Buying Stuff With Steem

I have long viewed having a web store that will let users buy real world items with Steem as a way for the common person to have an easy understanding of the value of the ecosystem.

I've invited many friends to join us here on the platform. It usually goes along the lines of "you're already using social media why not get paid for it?" They will then respond with how awesome that concept is but how does the money come to me? I'll then explain you get Steem but can convert it to BTC or eventually even just distribute it straight to cash. By this point I can already tell I'm on a losing battle.

If there was a web store with items they would normally buy with fiat it would allow a new conversation to happen. Instead of explaining trading crypto I could say you head to Amazon and just spend it instead of spending cash. Unfortunately I don't see Amazon making that change any time soon so we need small stores to fill that gap.

Here's my contribution towards filling that gap:

https://www.shopsteem.com

By no means do I consider this a work of art. This is a minimal viable product in the complete sense of the words. It only has some products loaded (mostly gaming items), limited UI that needs a deal of work, products are too costly due to limited connections and we can only ship to US addresses at this point. That being said if you can get past those issues it should work!

The store is based on WooCommerce and utilizes @sagescrub's Steem payment tool. This tool enables anyone to deploy a store and accept payment without any third party vendor. I want to say a huge thank you to @sagescrub for their work on reviving this plugin.

Originally created by @recrypto the plug stopped working after updates made it incompatible. I fooled around with the code and even asked others like @chansetheguy to have a look but was never able to get things working again. Thanks to this fine plugin stores like this are now possible again!

While I'm a huge fan of Steem I love Bitcoin. The store also features a deployment of BTCPay's payment server that allows us to accept bitcoin payments directly without relying on any third party processor. If you're also a fan of Bitcoin we've deployed a Bitcoin Lightning node that you can also use to pay for items. Just remember to not be too #reckless!

If you have suggestions for the site please let me know in the comments below. As I said before this is just a MVP but I want to make this into something much more. Your help with certainly make this reality! I'd also be interested in hearing what all you'd like to buy with Steem. This will help me focus on finding the right products we should focus on curating and bringing to the market!