I'm building one called Openship. Here's more about it: https://www.openship.org/blog/2019-10-23-using-open-source-t...
Curious: how is Openship different from building your store with apps from the Shopify Apps store?
The API-as-a-Marketplace
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Re: The API-as-a-Marketplace
#12I'm building one called Openship. Here's more about it: https://www.openship.org/blog/2019-10-23-using-open-source-t...
Curious: how is Openship different from building your store with apps from the Shopify Apps store?
I used to manage my shops using Zapier and Google Sheets for many years. Our products were coming from many different sources and many things would fall through the cracks. Customer service would be slow since agents would have to know where orders need to be returned and the return process.
Openship started as an internal project so all this could be managed from one dashboard so we could scale to 5000+ SKUs without the system being overwhelmed. Orders can be routed to any channel that has APIs to search products and create carts.
The other benefit of Openship is that your operations are abstracted out of Shopify. If you ever want to leave Shopify or roll your own e-commerce backend, Openship and your operations won't skip a beat. Let me know if you have any other questions.
Re: The API-as-a-Marketplace
#13My girlfriend is (one of the many people) building a Blockchain-API-as-a-marketplace for commodities trading: https://www.vakt.com It's amazing how many billions of dollars are still transacted via phone and paper records by organisations who ultimately have to rely on good faith to get oil from A to B (in possession of C and owned by Z). I can't imagine what it would take to verify a chain of actions taken a couple…
All well and good but blockchain doesn’t invalidate the need for ‘good faith’, which is actually due diligence supported by rule of law.
Re: The API-as-a-Marketplace
#14I wish OP would dive a bit more into the Stripe example as not-a-marketplace. There's Spreedly, which at first glance might be more of a marketplace. But then there's also an argument that Stripe itself is an API-as-a-marketplace, where they support different card providers/types, ACH, and a host of global methods. Is one interpretation more correct than the other? (at least as it relates to an investment thesis) ---…
> Just like a traditional marketplace, an API-as-a-marketplace has two sides: suppliers and buyers.
When I make a payment on a site with stripe (my transaction-in-need-of-payment-processing being the "demand" side), there's not really a pool of "supply side" vendors I'm trying to be matched with... I'm just interested in knowing that my money is going to the business I'm checking out with.
To concoct this into an example that's more of a marketplace:
- the business owner needs a payment processor for people checking out like me -- payment processing is the service
- imagine that transaction fees varied based on the nature of the individual transaction (imagine say an individual - there's multiple payment processors that offer various fees -- Stripe, Braintree, Paypal, etc.
The marketplace solution now is the one that matches the demand side (a $1-$10 preferred-vendor visa transaction) to the payment processor that makes most sense (supply side) for each individual transaction.
Obviously payment processing works different than this. That's why Stripe is an API, not an API-as-a-marketplace.
Now, replace "payment processing" with "shipping" and "$1-$10 visa transaction" with "1-10lb package going to Somewheretown"... now you have a situation that sounds like the real world. That's the niche the article says Shippo is filling.
Re: The API-as-a-Marketplace
#15My girlfriend is (one of the many people) building a Blockchain-API-as-a-marketplace for commodities trading: https://www.vakt.com It's amazing how many billions of dollars are still transacted via phone and paper records by organisations who ultimately have to rely on good faith to get oil from A to B (in possession of C and owned by Z). I can't imagine what it would take to verify a chain of actions taken a couple…
All well and good but blockchain doesn’t invalidate the need for ‘good faith’, which is actually due diligence supported by rule of law.
Yup, blockchain still has yet to address the rules of society and the expectation to be able to force financial transactions by court order
Re: The API-as-a-Marketplace
#16We've been working on something in this space called Violet: https://violet.io. At the core we're a headless API that connects merchants looking to sell their products natively in new channels with the developers (https://violet.dev) who are building those channels.
Re: The API-as-a-Marketplace
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
All well and good but blockchain doesn’t invalidate the need for ‘good faith’, which is actually due diligence supported by rule of law.
Yup, blockchain still has yet to address the rules of society and the expectation to be able to force financial transactions by court order
I'm not sold on the ledger-as-single-source-of-truth notion either. Blockchain is a solid technological choice for critical transactions that need to stand up to independent verification, but it's certainly not the only one. If it makes enough of a difference to turn these markets digital faster, I'm happy.
What I like is this notion that there are still huge, opaque markets that are extremely costly to take part in. And that tech can whittle them down to be very fast, cheap and easy to participate in.
We pay inefficiency and arbitrage taxes on everything we produce and consume. How many cents out of a dollar I spend on bread go to someone whose only value in the process is manning a phone or providing working capital? The sooner those two go away, the better.
Re: The API-as-a-Marketplace
#18My girlfriend is (one of the many people) building a Blockchain-API-as-a-marketplace for commodities trading: https://www.vakt.com It's amazing how many billions of dollars are still transacted via phone and paper records by organisations who ultimately have to rely on good faith to get oil from A to B (in possession of C and owned by Z). I can't imagine what it would take to verify a chain of actions taken a couple…
Chain of custody forms have existed for centuries.
Re: The API-as-a-Marketplace
#19My girlfriend is (one of the many people) building a Blockchain-API-as-a-marketplace for commodities trading: https://www.vakt.com It's amazing how many billions of dollars are still transacted via phone and paper records by organisations who ultimately have to rely on good faith to get oil from A to B (in possession of C and owned by Z). I can't imagine what it would take to verify a chain of actions taken a couple…
All well and good but blockchain doesn’t invalidate the need for ‘good faith’, which is actually due diligence supported by rule of law.
Right, which is why "enterprise blockchain" generally means a bunch of people fumbling around with Ethereum/Solidity, failing to build anything more secure than a read-only SQL database, and inheriting all the bad characteristics of Bitcoin
Re: The API-as-a-Marketplace
#20What I'm curious is why there's not yet a marketplace for consumer-generated data. Thinking things like wearables. Is it that these wearables are too miserly over their data, or are there other considerations that make this more difficult than some of the more common ones I've seen such as e-commerce and supply chain.
I see examples for medical data in this thread, which is notoriously slow to "open," so I'm curious what the reasoning may be...