Stellar Shop

rbates

Hi All – I'd like to introduce a website I’m working on called Stellar Shop.

The backstory is that I wanted to figure out what would happen if I created an online store integrated with the Stellar network. I’m aware of the existing widgets and shopping cart plug-ins, but I wanted to take it a step further in order to fully test out some ideas.

The Stellar Shop is a real store. I ordered a few hundred stickers from Sticker Mule, setup a basic inventory and invoicing system, and priced everything at a rate which hopefully people find reasonable. My goal is not to make money selling stickers, it’s an attempt to test out what would happen if the world settled on XLM as a global currency tomorrow (I know, right?)

Currently the backend handles order management and customer invoicing which includes:
• Creating invoices with unique URL’s and associated memos
• Sending URL via email (no account is required)
• Batch payment processing & reconciliation with the Stellar network

Other things I’m thinking about.
• Exchange Rates – XLM to native/local
• Revenue Recognition and tax reporting
• Support (returns, adjustments, etc….)
• Shipping

Something I can already tell you is that the payment experience with Stellar is not easy. It’s fast, and it’s free, so that's amazing. But copy/paste and QR codes are not ideal. Federation is a step in the right direction, but client support is still not reliable. These aren’t complaints tough, they are opportunities. Heck, the reason I chose to sell Stellar/XLM stickers is that I know this community is willing to put up with some of these pain points – and to help solve for them.

Please check it out and let me know what you think. Feel free to buy a sticker, or not. All feedback is welcome. Note: I’m only shipping in the US for now so I don’t get killed on postage rates. And yes, I’ll be stuffing all the darn envelopes myself.

Thanks!
Ross

chaynes

rbates

Too cool, just purchased some stickers to test!

Torkus

Me likes. Take a look at this payment button and see if you can adapt it to your shop:

PayWithStellar https://myplaynet.herokuapp.com/paywithstellar

rbates

Torkus Thanks Torkus. I'll put some thought into how we might be able to bridge these solutions. Could be a good starting point for a simple API. I like how simple you've made things to integrate, just need to think through all the scenarios where you need to manage state client side vs server side.

pantheon52

I stumbled upon this the other day, it was really impressive. Any plans on making this an open market so anyone can put their products up? Or like a shopify type platform for Stellar?

rbates

pantheon52 Awesome, glad that you like it. My plans are wide open, I've got plenty of ideas but want to make sure I'm headed down a path that others would find value in.

I can certainly see an opportunity for opening things up to be more of an open marketplace. Shifting the product to be more like a platform could be interesting as well. I think the key to this will be figuring out what/why this is better than existing solutions such as Shopify, Woo/WP - or even things like eBay/Etsy/Craigslist.

The most obvious advantage is fast and essentially free transactions using the Stellar network. The other thing I want to explore which takes advantage of the underlying technology is seller identity, trust and reputation. If we could build an ecosystem where a seller's transactions & ratings are portable via the Stellar network that would be a game changer. I'm in the early stages of building a second site called stellar.me to begin testing these ideas out. On one end is e-commerce (stellar.shop), on the other is trust/identity (stellar.me), the goal is to figure out how to make these meet in the middle.

nickymohawk

rbates Hey already said great job on the reddit, but wanted to go a little more in depth here. Especially with mention of an identity/trust platform, and how these can meet in the middle. Second I read this I thought of a system my parents have been part of almost 20 years. They used what I thought to be silly trade currency called ITEX. They are both small business owners, and they accept and use ITEX among mostly other small business owners. They recently went to a trade fair and actually did most of their Christmas shopping there.

So it got me thinking, especially with the notion of Stellar wanting to bank the unbanked. As stellar moves forward and increases adoption, it only makes sense to have a community marketplace. We already had a post on reddit about a cafe/restaurant (forgot which) accepting Lumens. Not sure how difficult on your end, but if the self employed and and small business owners had a place to list their goods or services on a platform that would be great. You could integrate the invoicing and payment you have done with the shop to allow producers (Etsy like) to sell their goods. Buyers leave sellers ratings and sellers leave buyers ratings.

Businesses who accept lumens, will be able find other likeminded businesses. Networking and sales, signing up and building trust with the community is advertising. As we move into areas where connecting with other lumen users is neccisary, already having a searchable marketplace I believe is a must. Especially if this becomes a true ico platform and provides banking services for those with no access to banks.

Anyway I still need my coffee so this may be tangent filled slightly incoherent rant.

jeremy82many

Nice site, I went through the steps and seems nice and user friendly

rbates

nickymohawk Thanks for putting these thoughts out there, I completely agree with you.

Going back in time, so much of the early talk about crypto/Bitcoin was mired in discussions about the "totally anonymous" transactions of illicit goods on places like Silk Road. But here's the thing, people's identities may have been obscured -- but they were far from anonymous entities. Trust, customer service, and feedback/reviews were just as important as they were in any other marketplace.

In the world of open source banking, there will be use cases for things like zcash where people don't want transactions tied back to them personally. That's totally cool, no problem at all. But to circle back around to your point, in a world where we remove the financial intermediaries we also remove some of the protections they provide. For this to work, the concept of trust and identity becomes even more important. I'm not sending Lumens to someone I'm not comfortable doing business with.

This is where I think we have another huge opportunity using the blockchain. 2 key attributes of the blockchain that make it valuable are 1) transactions are visible and 2) they can't be altered. It's those 2 things which make a pretty strong case for it being used as the system of record for trust and identity for marketplaces.

There are so many exciting things here to explore and build. Right now I'm trying to stay focused on the the things we can pull off today - ie I'm just some guy selling stickers for Lumens to other early adopters on the internet. ?

Thank you for providing some background and real-world stories about ITEX. I wasn't familiar with it before, but this is the perfect example of looking at a system or network that exists today and figuring out to improve upon it. We're not trying to overthrow central banks here, we're just trying to use technology to help people solve everyday problems.

rbates

nickymohawk Also, with regards to building a directory of businesses, and/or allowing other small businesses to list their products. I think the next logical step is going to be for me to host "featured" vendors free of charge. This would make it easy to coordinate inventory, payments, etc... without building a full blown marketplace. If the demand is there for people to host their own storefronts on stellar.shop, or possibly host their own stack (ala wordpress) I'd be thrilled. I'll also need help that's for sure.

nickymohawk

rbates Great points, I actually am an XMR user and hodlr personally because I also do value privacy in some respects. I became interested in Stellar mostly because of its values, like trying to fix a socioeconomic issue. As I delved deeper I have realized that Stellar is a perfect ecosystem for the "little" guy so to speak. Plus as you have said blockchain is the first instance of a ledger with no eraser. Trust and reputation are what follows. With no intermediaries many of these services start with an escrow type of service to release funds once delivery of goods can be confirmed. There are some marketplaces like this for other coins, though an escrow marketplace may benefit stellar operators more because while the funds are in escrow they could collect inflation. ? Though smaller purchases shouldn't need escrow.

If your considering branching out to other small purchases for other stellar adopters via your shop - ie hats, pins, apparel and such I'd be interesting in helping the cause. While finishing my last year for a degree in business management, with a focus in entrepreneurship, I have been helping my mom with her inventory, shipping and some marketing for her side hustle selling clothes. I have a bunch of free time on my hands, and I'm interested in volunteering my time to projects.

nickymohawk

rbates I agree, that makes sense as the next logical step. I can help with what I can do, as I haven't really touched any type of programming in well over 10 years since highschool. What I do have experience is operational aspects. Army taught me excellent record keeping with inventory, ordering and shipping. Enough so I handled all ration and water inventory aspects during my deployment for my FOB. If I can free up some of your envelope licking time on all those stickers to put towards development I'd be glad to.

spdz

OK, just walked through the shop to try it out. It has a good flow, but ran into some stickiness when going through the payment workflow. I was using my mobile to scan the qr code with stargazer on android. My expectation was that the QR code would populate the transaction on the mobile, so all i had to do was enter my password and hit submit. It did not work (scan does nothing in stargazer apparently).

Over all, I like it, just need to make it less sticky for the average user.

Thanks

rbates

spdz Thanks so much for the feedback. I appreciate you taking the time to drop into the thread here.

Regarding the QR code. I was having a similar issue, I could scan the barcode using a standalone app but if it was being passed back to an app from an intent it would be blank. I did some testing and just deployed an update that should fix it. I tested in Stargazer and Pegasus and everything works as expected.

To your point about ease of use, I agree 100%. This checkout flow only works for the early adopter crowd that's willing to copy/paste or scan data across apps. I built the process assuming that payments would be asynchronous instead of blocking or waiting for payments to arrive on the network. While this differs a little from a traditional e-commerce site where you don't get a confirmation code until payment is completed, if payments don't arrive I view as something akin to an abandoned shopping cart.

Improved adoption in federation addresses should hopefully help with some of the payment issues on the client side. There's another project on this forum looking to add additional security layers to the federation protocol which I'm excited about as well.

Something else which would be really interesting is if merchants could send a payment request to an address on the network. Then wallets could just poll for open requests and populate them in the client UI. It avoids any handoffs in the webflow since the transaction all happens network side.

Thanks again for your feedback. If there's anything else I can do please let me know.

rbates

Quick update. Our developer API is now available. You can read more about it here:

https://blog.stellar.shop/developer-api-launch/

And you can get started here:

https://stellar.shop/developers

If you have any questions let me know. Thanks to everyone for their input!

rbates

chaynes Right on, thanks so much. I appreciate it! I'll get them sent to you tomorrow.

chaynes

rbates

I used your site as a teaching example to those unsure how Stellar can be implemented for ecommerce sites. There are a lot of people that can't quite grasp the concept till they see it in action, so this made for a perfect walkthrough.

chaynes

rbates

The stickers look great, thanks again.

patrickwagner

Great work man!

I was actually looking for a Marketplace (e.g Ebay) where Stellar can be used for purchasing but ended up here after finding stellar.shop. Here then, after reading a few posts, I realized that I'm not the only one who would love to see a marketplace, that uses Stellar as main currency, materialized.

I also read that you are looking for some help. What exactly? I'm not a senior developer but know a bit of Python and Javascript and have bigger knowledge when it comes to servers, so if you could need such resources, let me know.