Re: [kNT] 1st Draft of CommerceTrial

[Daniel Harris <daniel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi there Romek,

This is a great start! Well done for kicking it off! Here we go... ;-)

We need to make shopping an easy (quick and simple) process for the 
consumer.

We need to make the act of purchasing stuff seamless: "click and buy".

As a consumer I want to select a payment service provider once and once 
only. I will hand them my credit card details or bank details or top-up 
my account with a cheque/cash or whatever. From then on I *never* need 
to enter these details again. I just refer shops to my payment service 
provider. But I may want to use token systems too. Or pay a 
subscription for content that's sold under an "all you can eat" system. 
Or pay from my mobile phone. Or put it on by landline phone bill. Or...

So, for example, with iTunes, Apple is my payment service provider 
*and* content provider. But we need to decouple these 2 roles so that I 
can just refer content owners to my Apple account when I make a 
purchase of content not provided by Apple. Likewise I want to be able 
to buy stuff from Apple's content store using another payment service 
provider entirely.

I for one don't want my credit card details being sent to each shop. 
But that's just my choice. Maybe you don't mind. So, that's 2 
variations we have to cater for in the trial. There may be other 
variations too which we need to cater for. We need to list these 
scenarios in a structured way.

I think at this early stage in the game we need to be more conceptual 
about describing the system. What I mean is, as a trial, it's going to 
be much easier getting this up and running with dummy "payment" 
packets/messages than it is with real credit card transactions. So, 
let's look at "payment" flow and then start to model these in a trial. 
People may come along with new forms of payment that we haven't thought 
of so we don't want to limit ourselves at this stage.

Or maybe not, or maybe we just build something that works right now. 
But my issue is that when we do that we are seen as competing with 
other systems. But we want those guys in from the start. So, that's why 
I like a complete mockup that just says "insert your payment method 
here".

This is not about building an end to end system that works - loads of 
people have already done that. It's about getting all of those end to 
end systems currently in the marketplace to interoperate. So, we must 
show interoperability in the trial - not that you haven't proposed 
this.

We shouldn't limit ourselves by what current technologies are capable 
of. So, time spent in trial/test/model/mock-up mode enables us to be 
more flexible in what we can cater for.

Note: I'm not saying you have or have not suggested any of this stuff 
in what you've proposed. So, see this less of a criticism and more of 
me re-membering out loud what this is all about! ;-)

Could we ditch powerpoint slides for work in progress and just put 
everything as wiki pages? It's all text and graphics anyway. Then it's 
easier to comment and search on things and to collaboratively design 
and Google picks up the pages too, yes? How about working with SVG 
format for graphics then we can modify easily? Never done that but 
could be fun.

We need to structure the page more as in a project plan document. Like, 
problems, aims, etc... I get the feeling we've jumped into 
technicalities and I don't know what problems we're trying to solve. 
So, let's work on making it clearer. I'm not saying your ideas don't 
solve the problems I'm just saying we need to do this in a structured 
order that reads nicely to newbies and oldbies alike.

We need to have something that we invite PayPal, VISA, Microsoft, Lets, 
etc into. Where do those guys sign up?

Cheers Daniel

On May 28, 2004, at 2:33 pm, <romek@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> After thinking about this at the last meeting, I designed a quick 
> scratch presentation available at
> http://www.kendra.org.uk/wiki/wiki.pl?KendraCommerceTrial
>
> To work in practice, we'll need stores running different e-commerce 
> solutions and show that they can interoperate.