Market

One shopping cart, multiple businesses

Picture this: three people use Commerce. One sells food, one sells screws and building materials, one sells flowers. On a given day you want food, flowers AND a pack of screws. On the market you see all the options — not necessarily grouped per business, just everything that's available — and you gather it all into your cart in one go.

The hard part is in the payment. The ideal is paying once for all three products, and afterwards the money gets divided and forwarded to the right shopkeeper. Sentoo recently started supporting something that goes in that direction (escrow-like); a proper implementation still needs to happen.

Advantage of scale

Why can this actually work? Because connected businesses together can do more than each on their own:

• Shared delivery pool — a restaurant that wants to deliver normally needs its own delivery person, with maintenance and a limited range (Rincon and Playa Grandi often fall outside it). Via Market one delivery pool can cover the whole island. Your order and your neighbour's go on the same run.
• Batches per area — for instance every hour or every two hours a run to Rincon; all the Rincon orders in that time window go along.
• Dynamic delivery locations — phones have GPS. When placing an order you just send your location along. Working at a workshop and out of screws? Order from M-Tech, someone brings it to the workplace. Part of the order-fulfillment logic that's also described in Commerce.

For the buyer that means more flexibility. "Today I'm not going to the supermarket — I'll order everything and have it delivered to my work in the afternoon, and I'll bring it home."

More than just commerce

Besides the data coming from Commerce, there are functions people currently use Facebook for:

• Second-hand — buying and selling products, without going through a group on another platform.
• Auctions — put up a product, a starting price, and people can bid. Highest bid within the time wins. (Already working in the demo.)
• Forum — a place where people talk with each other about what's on their mind. NOT social media in the usual sense, just a regular conversation spot. With real names, so people are mindful of what they say.
• Price transparency — if you use the purchasing module in Commerce, historical price data accumulates by itself. By sharing that, people can see in real time where the cheapest sugar, milk, etc. is to be had — without waiting for a newspaper investigation.

One account for all shopfronts

Market can also function as a central authorisation platform — OAuth-based. Create a Market account once, and use it to log in on every Commerce shopfront of a connected business.

The idea: if someone wants to order directly from your shop instead of going through the Market, that person doesn't have to type in their address, name and contact details again. They log in with their Market account, and the shopfront immediately knows who they are.

Here's where I need help

This is a big idea, and therefore a big project. For the financial part you probably need a third-party-funds foundation. A cooperative foundation could also work — to be part of Market you pay a monthly amount, and together you fund the service.

Many ideas are possible here, but I can't decide or execute this alone. Two concrete questions:

1. Is it a good idea?
2. If so, how would you like to help?