Questions about Mubiz

Can you describe what Mubiz is?

Simply put, Mubiz is a comprehensive suite of solutions for the three main barriers to entry of decentralized marketplaces. The first in the list of solutions Mubiz is providing is a web interface for both wallet and marketplace features. This saves users from having to download the client (in Particl’s case: Particl Desktop) on their devices and get right in the action simply by browsing our website. The second solution we provide is the exhaustivity of the listed products as well as an effective and long-reaching search engine that allows users to easily and quickly find the products they want. This solution, in particular, is especially useful in the case of OpenBazaar, another decentralized marketplace supported by Mubiz, where the data is only stored once on the vendor’s node. The third solution provided by our company is the integration of payment gateways of various natures, as in not only cryptocurrencies. As a matter of fact, Mubiz will be accepting banking/credit card payments as well as potentially Paypal, DCI, and etc. This, of course, will be done according to the various laws and will, ultimately, instantly convert into Particl just like any other non-PART Particl Marketplace transaction.

Thanks to these three services we will be providing, we’ll be able to offer to users an eCommerce experience no different than any other centralized marketplace as well as reducing the technical, psychological, and logistical difficulties brought by this new technology (i.e. we will manage the escrow & double deposits, returns, customer service, and etc) by taking care of all the technical stuff.

Any thoughts about the redesign of the website?

I, with the UX recommendations made by Louis Dubruel, initially coded and designed most of the current front-end for Mubiz. Even though the end result is alright, we’ve received a lot of feedback and suggestions from our users which made us realize that it was necessary to hire a professional team to redesign and optimize our UI/UX.

Ewa Nowak, a professional UI/UX designer, has accepted to help and advise us in completely revamping the Mubiz interface. The new interface is designed to be more modern, refined, smooth, as well as putting more focus on the products rather than the Mubiz brand.

Ewa made a lot of suggestions such as the display of a map for deliveries, using more icons to limit text, a refined charter, logo, homepage, and etc.

While the redesign of Mubiz was initially planned for Summer of 2018, the delays observed with the Particl Marketplace actually granted us more time to work on our interface which is a good thing in and of itself.

Will the new website be mobile friendly?

Yes, the entire website is designed to be responsive, thus compatible with all devices. For this reason, we do not plan on developing a mobile application for the moment as we believe the website will be usable enough from mobile. This could be a future roadmap item for us, and that is something that we will evaluate as we move forward.

What kind of legal framework are you building Mubiz on? More details about the legal steps being undertaken to protect Mubiz legally (and from what)

Mubiz is a company registered in Switzerland and operating within the Swiss legal framework. We have consulted lawyers to draft our General Terms & Conditions document as well as the handling of personal data. The biggest difficulty for us is that we are required by law to be in charge of customer service and product returns. That means we will be required to refund customers that are not satisfied with their product and receive the returned products.

The returned products will be sold back by Mubiz, under our very own store and eCommerce channels, and we thus reserve ourselves the right to not provide services for a vendor if its customer satisfaction rate is inferior to the minimum sales profit margin we identify for Mubiz. This will keep us from losing money due to bad products and/or vendor practices.

Will users have to KYC/AML themselves to use your platform?

According to the law, KYC/AML identification is required for users looking to spend more than 250€ a day. Mubiz has measures in place to detect users trying to bypass that limit. As we do not currently manage KYC/AML identifications, we thus limit carts at 250€ per day for the moment. This is definitely part of our roadmap!

What methods of payment will ultimately be available to users?

We currently accept payments through Coinbase: Bitcoin, Ether, Litecoin, and etc. We will be working on the integration of regular payments through banking cards as soon as the Particl Marketplace goes live on mainnet.

We are also considering switching our payment processor from Coinbase to Bity (which has fiat options) in the coming months.

Will it be currency-agnostic? As in, will you accept many coins? Which ones?

Cryptocurrency users will be able and should have no trouble using Particl Marketplace directly from Particl Desktop, which will have crypto-agnostic capabilities; Mubiz probably isn’t very useful for them. Mubiz has for mission to make the decentralized marketplaces it supports more accessible to the general public by offering more traditional means of payments such as banking cards, Paypal, American Express, DCI, and etc.

How exactly will Mubiz deal with escrow, shipping, returns, and customer support?

Mubiz will take care of the entire MAD escrow process for the end user (the buyer). Also, in order to provide an experience no different than any other eCommerce platform, Mubiz will pay the double deposit on behalf of the buyer as well. As precautionary measures, however, Mubiz will impose a few constraints:

Always the same escrow percentage rate

Free shipping to our warehouse so that we can manage the shipping of products available on Mubiz

The right of service refusal if the customer satisfaction is rate is too low such that we cannot make profits or break even with their products

In that sense, would you say Mubiz is going to act as an Amazon-like entity?

Our priority is to focus on the buyer side of the equation. Services for vendors, such as importing listings from other eCommerce platforms like Amazon, for example, has been identified as a potential long-term roadmap item. We want to first offer a fully comprehensive set of solutions for buyers first, and once that is nailed down, we’ll be looking into expanding our services to the vendor side should it make sense to do so at the time.

Will Mubiz be able to eliminate the volatility of the escrow system for vendors?

Our mission is to provide users with a seamless experience no different than any other eCommerce platform. As such, we’ve started working, together with Bity, on a solution to mitigate the risks caused by the crypto/fiat volatility. Once that is nailed down, we will then start working on a way to mitigate the volatility of funds when held in escrow.

Will the experience on Mubiz be as private as directly using Particl Marketplace?

No. Users looking for the best privacy set up will want, and rightly so, to use Particl Marketplace directly within Particl Desktop. Mubiz is not focused on privacy, but rather on usability.

Editor’s note: Mubiz states that, while their service requires some data to be harvested from their users, they will be fully compliant with Swiss and European laws, including the recent and widely-talked-about GDPR legal and privacy framework.

Will every vendor willing to sell on Mubiz have to ship your products to your shipping facility?

By default, every product listed on Particl Marketplace that fits our legal framework will be available on Mubiz. There is no opt-in or opt-out. If a buyer wishes to buy a certain product, we will make an offer to the vendor which will then have the opportunity or not to accept it and ship his product, at no charge, to our shipping facility. This means that any product purchased through Mubiz will first need to go through our own shipping facility, and will at the same time gain the whole suite of services offered by our platform such as customer service, returns, escrow management on behalf of the customer, and etc. This will be up to the vendor to accept our services or not.

What products will be listed on Mubiz?

By default, Mubiz will not make available products if they are not legal within all the countries we ship to. For example, you will never see firearms, drugs/cannabis, pharmaceuticals, and other similar items for sale on Mubiz. Our General Terms & Conditions contain an entire section about the listing restrictions.

It’s important not to forget that Mubiz is a legally registered and licensed company in Switzerland, we must abide by the law in its entirety. Furthermore, we desire to bring the decentralized marketplaces we support the exposure they deserve. It is only logical that we would filter items as our target users are “mainstream users” (as in, anyone shopping online) and expects a clean environment; advanced users and those looking for items not available on Mubiz can always download Particl Desktop and purchase their items on there.

Finally, any package that goes through our shipping facility and is found to contain illicit goods will obviously be properly reported to the local authorities.

What is your experience operating Mubiz using OpenBazaar?

We are extremely grateful towards OpenBazaar for proving decentralized marketplaces could be done. They opened the door to a new market that is poised to grow immensely within the next few years. The OpenBazaar developers are people we have the utmost respect for considering the risk they took taking such a leap of faith and building what had never been done before. I personally consider them as heroes.

That being said, not often does the first solution ends up being the most effective one, and we identify a few issues with OpenBazaar which will end up limiting both its development and adoption. We believe Mubiz should now be seeking out to other solutions in order to find which ones could improve on OB’s first proof-of-concept. For example, we found it extremely difficult to integrate nodes, build a crawler, and build on top of it a working search engine. We, in the end, succeeded in doing so, but it took a lot of resources to accomplish.

To be clear, Mubiz aims at being marketplace-agnostic, meaning that we want to host many different decentralized marketplaces that fit our vision and values. This is why we want to continue our support for OpenBazaar, and would only stop supporting a decentralized marketplace if its maintenance cannot be guaranteed to the community anymore of if its features/mission does not correspond to our values anymore.

What have you learned operating in the decentralized marketplace industry for the last few years?

The decentralized marketplace sector is very promising because it adds so much value and benefits to the end-user of an industry that’s already pretty big. Just like we had decentralized email services, then decentralized currencies and payment methods, now decentralized marketplaces are coming to revolutionize an industry in dire needs of disruption.

However, unlike cryptocurrency projects, the development of decentralized marketplaces is not a process that can be automatically or quickly profitable for the organization or individuals working on them. I actually believe it is much more profitable, as it stands today, for a developer to be working on some cryptocurrency in the hopes that the currency would pump, rather than be working on a decentralized marketplace project (as it is much more difficult to build and not necessarily tied to a speculative currency). It’s ironic and sad because, in the end, we are historically much more likely to remember the disruption caused by these new marketplaces rather than yet another currency out of thousands.

What attracts you towards Particl in general and in comparison with OpenBazaar or other decentralized marketplaces?

Particl has been built with the issues and shortcomings of other decentralized marketplaces in mind. Particl has, on top of this, its own blockchain, thus its own currency and wallet, features that are most definitely useful for us as it makes it that much easier to add new features and functionalities to the protocol, as required, as well as financially incentivizing developers to produce a solid protocol.

As a side-note but related to this topic, I believe it is highly improbable that we ever see a serious decentralized marketplace operate over the Ethereum network, in part because of its performance and block saturation. I also do not really believe in the future of projects that are steering away from their open-source and open-ended nature and rather identifying themselves or large corporate companies, such as Syscoin.

What’s the biggest obstacle you see in OpenBazaar to reach adoption?

For one, the OpenBazaar platform’s response time is way too cumbersome to expect a satisfactory enough user experience that could rival well established and centralized eCommerce platforms. As long as simply loading the description of an item will take north of 5 seconds, we can’t really expect the platform to gain “mainstream adoption”.

Will users be able to leave a review once they completed a verified transaction?

Yes, once the order is completed, users can leave a review on the page of the item they purchased. These reviews will be displayed on the website for all to see!

How much do you think users will be able to save using decentralized marketplaces?

It’s very hard to tell, that will take months of reliable data to figure out the details. It can be estimated, more or less, that the retailing margin is around 20%. From this, we can speculate that both the vendor and the customer could save 10% off of the cost of the item simply by transacting through a decentralized marketplace instead of through a retail channel.

Editor’s note: Here are the fee schedules (in USD) of other popular, centralized eCommerce platforms:

The variable closing fee is applied on media items, the referral fee is a percentage that is taken off of the final item price by the eCommerce platform after each sale and the Amazon Fulfillment fee is the fee you pay for Amazon to manage orders, shipping and products for you.

eBay (source) : (Per-category insertion/listing fee of $0.35 after your first 50 free monthly listings are used) + (final value fee of around 10% on average taken off after each sale) + (payment processor fee)

(source) : (Per-category insertion/listing fee of after your first 50 free monthly listings are used) + (final value fee of around on average taken off after each sale) + (payment processor fee) Alibaba (source): (Gold membership for $2,999 (outside China) to $5,000 (company in China)) + (escrow fee of 5% ) + (payment processor/banking fee)

(source): (Gold membership for (outside China) to (company in China)) + (escrow fee of ) + (payment processor/banking fee) Etsy (source): (Optional subscription fee of $20 for all the features) + (Listing fee of $0.20 ) + ( 5% transaction/sales fee based on the value of the item + shipping costs) + (payment processor fee)

(source): (Optional subscription fee of for all the features) + (Listing fee of ) + ( transaction/sales fee based on the value of the item + shipping costs) + (payment processor fee) Particl (subject to change): (Listing fee projected to be only a few cents) + (currency transaction fee of less than $0.50 or so)

What is your projected release timeframe?

The new Mubiz interface, as well as the new General Terms & Conditions, will likely be made available for October 2018. We will then, at that point, have a few administrative tasks that will be tackled all the way until the end of the year.

As for the Particl Marketplace integration onto Mubiz, that will mostly depend on the state of the Particl Marketplace development. For this reason, we cannot give any specific date as to when Particl will be made available on Mubiz, but that will be only a short time after its mainnet release. In fact, on paper, the alpha, testnet version of Particl Marketplace was supposed to have given us the time to work out the full integration, which has been proven to be true, but not at the speed we planned it to. Because of this, Particl will not be available on Mubiz from Day 1 but should be made available only days after its release. For the full, final integration of the marketplace, it will take a few weeks to work out all the kinks.

Do you have a roadmap for Mubiz?

In the short term, we will finalize our interface redesign and UX as well as update our General Terms & Conditions. Then, while we wait for Particl Marketplace to go live, we will complete all the administrative work still required to be done before integrating Particl by the Switzerland authorities.

Then, if Particl Marketplace releases by early next year, we will be focusing on putting for sale and managing items as well as offering as many payment options as possible and a solid search engine. Should Particl Marketplace release a bit later, that would leave us more time to optimize the back-end, logistics, commercial support, and other services offered by Mubiz.

End of the Interview