Why we created the first company on top of OpenBazaar.

Provistor is an “It as a Service” company that lets you run OpenBazaar on the cloud with just a few clicks, access your store from any web enabled device.

The world of e-commerce marketplace services enabling individuals to sell things to one another is currently dominated by a handful of powerful players, as capable as their services might be they are limited by regulations and by a banking/financial network that wasn’t designed for global online trade. This leaves most people outside industrialized nations unable to experience online shopping, much less to make a living by selling goods online.

When I found out about the OpenBazaar project, given my background in p2p networks I felt compelled to join to help bring it to existence, Bitcoin was the missing piece to make a p2p e-commerce network that could potentially turn any person around me into a possible buyer or seller. I think commerce turns nations into civilized partners, if that concept would be applied to everyone out there, how much better would it be if everyone treated each other as a potential customer or vendor.

As I became more involved and obsessed with the project I could take a 10,000 feet view of its parts, issues and weaknesses and it was clear to me that it was too hard for anybody to contribute to it in the state that it was so I put a lot of effort into a one step configuration script.

I also thought that regular users even if they had a friendly way to install the software, were used to an online shopping experience that involved simply opening a web browser to start shopping, they wouldn’t be used to installing specific software for ecommerce in their computers, also, the world has moved towards massive mobile computing adoption and a lot of ecommerce activity nowadays happens conveniently from the palm of our hands.

Without users on the platform, the rest of the hard technical challenges the project faces to bring p2p shopping to life wouldn’t matter, therefore me and my team knowing and loving OpenBazaar like few people out there created and launched a service called [Provistor](http://provistor.com) which enables people to run an OpenBazaar node 24/7, on the cloud with just a few clicks, this means vendors can have their stores running all the time reliably, and buyers can use the service to shop from any web browser enabled device, no app installations required.

It’s in our interest to continue to support the development of OpenBazaar, we know that this isn’t just a reinvention of e-commerce, this is a potentially a re-invention of commerce in itself, a worldwide job creation technology that will make available the longest tail of product offering seen by mankind, one that will level the playing field and who will ultimately benefit consumers with infinite choice.

Angel Leon

Provistor.com Co-Founder and OpenBazaar contributor.