Hacker News Reader

Comment by jborichevskiy | Hacker News Reader

Not 100% related but a fun thought experiment I’ve been thinking about. What if all these various online marketplaces (Amazon, Shopify, Weebly, Wix, eBay) had the exact same interface functionality? Themes might be different but searching, sorting, comparing, and buying were standard across the board, like NPC shops in video games.

I feel like it would lead to a significant increase in sales, due to the decreased cognitive load of figuring out yet another shitty interface. Mix in seamless payments and account management, and the idea of an online store starts to disappear entirely, to be replaced with the ability to just... buy stuff.

View on HN

Or if they used the same standard shopping protocol, that anyone could implement or use (like they use e-mail for communication with customers almost universally). You'd add your favorite e-shop URL to your favorite desktop shopping app, and you'd see products from various shops in one interface.

The app could have customer centric functionality, since it would be a "user agent". So you'd have stuff like price tracking, availability tracking, feature comparison, independent reviews, saveable shopping cart, global wishlist, consistent user interface that never changes unless you want it to, and is configurable by you, etc.

Seller would implement the protocol for their side and buyers would choose UI app to discover and order stuff, be it CLI or GUI, or scripted.

“What if there was only one way to buy things”, “then 100% of things bought would be bought through that one way”.

If you eliminate differentiation you are eliminating friction, but also innovation.

Fair point.

Maybe it can better be phrased as,

"what if online marketplaces published their data in an open format allowing the end client to display them however the user prefers"?

You mean like CSS Zen Garden?

Or via Styx/9p2000. Could you imagine an online store that mounted directly into your operating system? There would be a whole market of GUIs.

[edit]

Perhaps provided on a 9p.mydomain.tld subdomain?

Or would it just be something like nttp instead of http?

[/edit]

http://www.csszengarden.com/214/

Neat project - thanks for mentioning. Definitely in line with what I'm imagining.

It's inevitable, the very core nature of markets will inevitably lead to either one single player or an oligarchy of players using shared strategies

Interesting thought, I would love to hear the leading UX designers of those companies discuss their ideas, desperately trying to settle on a solution they all like.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com