Introducing SteemPay

asbear (68)in #steemdev • 7 years ago (edited)

I am introducing a new web app SteemPay that aims to help people to use SBD for selling and buying the real stuff. The primary mission of this tool is to simplify the selling and buying process using SBD.

Using SteemPay, you can create an invoice quickly, and the buyer can pay it by scanning QR code. You can also get paid without any Steem account if you have a Steem wallet in Upbit or Bittrex.

Although SteemPay only supports KRW currency for now, you can try out just for fun.
https://steempay.co

Motivation

Korean Steemians who owns their own offline stores like pubs, restaurants or clinics have been trying to receive SBD for their products and services. However it was not as simple as they thought because:

Converting the local currency KRW to SBD is a burden, and the exchange rate changes second by second
No one step way for sellers and buyers to create and share an invoice
Sellers and buyers must go through the manual processes for the payment, putting numbers by numbers
no clear and unified way to keep the track of the transactions

Here is the scenario of selling a cup of coffee for SBD.

Seller calculates the SBD price of the product
Seller gives the number like 1.352 SBD to the buyer
Buyer opens whatever Steem app he uses and manually puts the seller's account ID and the price
Buyer also needs to put some memo about what he is paying the money for.
Put active key if neeeded.
Seller needs to check if buyer paid that amount.
Found any mistake in the processes above? sigh...

SteemPay project was born to simplify this process, and has been making a great progress in his mission although it is still in its very early stage. SteemPay is now perfectly usable in Korea, and some Steemians are using it for their business already.

I will now walk you through what it does for the sellers and buyers currently.

Main page

This web app is currently not responsible but dedicated for mobile devices. There is a button to open and close the sidebar in which there are some buttons to move around the features.

Setting

Seller must setup their Steem accounts and exchange accounts in order to generate an invoice. Once it's done, seller can simply choose which account they want to receive the payment to. You must click "Save" as now it does not do auto save.

Invoice

You can create an invoice by putting the price in the local currency (now only KRW) and choosing the account. You can see the exchange rate is automatically fetched and applied to the KRW to SBD conversion.

Once all the required fields are filled, you can click "Create Invoice" to generate the invoice with a QR code. This invoice can directly scanned using any kind of QR code scanner, or also can be shared with the other people through many other ways.

At the moment the local currency is immediately converted to SBD and fixed to that value forever. However I am considering to add the opposite way of applying the exchange rate which is fixed to local currency and then converted when the payment is made. Both are necessary for the different types of businesses.

Payment

You can scan the QR code in the invoice to make a payment. A QR code reader is embedded into the web app for Android devices, but you can use your favourite QR code reader as well.

iPhone users can use their camera app to scan the QR code. It is very obvious and easy.

If you click "Pay via SteemConnect", you are redirected to SteemConnect. For the first time, you will be asked to put the private active key. If you did make your browser save your active key before, you will not need to put it again.

Used technology stack

NodeJS, Webpack, Javascript, HTML, ReactJs, ReactRedux, ReactRouter, Semantic UI React, AWS EC2, API Gateway, Lambda, Dynamo DB, etc

Future Work

Although SteemPay is functioning, it is still in its prototype phase. There is very long to-do list but I will not share everything here. The items on the top of the list are:

Supporting USD currency
More detail configuration for sellers
Introducing permanent invoice
Authentication

Although this project will be driven by the feedback from KR community, as they are actually using it for their real business, any feedback from non-KR will be really appreciated.

I deliver incrementally and work backward with the feedback. Therefore this project will be progressing quickly towards the right direction.

Open Source

SteemPay is an open source project.
https://github.com/ianpark/steempay

Please Support SteemPay project

You can support this project by various ways.

Vote @asbear as a witness. You need to manually put my account because I am 57th now.
https://steemit.com/~witnesses
Vote and resteem this post
Follow me :)

Many thanks!

#dev #steemit #steempay #witness-category

7 years ago in #steemdev by asbear (68)

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fknmayhem (71) 7 years ago

This is awesome.

May I suggest though that rather than doing the obvious and integrate the USD, you initially focus on lower ranked economies and nations. New economies like Steem have the potential to massively disrupt the status quo and directly improve social vertical mobility.

There is a reason why there are so many mobile payment apps in the Asian scene (and Africa): the unbanked demographic is massive. While we still suffer the inconvenience that most debit card issuers have pulled out, it is more likely that affluent users are capable to easily exchange without going through many expensive hoops.

For the unbanked demographic this is often an expensive chore tho. I know for example that in the Philippines there are people who are not capable of withdrawing their crypto without paying expensive Western Union/Remittance cash out fees. Alternatively they must travel for hours to use one of the few BTC ATMs. IDs are still expensive and not everyone has one thus excluding options like the otherwise excellent Coins.ph which serves many locals already but has KYC/AML and thus requires ID verification.

Same situation in Indonesia and I bet Nigeria, Kenya, Venezuela, and Brazil are not different. Something tells me that those local scenes, most of which have also setup their own communities on Steem, will find ways to propagate the use of a Steem payment platform and grow faster than USA adoption. If not faster in number most likely definitely much more in local importance, in social vertical mobility.

From a 2014 CoinDesk interview with Ron Hose, Co-Founder of Coins.ph:

“In contrast to developed countries, where bitcoins as a payment method are more of a novelty - here it is serving a real problem. For instance, credit card penetration in the Philippines is 3%. Only three out of 100 customers that land on an e-commerce site have an immediate way to pay for it."

Disclosure: I’m a European living in PH.. The PH community here on Steem is very active, although by long not as large as the KR community, but I’m not active in the scene myself. My personal focus is mostly on convincing local store owners, especially sari-sari stores to start accepting crypto. Many are eager but lacking flawless methods don’t help (and coins.ph is mostly focus on signing up franchises and restaurants for faster expansion).