Anybody interested in discussing ideas about a Stellar Decentralized Marketplace? Here are some points to debate:
Share your thoughts...
This is a very good starting point for ideas about distributed marketplaces:
https://www.openbazaar.org/blog/openbazaar-2-0-live/
Even if it would be good for Stellar to offer a sister blockchain for storage so we keep it all under one platform, for now we can consider IPFS an alternative and we're open to debate other options available.
First of all we have to understand the concept of a "decentralized marketplace" which is a marketplace not controlled by a central entity, so the whole idea is being able to post your own products on your own shop linked to your own account allowing multiple competing UIs to search for and present that information to consumers.
What's the advantage of a decentralized marketplace? It is censorship resistant and it can not be regulated or taken down by central authorities with the added benefit of no taxes whatsoever. Everybody can trade anything at any price governed only by the laws of supply and demand.
Can the Stellar Network be the platform of choice for such a project? That's exactly what we're going to find out.
Products need images so we definitely need storage and since Stellar provides none we need to look for alternatives like IPFS or Sia coin as I learned today. Product metadata could be stored as json and retrieved on demand. The important parts would be trust and aggregation.
For trust I've thought about a SHOP token with auth required/revocable flags so anybody can create malls or shopping centers where people could attach their shops by buying lots on that marketplace (token).
That way it would be easier for search engines to query trustlines for a shoppping center (SHOP) and present all shops in that marketplace. They could be aggregated by categories like electronics, art, clothing, whatever since anybody could create a marketplace. Bad behaviour could easily be solved revoking the trustline. Successful shopping centers would increase in value since everybody would like to have their shops listed so they could either sell the lots (token) in the marketplace or simply print more, up to each mall owner.
Anybody could have an independent shop but why would they? Aggregation is half the success of any marketplace. I'd like to look for used iphones in one place and not in thousands of individual shops hard to find. Of course once the search apps present query results then we can go to individual shops to continue browsing for products.
Now, we all know drugs and illegal stuff will pop up in their own marketplaces, but everybody decides which SHOPping mall to trust and subscribe so there won't be any kind of censorship providing room for everybody who wants to trade anything. If you are a mall owner you set your conditions (auth revoke/require) but if Alice opens a drug paradise SHOPping mall then those interested would attach their shops there and subscribe to their query engine.
Also, there would be plenty of competition for query engines and UIs since everything is on the blockchain (and external storage) which would make the best marketplaces and the best apps to thrive.
Finally, since Stellar allows all kinds of assets to be created, people could easily use any currency (fiat or crypto) in the whole world to buy stuff and marketplaces could easily provide payment integration with all wallets already available in the ecosystem.
Of course we can dream with Stellar offering storage, dapps and marketplace operations some day, but until then we must push the world we want forward and build it ourselves with our bare hands.
I think all references to external resources (whether data fields or memos) should be done using uris so we can point to any storage provider like IPFS, onion, or even imgur.com, amazon, etc. We have to define schemas and relations in order to organize the information without limiting user options.
Hello Torkus
I would like to talk to you about a business opportunity that will change online retailing what is the best way to reach you?
I want to retake this idea for some more brainstorming. Feedback is welcome.
Hi, this subject is much related to what I have been working on with Litemint. These are the main points I wanted to address:
I have achieved to implement the first 3 points using the Stellar DEX and path payments to resolve cross-currency transactions from the third-party shops. Merchants can list their items in any currency they want in their shops and users can choose any currency they want to buy; the transaction is routed trough the relevant assets on the DEX for decentralized resolution. Merchants do not have to buy a specific token (this could be seen as a form of centralization and could hinder adoption).
What Litemint does not offer (yet) are decentralized listings and discovery. I also think that ideally, in the best of worlds, decentralized listings are needed, but I had 2 concerns from a business startup standpoint:
It is more practicable to boot a marketplace from a vertical to increase chances for early adoption, find a focus and crowd, like Envato with Flash Files, eBay with collectibles, then expand from there (I picked games as this is my initial industry).
Mass-adopted marketplaces tend to provide strong content curation features to prevent them to become a pot for illegal or inappropriate products. Open-listing marketplace naturally attract more of these products that don’t go mainstream and imbalance may hinder or totally forbid mass-adoption.
I will certainly revisit this at a later point, maybe offering an alternative by creating a specific client.
Last point I would mention is addressing trust and I had similar thoughts to yours. What you called Shopping center (or merchant hubs as I called them). Due diligence is not easy to perform on transient merchants and services so these hubs would allow merchants to be verified and collateralized even if needed allowing for more sophisticated items to be sold safely (including physical one). They would not need to be token-based (although they could to setup a business model revenue), more like anchors bound to a website.
