gift card payments.
Even if they use host capture and a canonical credit card terminal, the Merchant will certainly want to reconcile their receipts with the end-of-day settlement.
This is not functionality "CSV/Excel" files and batch processing interfaces can provide.
> Much of US banking operates almost entirely on this premise and has done so forever.
This is a disingenuous statement as it relates to at least credit/debit/gift card transactions. Bank-to-bank and select high-volume Merchants communicate in certain circumstances with secure file transfers, especially for daily settlements.
The vast majority of Merchants do not, and instead rely on secure web applications to authorize, capture, and settle their transactions.
Perhaps other banking domains rely on Excel and similar to do business. I cannot speak to those business areas.
> I'd take a look at the Nacha (ACH) operating rules if you have any doubt that sophisticated business workflows can be built on top of flat files and asynchronous transmission.
And I'd recommend you take a look at different integration - online payment processing using Oribtal as described by Oracle.
https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E69185_01/cwdirect/pdf/180/cwdire...
I might be mistaken, but isn't banking famous for
(1) the long hours (i.e., processes suck), (2) the drudgery of updating said Excel files (i.e., processes suck) (3) horribly expensive to access (i.e., processes suck)
I have never once in my life as a corporate lawyer thought of banking as a model of operational efficiency.
This was a fairly small company (~300 employees) and a national bank, so it strikes me as likely that this is how a lot of companies do business.
> Email and flat files are far more flexible than any web solution.
Some times I feel like I’m taking crazy pills when I read HN lately. Suggesting that we e-mail requests around and have a person on the other end manually do things including merge data into SQL tables is such a bizarre claim to see. Every once in a while I encounter some business that operates like this and it’s inevitably a nightmare, either as a customer or a partner. Not to mention it’s ripe for everything from fraud to the company falling apart because the person who normally reads those e-mails and does the things for 20 years suddenly leaves one day.
This feels like a mix of rose-tinted glasses reminiscing about the old-timey way of doing things combined with a layer of career burnout that makes everything modern feel bad. Dealing with a business that operates this way is not good.
It was like that one dude on HN that criticized Dropbox back in day saying he could have built it in a weekend using rsync and a bunch other nerd nonsense that the average person doesn’t have the time or the expertise to mess with.
Often it just reads like contrarianism for the sake or it
> Yeah, I mean, it’s a it’s a very, very, very important question, the SaaS applications, or biz apps. So let me just speak of our own dynamics. The approach at least we’re taking is, I think, the notion that business applications exist, that’s probably where they’ll all collapse, right in the agent era, because if you think about it, right, they are essentially CRUD databases with a bunch of business logic. The business logic is all going to these agents, and these agents are going to be multi repo CRUD, right? So they’re not going to discriminate between what the back end is. They’re going to update multiple databases, and all the logic will be in the AI tier, so to speak. And once the AI tier becomes the place where all the logic is, then people will start replacing the back ends, right?
https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/hey-why-do-i-need-e...
Is this perhaps why Microsoft is in a uniquely good spot to take advantage of AI for customer facing software? If customer expectation of your software is already that it's horribly unreliable and error prone, AI bringing more of the same may not really hurt...
Or
"If you ever want to make someone look dumb, quote them verbatim."
This evolved through multiple iterations as the government end of it did. At one point you no longer had to walk there physically; instead, there was a dial-up endpoint running UUCP that could be used to fetch the file. Then they found out about Internet, and it became a website with the file, now .mdb (MS Access) rather than .dbf. I rewrote the app in .NET/WinForms, since it was much easier to do all those things from it than to try bolting it onto an old TUI DOS app.
But it was still basically the same table with the same schema by mid-10s, and my app was still chugging along. I wonder sometimes if some iteration of it is still in use today; wouldn't be surprised if it were.
7:40 - Bob was delayed by 5 minutes. ETA 7.45
7:35 - Bob is heading your way. ETA 7:40
7:20 - Bob has picked up your order from Pizza placeSo you work in logistics support, but you pay to do it?
What makes the most sense in this situation: you walk to the nearest pizza place, you buy your pizza, done.
To an able-bodied person it shouldn't take more than 5 minutes.
Bonus points: you know the way back to your home.
> because problem-solving is work
You know who made someone else's problem a problem=solving problem? You.
The delivery guy will eventually find your place or he's just taking a different route for whatever reason.
How arrogant is it to think that you can tell people how to do their job, from your couch?
You obsession for micro managing other people's actions it only says that you suffer from high anxiety, it is not in any way proof that you make everyone better off. That's just what you tell yourself.
while wanting to monitor what the delivery guy does while doing his job and pretending to "help" him because you truly believe that having tipped a couple dollars makes him your butler, that's completely normal...
alright...
There’s a reason why everyone hates the USA right now — one major reason is that, unlike in much of the world, you truly believe that workers don’t have rights.
I sometimes forget that HN is mostly US people, unaware that there is a World out there.
It's illegal or challenged in courts in many developed countries, that are actually developed.
> showing a driver's location on maps in apps like Glovo or Uber can potentially infringe on workers' rights in Europe, particularly under EU labor and data protection regulations. In Europe, the legal status of gig economy workers on these platforms has been a contentious issue. Several European courts and regulatory bodies have made rulings that impact how these companies can monitor and track their drivers.
> the practice of constant monitoring of delivery drivers by app users (where customers can track drivers' real-time location) has been challenged in several European contexts
ELI5 for you: would you accept a webcam pointed at you that your client (or your employer's clients) can constantly watch, to see if your doing you job the way they want you to do it?
For example, would you accept that a McDonald's customer could monitor how their burger is being made and could give instructions to the people working there, by the sheer overwhelming power of having bought a burger?
And why not?
If you want to argue that they are not work, then surely helping a delivery person who's lost in your neighborhood also counts as non-work for the same reason.
I originally planned to scrape the data and make my own website with better (imo) controls, but v0 turned into pumping the data into a Google sheet.
I've never needed v1. The Google sheets "UI" solves filtering (i.e., breakfast vs lunch), access control, and basic analytics (~7 other colleagues also use this daily).
That said, I do think plain vanilla approaches like this site describes are valuable—not because everyone should use them, but because they remind us what the browser can do without 20 layers of abstraction. That can be really useful when the goal isn't a full app, but something in-between email and interface.
It’s less about dogma, more about choosing from a wider spectrum of options—including “no UI at all.”
That said, there are b2b exchanges where a simple website is perfect. Supplier quality cases where people need to exchange short texts or general supplier information exchange.
Also b2b customers are far less concerned about UX style than the average retail customer. The former wants a system that just works efficiently and everything else is a waste of time. Sometimes productivity clashes with modern sensibilities and in the b2b case productivity still wins.
I hate mail though for formal processes though. In that case a link to a simple website that orderly takes up information and it is the better solution.
I also hate putting excel files into tables. There is always something going wrong, especially with files created in many different languages, and it is still work overhead. But there are already solutions for general information exchange that aren't necessarily parasitic SaaS services.
Of course there are alternatives, but I wouldn't call the usual ERP/CRM software superior to web apps.
The fact that this all got hyperlinked is a superb. convenient, but also a challenge from tech perspective, and what FAANG did in the 30 years to come (after 1992) led to this horror of entangled and super-complex technologies we have today. Even vanilla web is quite complex if you take into consideration all the W3 standardization.
Security or not, you can have an appliance run much simpler software given longer product lifetimes,... My only hope is now with llm-assisted coding this vanilla approach comes back, as the boilerplate pain becomes more bearable (how I really hated html at some point...). Besides, it is much more pleasant to prompt yourself a website, rather than try to position some image on stupid fb/insta pages/events, which is one major reason to step back and own your content again.
With that title I didn't expect Javascript to be part of the equation. To me "vanilla" is CERN's HTTP+HTML.
The thing that happened is that FAANG redesigned the web for their own needs, then other companies used that to fulfill their own needs too. That's how we ended up with a lot of available content, but also user info mining, browser monopoly, and remote code execution (JS) as a daily normalization of deviance.
There are some secessionists - Gopher is still alive, Gemini - but alternatives have a hard time to compete with the content companies can provide apparently for free. Most of the content we want costs time and/or money. Content creators can be fine with contributing from their own pocket, but this is not really sustainable. User sponsorship (donations via Paypal, Patreon, Kofi, ...) don't work well either.
Also, since the supporters of the alternatives are generally supporters of freedom (who isn't? Well, people don't reject freedom, they are "just" making compromises), they have to deal with illegal content and other forms of abuse.
So there are 3 problems an alternative web must solve: protocols, moderation and repayment.
and most importantly - we lost our right to search the content that the community generates. it is now walled off behind FAANG services, that threw us directly in the dark ages of internet, when even your own content is out of reach.
here's as simple example - a group of friends been throwing parties for 20 years, like raves. all these are announced on the FB and now-and then on some other services. more than 400+ events for 20 years. trying to find these again is impossible. google won't index them, fb won't allow you to scrape then, insta also. perhaps some obscure snapshot lives of it in internet archive, perhaps not. so one reason to own the content you publish is to be able to actually use it yourself after a while.
Even with JavaScript in the equation, the vanilla web is a good option to reclaim all that, and honestly bringing a personal site up in 2025 takes... less than a day to setup with all the VMs, DNS, CF tunnel, DB, FE/BE hassle that stands in the way. It's more available than ever, people just need to brave and embrace this... but something tells me the majority will not do it.
There are times when it's the easiest way to handle things, especially for experienced users. But I find it a massive hassle to maintain support for every possible mistake the user can make.
The benefit would be that you have a fixed set of UI components available in Excel and don’t need to worry about styling and whatnot.
If you have certain options, use Excels forms to place buttons, menus and selections.
I'm not an instant fan of it, but it is one way for someone to lay out their thinking about how to solve something that works.
that is, letting your user to blindly and impulsively following what they want is a mistake.
I've discovered that when you start getting really cynical about the actual need for a web application - especially in B2B SaaS - you may become surprised at how far you can take the business without touching a browser.
A vast majority of the hours I've spent building web sites & applications has been devoted to administrative-style UI/UX wherein we are ultimately giving the admin a way to mutate fields in a database somewhere such that the application behaves to the customer's expectations. In many situations, it is clearly 100x faster/easier/less bullshit to send the business a template of the configuration (Excel files) and then load+merge their results directly into the same SQL tables.
The web provides one type of UI/UX. It isn't the only way for users to interact with your product or business. Email and flat files are far more flexible than any web solution.