shops is a fair ecommerce that connects buyers and sellers on the fediverse.

to keep track of feature & development summaries in a blog post format, take a look at the shops' project page from my blog.

features

• federated: building with activitypub protocol to interoperate with any social media for true global reachability for sellers
• agpl license: open & community orientated development process that anyone can contribute, use, and study
• compatibility: great hardware compatibility for self-hosting enthusiasts
• user transparency: fees are configurable and observable publically to fight scammers, scalpers, and anti-consumer corporate dealings
• written in rust: code correctness & memory safety helps developers to build safer and faster

comparison chart

service	open source?	cross platform?	federated listings?	*platform fee	*seller fee (per month)	*max platform fee protetion?	ads?	preserve user privacy?	buyer fee	referral fees
shops (official server)	yes (agpl)	yes (activitypub)	yes (activitypub)	yes (configurable)	no	yes	no	yes	no	no
flohmarkt	yes (agpl)	yes (activitypub)	yes (activitypub)	no	no	unsupported	no	yes	no	no
ebay	no	no	no	13.6-20%+	$5-$3000	no	yes	no	4%+	$0.3 per item
amazon	no	no	no	5-17%+	$40	no	yes	no	$0	8-45%

note:

• platform fee (per transaction): adjustable by shops' sysadmin, ranging from 0-100%. official shops is 1%. this is the one and only source of income for sysadmin. it's publically available on every transaction
• seller fee: no means shops doesn't support or will never support this "feature", because it makes no sense to anyone
• max platform fee protection: a safety limit to prevent buyers from paying eccessive fees to platform. e.g. for $1000 item, its platform fee is 1% == $10. since item has exceeded its max platform fee, so the actual fee will be capped at $3

documentation

project documentation is provided out of the box in the repository. shops provide 2 types of documentations:

• a owner's manual
• a local api doc (interactive web gui)

owner's manual

owner's manual offers high level explanation of what the project does and how to use the project codes. it can be locally hosted with mdbook by running (very help while working on the codebase and need to document some concepts or guides):

mdbook serve doc

see the documentation section for more details.

api doc

api doc is available as soon as server starts running under either dev or test environment.

to access api doc on the browser. visit http://localhost:3000/docs

instances

• general supermarket

more info

• matrix chatroom
• mastodon

donation

• bitcoin: bc1qmf5khkujhwhdqzl0urec7stusay257lnslspld
• monero: tba

license