[theturtletalks]

Yes the marketplace supports our e-commerce platform, Openfront, for now but is built with adapters so any platform can be connected.

We felt AI was the perfect glue between different types of stores and could navigate them using intelligence. An example of this is being able to paste in your address in chat and AI will figure out which is the country, state, etc. Different stores handle addresses differently.

[throwacct]

Ok. How can this help businesses wanting to take "control" of their brand and customers? Won't this be equivalent to being an Amazon Seller?

[theturtletalks]

The difference is stores own everything. When someone buys, payment goes straight to the store's account. Customer data goes to their system. The marketplace just queries their existing API and renders it conversationally. Orders show up directly in the store's platform. They don't have to log into anything new or manage multiple dashboards. We never touch the money or data.

[throwacct]

This system would function similarly to platforms like WooCommerce or Shopify, but with the key differentiator of being integrated directly into your search engine/chat interface, instead of Google, Amazon, or ChatGPT, right? What is your monetization strategy? Ads? monthly fee to show up on the engine?

Also, you're adding a discovery platform where businesses have to compete against other businesses for visibility and customers. Why would I choose to, yet again, help create another "aggregator" to the already saturated "aggregator" market (Amazon, Shopify, Google, ChatGPT, etc.)?

Btw, I'm not trying to bash your idea. The reason I ask is that businesses (even smaller ones) don't pay just for software, but for everything else (support, etc), and among those things, software too, and frankly, the main problem 15 years ago was discovery, but with social media (Twitter, ig, and now TikTok), discovery itself is a solved problem.

[theturtletalks]

We sell the software. Openfront is open source e-commerce platforms for every vertical (retail, restaurants, salons, hotels). Businesses get the full source code, self-host or host with us. That's our business.

This marketplace doesn't charge transaction fees because stores already have their own infrastructure. We're just connecting to it. Marketplace operators who fork this can charge flat listing fees or affiliates, but the model works because discovery is separate from infrastructure.

On discovery being solved: social sends traffic to your site, but checkout still happens on your platform. Same here. The difference is stores aren't locked in. They expose a standard interface once and automatically work with every marketplace using that protocol. One store can be listed on multiple marketplaces serving different audiences without any extra integrations.

You're right that businesses pay for more than software. But they also shouldn't have to pay 15-30% transaction fees when they already own the checkout stack. That's the shift.