In Sweden we also have something similar to purchase orders which is common even with B2C and it always bothered me how often it is used compared to the US where credit card was more normal. I think the article brings up a good point, if a startup could figure out the taxes and bookkeeping, set some reasonable margins or costs for the service it could be a really good business.
Edit: Sorry, they would handle the POs so that is liability, I guess some kind of verification or legal framework is also needed here.
>In Sweden we also have something similar to purchase orders which is common even with B2C and it always bothered me how often it is used compared to the US where credit card was more normal.
Our clients send us purchase orders in Europe, but the context is custom, turn-key, machine learning products developer for large enterprise. We take them by the hand from "I have many problems" to a product their people want to use.
We're building our machine learning platform to make that product development faster (data, scheduling training notebooks, automatic tracking, etc.). We also adopted a plugin architecture for product so we can plug functionality and, more importantly, remove functionality to allow clients to discard what they don't need and avoid a product with 2000 buttons and menu items.
Edit: Sorry, they would handle the POs so that is liability, I guess some kind of verification or legal framework is also needed here.