User Interface Tweaks

Improved Sell Orders Page (Work-in-Progress)

The lowest hanging fruit for impoving Particl’s user experience is by making several tweaks to the user interface of Particl Desktop, the client on which the Open Marketplace is hosted. These tweaks are currently being worked on based on user feedback and will make using Particl much easier, especially for those who haven’t used it in the past. These improvements and additions will also display more information to buyers and sellers, making it easier to track what’s happening within the client (i.e. why funds are moving around, or at what time has a certain transaction been locked into escrow, and etc).

Lowering Marketplace Fees

One of the most reported issue with the Open Marketplace is the cost of listing an item. As the marketplace is fully autonomous and isn’t being operated by any third-party, it charges no commission, subscription, payment processing, or escrow fee at all. It does, however, charge a small listing fee to fight off spam on the network.

In fact, when listing an item, the network usually charges sellers with a few cents worth of PART every day. And while it isn’t that big of a deal for any seller making a few sales here and there on their listings, especially given the fact that no commission is being charged on top of sales, it can quickly add up for some of the smaller scale vendors who struggle to make sales and sellers with huge inventories (hundreds/thousands of listings).

Adjusting Marketplace Listing Fees on the Partyman App

Fortunately, you can actually contribute to making this listing fee smaller. The Particl team has published on their blog a full tutorial on how to instruct your staking node to broadcast a request for lower fees to the SMSG network. SMSG is the network on which marketplace-related content is published and hosted.

Additionally, the Particl team is in the process of improving and optimizing the SMSG network. It is estimated that the marketplace fees (i.e. listing fees) will significantly be lowered due to the more effective SMSG codebase.

These changes will come gradually within the Beta phase of development of the marketplace as updates get pushed.

Product Import Tool

Product Import Tool (Work-in-Progress)

One of the key components of a two-sided marketplace is getting a good amount of sellers and listed products. This is why the new Particl Open Marketplace roadmap for the next few months includes a lot of tools that will make it easier for sellers to adopt the platform.

One such tool is the Product Import tool. This tool allows vendors to quickly import large inventories from other sources, considerably reducing the time it takes to populate the marketplace when holding custody of large inventories. Without this feature, sellers need to manually add listings one by one, which is a very time-consuming process.

With this feature in place, sellers are going to be able to import and list large inventories with only a few clicks. Outside sources for inventory importation will include WooCommerce stores and CSV files (spreadsheets). More options are very likely to be added in the future.

Q&A Section — Ask a Question to a Seller

But a two-sided marketplace being a two-sided marketplace, it also needs a good amount of buyers so that it can reach its full potential. This is where the upcoming Q&A section comes into play.

This “comment section” will allow anyone to ask questions to vendors before purchasing (or flagging) a product. This isn’t unlike the very popular Q&A section that Amazon has had for some time now, and it goes a great way into giving you information that might be missing from the item’s description.

This feature, while not a direct line of contact with the seller, will help buyers make more informed purchasing decisions and give a little bit more confidence when buying an item from a complete stranger. The more you know, the better decisions one can make.

Particl Desktop Settings Page

The Particl Desktop Settings page is a no-brainer. Currently, if you want to change a configuration on your Particl Desktop client, you either have to modify some config file or enter some command inside the console. This works, but since the goal is to make Particl’s user experience as good as possible, it’s definitely not as user-friendly as it should be.

The Settings page is pretty much what you would expect from a…settings page. It allows you to change various preferences without having to go through the hassle of finding a tutorial on how to find and modify a config file, or find a list of commands to enter in the console.

Market Management Tool

The Market Management tool is one of the most awaited features of the Open Marketplace, and rightly so. It is what’s going to make all the individual pieces of the marketplace click together and form into a giant distributed network of markets.

Select What Market (or Storefront) to Browse (Work-in-Progress)

Market Management will allow you to either create a market of your own or connect your client to a pre-existing one. These community markets can be created by anyone and are completely independent of the main interface of the Open Marketplace. In fact, they are powered by completely different sets of market keys, meaning no data can be shared between the different markets. It’s like multi-wallets, but more advanced and for markets.

On Particl, there are two types of markets: community markets, and storefronts.

Community Markets: They are markets on which anyone that has access to it can buy or sell goods and services. They function exactly the same as the main interface of the Open Marketplace, and nobody has any special permission over other users. Not even the market creator. These markets, however, are not enabled nor visible by default. To access these markets, you need to connect your Particl Desktop client to its Market ID.

Note: The main interface of the Open Marketplace is a community market that’s enabled and displayed by default by the Particl Desktop client.

Joined Markets (and Storefronts) Page (Work-in-Progress)

Storefronts: They are customizable community markets on which special permissions can be attributed to various users. In their most common sense, they are storefronts on which a seller can “set up a shop” in such a way that only him (or the people he gives administrator rights to) can publish listings. Anyone with access to a storefront can only buy (or flag) the listings put on there by the owner of the storefront. Storefronts can also be used by communities looking for higher standards in quality on which only vetted sellers could publish listings.

Note: By default, Particl Desktop has no way to automatically find Market IDs on the network. These keys need to be distributed manually by whoever wants people to interact with a certain market or storefront…unless these markets/storefronts get promoted.

Promote a Market or Storefront (Work-in-Progress)

While Particl Desktop cannot automatically scan and detect community markets, it is still possible to promote your market to the network, for a fee. When “promoting” your market (or storefront), your Particl Desktop client broadcasts the Market ID of your market to the network using SMSG. It is then picked up by the other clients connected to the Particl network, and is added to a “market browser”. At this point, a market will act just like a listing. It will show up on the market browser for the amount of time it’s been promoted. Once the promotion period ends, the market disappears from the market browser.

Note: Once a market or storefront disappears from the market browser, it is still accessible to anyone with its Market ID. The only difference is that it won’t be publicly accessible from the market browser itself.

Anyone with the proper Market IDs of a market or storefront can promote it. All the fees paid to bump/promote community markets are, just like the listing fees, redistributed to stakers.

Create a New Storefront With Logo (Work-in-Progress)

Storefronts are ideal for sellers with an already established reputation. It allows them to guarantee to their customer base that a given market, thus all products published inside of it, belongs to him. This can easily be done by, for example, displaying the Market ID of the storefront on the seller’s official website.

Additionally, storefronts allow for a minimal amount of customization/branding (logo, store description, store title) and aggregate all the listings of a vendor to a single point of access This makes it easier and quicker for customers to find what they’re looking for, when they need it.

Adjustable Escrow Ratio

As it stands right now, Particl’s double deposit MAD escrow system only works using a 100% ratio, meaning both parties need to deposit a security deposit equal to 100% of the value of the item or service being purchased. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. After all, a 100% ratio does provide the best game-theory for this type of escrow. There might, however, be some circumstances where such an escrow system wouldn’t be ideal.

Take the example of a well-known seller that’s already trusted by its customer base and runs a storefront on Particl. This seller might want to move some of its inventory on Particl to save on fees and improve the level of privacy for his business as well as his customers. But since that seller is already well-known and has an established customer base, it might not be ideal for both the seller and its customer to front funds in order to cover a double deposit MAD escrow smart-contract. There is already trust that’s been established between the two parties and, since the seller is running a Particl storefront, he can prove ownership of the products being offered simply by spreading his Market ID on his website or social media pages. In that situation, the required security deposits become an unnecessary obstacle for both the seller and the buyer as they do not necessarily require, or want, escrow protection for transactions.

What an adjustable escrow would mean is that vendors could set up their own escrow ratio preferences from 0% to 100%. In the above example of a well-known seller running a Particl storefront, he could just reduce his escrow ratio to 0%, meaning no security deposit would be required from neither the buyer or the vendor. This, of course, means that buyers would have no recourse against a dishonest seller, but for those already-established sellers with an existing customer base, having the opportunity to not have to advance coins to fund the escrow system would make adopting Particl’s Open Marketplace much more of a no-brainer.

Inventory and Quantity Management Tool

This feature is self-explanatory. There is no way, currently, to manage a wide inventory and add quantities to your listing. Fortunately, the marketplace back-end currently allows for most of it, but it hasn’t been integrated into the Open Marketplace just yet. Note that a relatively fair amount of development is still needed around this feature and it is likely to be released after the Market Management tool.

This tool, like its name implies, allows vendors to easily manage inventory quantities, manage multiple listings, and etc. Just like the Product Import tool, Inventory Management is going to make it way easier for sellers with large inventories to take the leap and get started selling on Particl without it being a big hassle.