As a Tindie seller, I have hopes that this injection of cash will address several outstanding issues with the platform.<p>I sell a DIY touchscreen home automation controller that I build by hand in my basement[1]. My product is targeted at DIY types interested in owning their own home automation environment. The project utilizes a 3D printed enclosure, a custom PCB, an ESP8266, Nextion LCD, and a few supporting components, fasteners, etc. All firmware, gerbers, STLs, etc are open source and available on GitHub[2].<p>I didn't really intend to sell these things, but several interested users who didn't have access to the required tools or skills talked me into listing on Tindie. It is a great platform for my use case - basically zero friction to get a simple store stood up and to start collecting orders. There is nearly no customization possible, you simply upload some markdown, setup your products, then add your PayPal info to collect payments.<p>Over the years, users have been requesting (seemingly simple) features to be added to the platform. For example, the Tindi API is a read-only affair. You can collect your orders via the API, but once you've shipped them, you cannot use the API to mark the order shipped (or provide tracking info, etc). User requests for this functionality have been made going back to 2015, and nearly immediately, statements were made that an "API v2" was coming "soon". You can request beta API access, but in my case that request went unanswered and no others have suggested that their access was granted either. 6 years later, there is still no way to mark an order shipped without clicking around in the web UI.<p>More concerning has been the lack of any ability to deal with taxes. US law now requires that I collect and pay state sales tax, but Tindie can't handle it and shows no sign of ever adding that feature. The list goes on, no way to handle UK VAT post-brexit, no ability to utilize payment providers besides PayPal, etc etc. Each request is met with "we're working on it", but in the 3 years that I've been selling on Tindie, I've never once noticed any new features added to the platform and no community announcements to that effect have ever been made.<p>There is allegedly a development team behind this, but there is zero outward indication of any product development happening at all.<p>Hopefully a cash injection might get Tindie up to modern standards for a web store. I love the ethos behind the product, but the product itself is severely lacking.<p>Hopefully, $700M will help move this platform forward.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.tindie.com/products/luma/ha-switchplate-hasp-single-wide-assembled/" rel="nofollow">https://www.tindie.com/products/luma/ha-switchplate-hasp-sin...</a>
[2] <a href="https://github.com/HASwitchPlate/HASPone" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/HASwitchPlate/HASPone</a>