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Vespco's Monero Marketplace Idea

Vesp posted this 7 years ago

Vesp | 7 years ago

enter image description here See better formatted version of this proposal here: GeoCrypto.io

OVERVIEW OF GEOCRYPTO.IO -- MONERO MARKETPLACE

TL;DR: The Vesp.co Marketplace software will be integrated with Shapeshift.io & Kraken's APIs for price and trading to make a Monero centric marketplace.

All code related to Monero will be released under an open source license. 

Theenter image description here

WHAT IS IT?

  • GeoCrypto.io is a marketplace that only pays sellers and affiliates with Monero but accepts many payment methods.

  • GeoCrypto.io will accept most cryptocurrencies, wire transfers, and cash and checks by mail.

  • GeoCrypto allows for the sales of goods and services and the local exchange of cash for Monero. 

  • GeoCrypto allows users to opt for price fluctuation protection. If they opt in, this will be achieved by buying & selling a parallel amount of Monero at the time of transaction. 

UTILITY

  • Accept all cryptocurrencies, money order, check and cash by mail but will only pay sellers in Monero. 

  • Sell goods, services and act as a "localbitcoins" for Monero. (again, any cryptocurrencies can be used but payout will be in Monero only). 

  • Provide a global on ramp for individuals in countries without robust payment processors. 

  • Facilitate value transfer in markets that payment processors restrict, such as the adult content (erotica, toys), herbal products (kratom, salvia, spore syringes). 

  • Aspects relating to cryptocurrency integration, when possible, will be released as open source. This will include any API stuff related to shapeshift, exchanges, and monero integrations. 

Please note that the actual existing marketplace software will not be open sourced at this time but it is an option we're exploring. 

HOW

  • Vespco marketplace software. See demo: http://dev.vesp.co 
  • Shifty button + serhacks Monero integration makes this easy 
  • Integrating account back-end to work with exchanges for protecting price fluxuations and to pay 

Currently the vesp.co software is integrated with credit card payment processors. These will be removed and replaced with the shifty button. 

Monero payout address will be added to seller accounts and upgrading the current  accounting system so that it can properly handle Monero and allow for price fluctuation protection. 

This should be fairly easy to do and 

Example of categories:

  • Goods

    • Agriculture & Forestry
    • Herbal Supplements
    •                 Listing: 100g, Red Vien Kratom
    • Adult (18+)
    • Cleaning supplies
    • Glass Cleaner
    • Body Soap
    • Bar Soap
      • Listing: Monero Soap - Clean your bits!

  • Services

    • Business
    • Narration
    • Marketing
    • Accounting Services
    • Taxes
    • Personal
    • Prepaid Phones

  • GeoCrypto (localbitcoin equivelent for Monero)

    • Americas
    • Asia
    • Europe
    • Africa

WHO

  • Cameron Ruggles - owner of the marketplace software, founder, and manager. 
  • Serhack (Monero PHP integrations project, Annularis)
  • Mykhaylo Legenchenko (Vesp.co Software Developer)

CURRENT DEVELOPMENT

Watch the website development here: GeoCrypto.io 

    Features to be added: 

  • Accept over 40+ cryptocurrencies
  • Remove credit card processing system
  • Protect against price fluctuations 
  • Monero Payout & accounting system

    Current features:

  • Responsive, simple web design
  • Seller stores: example
  • Integrated marketing: 
  • Rating system: example
  • Affiliate program:
  • Adjustable sale fees
  • Premium Accounts
  • Robust product page: 
  • Multiple product images
  • Rich product descriptions; images, links, video. 
  • Product specifications displayed. 
  • Add to cart OR buy now feature 
  • Descriptions allow for links, images, and formatting. 
  • Recently viewed items 
  • "Customers also bought" list
  • Related products list. 
  • Product favorites 
  • Display order history. 
  • Internal messaging between buyer & sellers
  • Product variations 
  • Payment via cash, Money order, check, etc via mail. 
  • Product Import
  • Amazon Product Import
  • eBay Import
  • Etsy product import
  • CSV file 
  • Shipping Labels 
  • Commercial base shipping prices  for all sellers
  • Manual orders
  • Ability to buy additional shipping labels not linked to transactions
  • UPS, FedEx, USPS, DHL, and other parcel services available. 

TIME FRAME

The Vespco marketplace software will be finished with it's final features in 2 weeks on approximately 10/2/2017.

The shifty button and a price API will be easy to integrate after that, I expect less than 1 week. 

At that point the site GeoCrypto.io will launch and be in beta - it will not offer price protection. 

A trade API, likely Kraken, will then be integrated. This will be used to offer price protection from when you are paid by customer vs when you receive your funds which will likely be biweekly. 

All code related to the shifty button, price API, and trade API will be released as an open source script after it is developed. 

Task should be completed approximately 1 month after it begins on 10/2/2017, so the site should be fully functional within 11/2/2017

FUNDING

Amount desired

$2,000 USD OR 20 XMR.

How it will be used:

To pay the developers.
Legenchecko will be doing the bulk amount of work, and so will receive most of this payment. Secondly is Serhack who will likely help with the actual Monero integration part. 
I (Cameron Ruggles) will not be paid anything for managing this project.

I am also paying them out of my own pocket, I just don't want to overextend myself financially so I am wanting help. I think this is a small amount to ask for the type of project that it is and my willingness to release some of the code as open source.

All money raised will go exclusively towards adding the monero/cryptocurrency centric features. I plan to add my own money to this project as well and I am not taking any for the work I am putting into it. I just wanting help with the expenses.

FEEDBACK

Please contact me for feedback, I am really wanting critical views and opinions. I think this is a good idea already but if it can be improved or if you see a problem with it, I would love to hear it. 

CONTACT

  • [email protected]
  • 1-435-720-3735 (Signal)
  • facebook.com/cruggles3
  • https://www.facebook.com/GeoCrypto

Milestone 1: 5 XMR Finish Vesp.co Marketplace software. There are a few issues regarding internal messaging, shipping and ratings that need to be integrated better with the recent html/css redesign.

Milestone 2: 10 XMR Integrate shapeshift.io'a shifty button and disable legacy payment method (credit card processor).

Add a wallet that only has the viewkey(s) to verify transactions without need for trusting a third party.

Add a Monero payout address field to the sellers account so that they can be paid biweekly.

This will make the marketplace functional and at this point it will launch in beta.

Milestone 3: 5 XMR Kraken API integration to protect sellers from price fluctuation by trading Monero/USD in parrelel to transactions on an exchange.

Replies: 12
Vesp posted 7 years ago Weight: 0 | Link [ - ]

All the milestones are now finished. The various issues with the software (milestone 1) are now fixed, and you're able to checkout using both shapeshift to monero or directly with Monero (milestone 2). Milestone 3 is also integrated, but it is not live because I need to save up funds to bridge the gap from time an order is paid, to when it is paid out to the buyer. So this will be released in a private beta to specific sellers only.

Please test it out! Feedback is welcome and we'll be live very soon. :) I need to delete some test products before making it live.

astro11 posted 7 years ago Replies: 1 | Weight: 0 | Link [ - ]

I like the idea. My main concern really is the uber focus on the "grey area" that you're attacking. The vast majority of the community wants Monero to be seem as your day to day digital currency and a marketplace like that, where the focus clearly is on selling items that are considered "grey area", might divert the mainstream focus from being a day-to-day digital currency to really being a "darknet market/illegal activity" currency.

Reply to: astro11
Vesp edited 7 years ago Replies: 1 | Weight: 0 | Link [ - ]

Thanks for your thoughts and I agree. It's not only gray market. Shirts, soap, jewelry, electronics and anything else that is legal will be available and enjoy and encouraged.

They will probably represent the bulk of the listings by far.

However, I wanted to make it clear that legal but shunned items would also be allowed and ultimately be a significant part of the sales.

I will not make this site seem like a darknet/gray market but this post is just being explicit and honest about the real utility it will have and the problem it will solve.

Reply to: Vesp astro11
astro11 posted 7 years ago Replies: 2 | Weight: 0 | Link [ - ]

> It's not only gray market. Shirts, soap, jewelry, electronics and anything else that is legal will be available and enjoy and encouraged. They will probably represent the bulk of the listings by far. However, I wanted to make it clear that legal but shunned items would also be allowed and ultimately be a significant part of the sales.

Now this is an idea that I can get behind. The tone of the idea's description is really focused on the grey market and that's where my concern was. I would love a general marketplace working primarily with Monero.

I recommend you join the IRC channels or Slack and communicate with members of the community to gather some feedback, since pretty much no one comments here.

Reply to: astro11 Vesp astro11
Vesp posted 7 years ago Weight: 0 | Link [ - ]

Yeah, I have posted this around on the IRC, two telegram groups, and /r/Monero. I'll check out slack. From your and other peoples feedback I have created this now: http://piratepad.net/AYPLEE24sa If you see anything that needs further clarification or how I can improve the project, the proposal, etc I'd love to hear it.

I am not sure how to proceed at this point? A lot of people think it would be useful but I don't get how to get this "approved" by the community to move it to the next part of the FFS system.

Reply to: astro11 Vesp astro11
Vesp posted 7 years ago Weight: 0 | Link [ - ]

Also, would you be willing to donate to this project? If so, any estimate on how much? I believe part of the approval process in the ideas section is to kind of get a feel for and gauge that it would actually get funded.

Kind of tricky because like you said, this forum is pretty dead and I am not so sure random comments on reddit/IRC count towards it. :P

cryptochangements edited 7 years ago Replies: 1 | Weight: 0 | Link [ - ]

Would you mind elaborating on the 3rd milestone? Perhaps I'm just misinterpreting your description but i dont see why you would need 5 XMR to use an existing API

Reply to: cryptochangements
Vesp posted 7 years ago Weight: 0 | Link [ - ]

Thanks for comment. I see that I didn't clarify too well but there's a few. reasons. Largely it's not just the API since my side has to track which sellers have the price protection feature turned on, and make just those specific USD/XMR exchanges when it verifies that we've recieved the XMR for payment.

So it is more involved than just having it work with all users by default. It probably would have been better to combine of molestone 2 and 3 together but was trying to make it easier/quicker to read.

Another real Osseo that I didn't elaborate on at all is that ideally it's more than one exchange. One issue I'm fairly worried about is the reliability of the exchange I'd be doing this price protection on. If they were to temporarily disable XMR trading, close my account, go offline, etc it would stop the price protection entirely, so its likely I'll need to integrate another exchange to help with this purpose. Although, with the money I'm raising here the goal is just to get a functional, working site and building in that type of fault tolerance will come in later.

One thing that is also really tricky is if the price protection is popular, it will require me to tie up a lot of money in the exchange.

It ultimately might be better to have the payments with price protection go straight to an exchange address that automatically sells it, but I don't particularly like that idea as I'm planning on using multiple payment addresses/subaddresses when they get here to help conceal payment information from shapeshift.io and whatever other shapeshift-like exchanges I can work with in the future.

Vesp edited 7 years ago Weight: 0 | Link [ - ]

Small update for milestone #1: Milestone 1: 5 XMR Finish Vesp.co Marketplace software. There are a few issues regarding internal messaging, shipping and ratings that need to be integrated better with the recent html/css redesign.

Currently we've got 7 small little issues we need to work out before we start the more involved Monero integration.

It's taking slightly longer than expected. This is due to some issues with the graphical redesign being implemented in an annoying way by the team we hired, which gave more workload to our main developer.

remaining issues are: 1: Update old hybridauth lib. This is pretty much complete, just haven't tested it yet since it had an issue with our subdomain and needed to get it working.

2: Item specifics Feature on product page + make item description expandable. This is done other than some static HTML needs to be removed.

3: front page Front page is largely finished other than some hotlinking needs to be added to some products, and the featured lists/daily deals need to be finished but that's just a few lines of code.

The remaining issues that might take a little bit more work will be: 4: Orders page -- display proper number of orders & sorting of orders 5: Message sorting & display 6: Cart -- Make it so reviews are that of products in the cart 7: Fix http://dev.vesp.co/store/orders to work more like shipstation.

Excited to get the monero part going - hopefully by monday that part of the process will begin and should be fairly easy to implement.

Vesp posted 7 years ago Weight: 0 | Link [ - ]

Since I have gotten a lot of feedback from the community I am going to edit the original post.

However, the original post will be here in case anyone wants to view it: https://pastebin.com/t3uthETk

antw081 edited 7 years ago Replies: 1 | Weight: 0 | Link [ - ]

Donated.

Reply to: antw081
Vesp posted 7 years ago Weight: 0 | Link [ - ]

Thank you! Greatly appreciated.