Subject: Re: Trade Questions

From: "Donald E. Eastlake 3rd" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 03 Jan 1999 19:26:57 -0500

Elad,

From:  IETFMAIL <[email-masked]>
To:  [email-masked]
cc:  Elad Sion <[email-masked]>
Message-ID:  <[email-masked]>
Date:  Thu, 24 Dec 1998 09:27:28 +0200

>Hello.
>
>My name is Elad Sion, and I am pretty new to the trade list and protocols.
>I find this protocol and its implications very interesting.
>
>I do have a few questions, however about v1 and possibly about the
>requirements of v2:
>
>1. Is there a way to do bargaining? In many cases, especially when selling
>over the internet
>  with very little production costs, I would rather sell for less than not
>at all. Is there a way to
>  'renegotiate' the price?

I would say this is part of the shopping phase that comes before IOTP
Purchase or the like.  It is beyond the scope of IOTP as it is
presently conceived.

>2. What is the minimum number of round trips it takes to make a purchase?
>Can this protocol
>  be used with UDP? Is it possible to create a single offer (with an
>expiration date) and make
>  multiple purchases based on that offer? Is there an expiration date for
>offers?

Round Trips: In the brand independent case, the minimum is two round
trips, one with the merchant and one with the payment handler.  In the
brand dependent case, and additional round trip with the merchant is
needed because in that case the merchants offer is dependent on what
payment method the consumer selects from among those offered by the
merchant.  If separate interaction with a delivery handler is
required, this adds one round trip in each case.  (The merchant,
payment handler, and delivery handler can be hosted of separate
machines or the same machine...)  I'm assuming web/HTTP usage.

UDP: IOTP tries to be transport independent.  But the messages are XML
documents which could easily be pretty long.  It would probably not be
reasonable to try to map to a UDP packet per message.

Offer reuse: A signed offer is bound to who the customer is and can
not be reused for a different customer.  Pieces of a signed or
unsigned offer could be re-used.  If the same host is acting as the
merchant and the payment handler, there is no need to sign the offer.
The signature on the offer in v1.0 is to protect from modification and
if it is being returned to the same site, that can be done without a
signature.

Offer expiration: An offer does have optional inception and expiration
dates & times.

>3. Is there a free protocol stack that I can get? Or some implementation
>that I can test
>  interoperability with?

Not yet that I am aware of...

>Thanx a lot,
>-- Elad

Thanks,
Donald
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