Storefront

Written by Matthew Carano and kingflurkel

Real World Storefront

In Swarm City, the three main conceptual pillars are Hashtags (marketplaces), Hives (communities), and Reputation (standing). While it’s not imperative for an end user to thoroughly understand these concepts in order to transact in Swarm City, anyone wishing to organize or build would benefit from knowing them.

Another important concept, but more practical than philosophical in nature, is the storefront. A storefront is a graphical user interface (GUI) that allows people and communities to easily access and use a hashtag in Swarm City. To end users, storefronts will look like apps. On Boardwalk 2.0, users interact with hashtags by going to swarm.city, creating a user profile, and then selecting a hashtag from a list. In the future, users will go directly to the storefronts of their favorite hashtags, because interacting this way will have certain advantages.

For one, a hashtag’s storefront will be crafted with the needs of the specific marketplace in mind. For example, a rideshare hashtag will most likely require features like a map and driver profiles, whereas buy/sell hashtags will need to organize product pictures and descriptions. This will make the end user’s experience more customized and appropriate to their goals.

#Needaride storefront example

There will be many different types, but here is an example of what a rideshare storefront may look like in Swarm City. In this one, the user would type where they want to go in the yellow box. They might choose a specific destination like an address, or a a general destination like a restaurant chain.

As mentioned earlier, the storefront makes it easy to access a specific marketplace. In this example the marketplace is #needaride. Once the destination is chosen, the user has the option to send their ride request to a specific hive, or open it up to any driver providing rides on #needaride.

This Storefront gives Hives the option to tell prospective customers a bit about their drivers. This includes the total reputation their drivers have earned in #needaride as well as other marketplaces. In this case Chasyr created a video advertisement for users to watch if they desire.

After the rider and driver choose to work together, the #needaride storefront may show the driver’s progress as they make their way to the rider’s location.

Both rider and driver automatically send SWT into the smart contract once they decide to work together. When the ride is complete, the rider will indicate in the app that the ride was successful. This sweeps the escrowed funds to the driver’s wallet. If anything went wrong, the rider may begin a conflict resolution process.

Try the clickthrough model yourself: https://invis.io/U8DFZWWH9, or see a short video showing the rideshare storefront model:

A market for storefronts

Each hashtag owner will be able to choose a storefront that best fits the needs of their hashtag’s user base. This will open up a bountiful market of storefronts, and the experience will be similar to choosing apps on the Google app store. The goal is to make it easy for hashtag users to find each other, communicate, and transact, and storefronts play a vital role in that.

Any developer with polymer skills may create one or many, and they will receive a small, flat fee for every transaction that goes through their storefront. That means their incentive is to build storefronts that are a useful addition to a marketplace, so that many hashtag owners will employ them. It also means hashtag owners will have many storefronts to choose from, perhaps dozens or even hundreds of options. There won’t be one rideshare storefront, just like their won’t be one rideshare hashtag. Hashtag owners will choose the one that best suits their marketplace.

User Interface

The goal of Swarm City is to make it easy for people to use blockchain tech and smart contracts as a solution to the problem of reputation. When two parties engage in a transaction in which neither party knows each other, how can they trust each other to be good actors? The answer is they must trust that the system they’re transacting through will create immutable, context-based reputation for every user. Swarm City does that.

In the pre-blockchain world, this meant using commerce platforms like Amazon and Uber, but these are centralized behemoths that take a large transaction fee to pay for their infrastructure, and act as a honeypot for black hat hackers. Code makes these platforms obsolete, and Swarm City makes interacting with this code a friendly experience. Storefronts are even friendlier. For the most part, a user won’t feel like they’re interacting with the blockchain at all, but instead their favorite app.

If you’d like to know more, please come say hello in Slack, and follow us on Twitter. You may also follow our development process on Github.