Merchant

Aimed for receiving payments, focuses on inbound liqudity

Capital requirement

minimal to buy incoming channels
temporarily high to create incoming capacity from channels opened

Channels and peers

few (2-3) channels with well connected and capitalized nodes
connect to nodes on the Bos list
see existing fee settings on Amboss / 1ml.com
Check node stability on Lightning Web

Liquidity

mostly remote

Uptime

high, but not perfect
unavailability affects sales

Management

Loop out (Autoloop) to empty existing channels
Close and Reopen when channels are filled up
- a channel open (and close) is not more expensive than using Loop given :
  - have onchain liquidity for more channels (or splice in in the future) or
  - can afford the channel downtime between peers to close and reopen
Buy further inbound liquidity
Use liquidity ads to buy inbound
Try Amboss Magma
Place bids on Lightning Pool
Advertise to receive inbound
Sweeping funds
- On-chain or off-chain sweeps may be necessary if Lightning wallet balance becomes too large
- An off-chain sweep can improve your privacy as well as give you inbound liquidity

Examples

Self hosted node connected to a local or remote BTCPayServer
BTCPayServer on a VPS (acceptable with low amount of funds)
Fully hosted solutions (trusted) - eg. Voltage
Coming: Greenlight from Blockstream

Special cases

Accepting donations
Offer to pay onchain for high value payments (miner fee < 0.5-1%)
can progress to a Routing node as the number of connections and capital grows