What is your criteria for “seamless”?

Example 1: Clothing. Designers and manufacturers these days have evolved to make garments, especially for children, with flat seams and printed or soft tags. Have you ever worked through sensory issues with a toddler or preschooler who cannot deal with a scratchy t-shirt tag or supposedly scratchy interior sock seam? You basically cannot go about the rest of your day until you deal with the offending seam/tag (short of having them go naked). You need to remove the itchy-scratchy factor so everyone can concentrate on more important things than the feel and construction of one’s clothing, like: being active, having fun and learning stuff.

Example 2: Online shopping. Amazon “one-click” purchases. I no longer recall how involved the initial set-up was, but once it’s set up, the process is quite seamless. And dangerous. It’s how books keep sneaking into the house through the mailbox.

Example 3: Bitcoin apps. End users should not need to read a book, take a class or register for a special course to figure out how to use them. Number of steps and onboarding time should not take days (preferably as long as it would take to sign up for Instagram, for example). e.g. Streamanity is pointed in the right direction as being a seamless way for content creators to accept micropayments with little to no hassle. Do they make use of Cashport on the back end?

Mostly, the reason I am not really selling art prints or illustrated mugs/shirts at the moment (unless you are one of the friendly and persistent ones who has sent a direct message or email) is extra friction in the form of extra decisions and extra communication requirements. I started researching options for accepting BSV payments online months and months ago. The landscape keeps changing. Just when I was ready to start using Cryptartica for print-on-demand, it kind of stopped being promoted by its Twitter account. I’m not sure if I can now pronounce it to be a casualty of the contentious November 2018 BCH-BSV split. Talk about lost momentum for merchant adoption.

Since then, more than one party has offered to assist me with printing art on stuff and shipping it. However, just that extra friction in the form of the back-and-forth communication required to make this happen in reality, has been a barrier (which reflects more on me than them). In addition, although I’d like to eventually sell art prints for BSV, my local printer and the postal service does not accept BSV so there are additional steps of converting to fiat and using an exchange to withdraw, on top of the fact that I’d rather earn and save BSV. 🙁

Any task that takes the focus away from creating and towards administrivia (well, some might call it “the basic stuff” for entrepreneurs) is unattractive for most creators. Even using social media for marketing can be a huge distraction. Anyways, many artists are not entrepreneurs at heart and it takes a lot of mental energy and time to set this stuff up (seamless merchant solutions). Technological solutions are just that, they are supposed to make your life easier, not more difficult or frustrating.