First of all, thanks to Mike for starting up this group. : )
I want to think about this more in the future, but I thought I'd send out an initial ping as something I want to address in Ubercart beginning with Drupal 7. Basically, my question is what is the future of e-commerce in a semantic web? How can e-commerce change and evolve as we move forward?
A lot of e-commerce (and therefore e-commerce applications) seems to be about a store website/application (iTunes) with a product catalog, shopping cart, and order management system. eBay brought something new to the table with "peer to peer" e-commerce allowing for a marketplace of buying and selling that didn't depend on a store w/ a set product catalog or shopping cart. Amazon does a lot of good community building around products and had something going w/ their one click ordering. PayPal and Google Checkout both provide solutions where shoppers can shop across many sites without having to share their financial information.
My question is... what should happen or what are you trying to make happen in your markets as the web continues to evolve? What about a new marketplace site that pings individual store websites to find out what they're selling, allows customers to checkout from several different stores all at once using a third party payment system, and then sends order fulfillment information to the individual vendors? What about getting drop-ship manufacturers to describe their products w/ RDF and mashing that information up with product reviews and comparison tools? How about some sort of shared shopper/buyer trust system that brings eBay's feedback system to the entire e-commerce world?
People have requested fancy shopping features, like drag and drop shopping carts, for Ubercart, but I tend to tune those requests out. They require a lot of work, are unconventional for shoppers, and aren't really innovations... just a new UI on an old concept. I'm less interested in innovative interfaces and designs than I am about engineering new ways of finding products/customers and making business transactions. I feel like fields in core and the work done around RDF and aggregation could be a boon to Ubercart, and I want to know what's out there that I should be keeping an eye on as we move forward.
Comments
very confusing..
Would it be better to call this the ubercart module group, rather than the drupal commerce group?
It would make more sense as there already is an ecommerce group dealing with ecommerce related posts and sub groups, such as the eCommerce module group.
It would also be far more intuitive and less confusing.
Yeah, I know
Unfortunately the namespace has been taken by the maintainer of the e-commerce module group (I heard a rumor he switched the name after the fact, but don't know that for certain), which is even more confusing since the url for that group is not g.d.o/ecommerce-module, but g.d.o/ecommerce. Gordon has made it clear that he doesn't want any other discussions going on there besides e-commerce module developments (i.e. it will be pretty quiet there), so we started this group for more general discussions. With that said- anyone should feel free to post about e-commerce module as well as ubercart. Most of us are pretty invested in ubercart at this point, but that doesn't mean that we're not open for discussions, debates, and such about which module is better for different situations, and I personally hope that the e-comm package gets revived and can once again help push Drupal as an e-commerce solution.
Anyway, as you can see on the link that Mike posted, Gordon is more than willing to tell people to leave that group when they aren't talking about the e-commerce module, so I think/hope that most people should find there way over here.
Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg
ZivTech: Illuminating Technology
Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg
ZivTech: Illuminating Technology
Confusion
The e-Commerce module group is specifically for the e-Commerce Module. See this post for some background. Alex UA and I discussed this more @ drupalcon Szeged and decided to start the group.
The idea behind this group is to have a forum for anything related to commerce with Drupal. The topic Ryan posted is a great example. How do we take advantage of the semantic web for commerce. Other items would be advising users on how to accept donations, which commerce module might best suit their needs, and discussing high-level topics of the ever changing world of online commerce.
Reputation Service
I like this point, but broadened to the entire web. This is an idea/concept I've been thinking about and wanting more & more over the last months... and just discussed it briefly at a drupal meetup in Minneapolis last week. Many online communities have some sort of reputation system in place, but it only exists within the walled garden of a specific site or system. But that's not what we want. We invest heavily to build a strong reputation in the communities we take part in, and we want to be able to take our reputation around with us, where ever we go... maybe tie it to our OpenID, for example.
In following with the next trends of the web... the semantic web, the open web, web 3.0 or whatever you prefer to call it... where various services are being meshed and mashed at deeper & deeper levels, and more transparently... this seems a logical next step. Take a look at the services model used by the likes of OpenCalais, DISQUS, Mollom, etc. and an independent, ubiquitous reputation service begins to make a lot of sense. Maybe it could be seeded with data from the big communities that have tons of reputation data already stored away, like eBay, Amazon, slashdot, etc.
I don't know if anything like this exists or might be in the works -- if so, I haven't seen it. I thought OpenKarma would be a terrific name for such a service. I tweeted the thought a few weeks ago.
So, getting back closer to the point... I think buyers' & sellers' reputations would be a great application of this type of system (and I don't want to hi-jack this thread away from commerce systems/applications in general!).
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Matt J. Sorenson (emjayess)
d.o. | g.d.o. | WEBJAX'd! | twitter
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matt j. sorenson, g.d.o., d.o.
VotingAPI and Users/Vendors
I think that reputation controls are a big part of what is needed for successful e-commerce sites, and ubercart should definitely take this into consideration. However, I wonder if it wouldn't be better to keep reputation systems separate from ubercart itself, as I think there could easily be other applications for such a system outside of commerce. Is there already a way to tie in the voting api into user profiles? If not, this might be a better, more generalized, way to go...
Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg
ZivTech: Illuminating Technology
Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg
ZivTech: Illuminating Technology
Loose coupling
Great point. I think it is smart to think of reputation controls as a service that can be molded and extended to various other pieces of functionality -- or to various facets of a user's reputation, perhaps (e.g. "pays promptly", "ships quickly", "contributes insightful commentary", "talks too much")...
As to whether voting api has been integrated with user profiles, there are the userpoints module and the userpoints extensions modules. At first glance, these seem to be geared a little more toward building an incentive system than a reputation system. After a bit of browsing, I also find the userpoints_ubercart module, which is maintained separately from both userpoints & ubercart, but integrates the two.
I haven't used any of these, so I can only point in that direction and see what others have to say.
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Matt J. Sorenson (emjayess)
d.o. | g.d.o. | WEBJAX'd! | twitter
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matt j. sorenson, g.d.o., d.o.
Reputaion Service
Mike O'Conner and I talked about this idea at Drupalcon. Not specifically for e-commerce, but for reputation in general. It would be great to be able to "carry over" karma from one forum to another, one web site to another, or one marketplace to another.
I think this concept will initially run into resistance from established sites like eBay who's power is their market / user base and who try to lock their users in. But this "ebay" approach will inevitably fail because of consumer pressure. Just look at wireless carriers in the US. For decades they have fought tooth and nail to lock consumers into their network with their device and their apps. The iPhone and Android are breaking the networks open. Why? Because it is what consumers want.
I think / hope the next steps in e-commerce especially related to the semantic web will include features which break these sort of protectionist concepts open in favor of better usability for the consumer. OpenID, a reputation service, an open reputation service for rating merchants, an open market place for payment services, are all concepts ripe for delivery.
Andy
EBay was an early adopter of
EBay was an early adopter of opening up their platform to developers with web services. IMO, if eBay resists such an 'OpenKarma' system in the interest of hoarding their reputation data, consider them antiquated. The smart move would be for the established players like eBay & Amazon to plant the seeds of such a system (hopefully their strategists are paying attention!). Where the world is not yet flat, it soon will be.
And with those web services already there, maybe the seeds are already planted... example: if we can tie an eBay UserId to a person's OpenID (or if eBay enables this), then a reputation service could conceptually use eBay as one source of reputation data, using eBay's GetUserProfile call from the Shopping API. Further, and still assuming cooperativeness... data such as an eBay user's feedback rating shouldn't need to be forked and stored again, just continually updated. So, you register your 'OpenKarma' account, and teach it how to read your eBay feedback profile, Amazon seller & buyer ratings, etc... using say, OAuth-style weaving of the OpenWeb.
It seems there is real interest in these open, independent reputation service ideas, perhaps enough to spark up a group on g.d.o. dedicated to it (so we don't hi-jack the whole "what's next in commerce" thread here)?
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Matt J. Sorenson (emjayess)
d.o. | g.d.o. | WEBJAX'd! | twitter
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matt j. sorenson, g.d.o., d.o.
ATTN: Mark Carges of Ebay
don't mind me, just trying to get someone's attention ;)
If anyone from eBay stumbles thru here, Hi!... would love to have you peruse the above concepts and chime in.
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Matt J. Sorenson (emjayess)
d.o. | g.d.o. | WEBJAX'd! | twitter
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matt j. sorenson, g.d.o., d.o.