OPEN MARKET PROTOCOL (OMP)

This document contains the draft text for a generic market protocol and is subject to change.

Intent

The intent of this specification is to create a standardized and open format that can encompass all the economic interactions of an online marketplace.

License

Open Market Protocol (OMP) is released under the terms of the MIT license. See MIT for more information or see https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT.

Design

The Open Market Protocol (OMP) is divided into two distinct formats. One of these, the public listing format , contains all necessary data related to a certain item or service being offered for sale (the title, description, images, payment destination etc). The private message format contains all data that must remain private, such as the transaction information and the conversations between the seller and buyer, or the exact shipping details.

Virtues

The protocol is designed with a few virtues in mind. One of those is extensibility . Technology moves at an exponential rate, and the very few protocols that survive the test of time are all designed with extensibility in mind. A protocol looking to be relevant on a long enough timeline should be both robust and flexible enough that it easily allows any developer to securely expand it. The development of decentralized storage networks (DHTs, BitTorrent, IPFS) and blockchain solutions is still young, there aren't any clear "winners" that meet all criteria nor may there ever be, thus the protocol must accommodate for it.

Privacy is also an important cornerstone, the protocol specifies a format for private messages that buyers and sellers must use, we highly advice that these messages be exchanged over end-to-end encrypted communication channels. Recent revelations and academic papers have proven beyond a doubt that there are many active threats to our digital privacy and security. Additionally, decentralized networks, as well as blockchains, are open public books full of sensitive information for passive attackers to abuse. This was of great concern when designing this protocol as it could potentially put users at risk. We want to allow the right tools and techniques to maintain the level of confidentiality that businesses and people are accustomed to.

Fragmentation

The online ecommerce industry is a fragmented space. A few big enterprises such as Amazon and Ebay have established a dominant position in the e-commerce market. A tremendous amount of small online stores are also certainly not to be neglected. There is a plethoria of software applications to set up online shops, but nearly none of them are designed for interoperability.

One of the many frustrations that online merchants and vendors suffer is the lack of portability of the inventory data between the many different online marketplaces. The more markets your products are available on, the greater their exposure and thus the greater their potential revenue streams. Yet importing the inventory data into another application or website remains a cumbersome process, often on purpose to prevent vendors from using competition. Until now everyone was stuck with either importing csv files (which have many limitations) or using third party software that manages the multiple marketplaces.

The lack of inventory portability by large enterprises is a deliberate design strategy to prevent vendors from also offering their goods on competiting platforms. Moving vast amounts of inventory data to a competitor is a deliberatly painstaking process to capitalize vendors and thus restricting their economic potential.

This protocol allows for full inventory data portability, but it doesn't stop there. It also easily lets you assign images, payment and shipping details to specific listings. Transfering listings and inventory to other marketplaces that follow the OMP specification become very straightforward.

The current rise of blockchain technology has given programmers a toolset to interact with money in a way that wasn't possible before. The core of the payment format is designed for operability with the Bitcoin blockchain (or any derivatives for that matter). This allows merchants and vendors to accept a multitude of virtual currencies on a per item basis.

We believe that a unified protocol is a step in the right direction towards more open and free marketplaces where portability is cherished instead of demonized.

Help

We welcome all voluntary contributors, don't hesitate to reach out to us on GitHub. There is a list of task.