The factory gets paid in step #1 (many can accept direct wire transfers or have Hong Kong/Singapore/ or even New York banks). Sometimes a deposit is made to start an order and the final amount is paid to release it from the factory after inspection.
There are agents who can handle funds on your behalf and when you work with a new factory or it is a super large order, it is common to use a service that will escrow the funds until the goods have been inspected and released.
Sometimes we even have our own staff monitor the assembly and packaging inside the factory to be sure the quality of parts we ordered are actually going into each piece. This is normal every day in Chinese factories, they know the game.
Hah, I installed Postiz just yesterday, interesting to see this thread. It’s like buffer or one of the other paid tools to schedule your social media posts and track engagement. Of course, of particular interest to our community, Postiz is self hosted.
It doesn’t have as many features yet as the major SaaS businesses, but the software is looking good and quite usable right now. I’m sure the more people who use it and support the developer, the more this tool can grow.
For example you can plug in your OpenAI API key and get an LLM chat interface inside the software while writing social posts. But I don’t think it learns your style or creates posts using any kind of system prompt yet unless you type it in each time.
Another thing I couldn’t figure out so far is how to limit which social media channels individual users can see. For example my business has several different units and there’s a different marketing team on each unit, so they shouldn’t be able to post into other channels.
If you’re in the business of needing to post regularly on a lot of channels I think postiz is worth checking out.