Openbazaar is a peer to peer application that gives you the freedom to do commerce over the internet. There are no fees and no restrictions.
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OB2
I have been eagerly awaiting OB2 which is the next release of the current software incorporating a major infrastructure overhall. It will use IPFS so that it is truly tool that anybody can use on their home computer. At the moment you need a server so that your store is always online. In my experience you probably need a cloud server provider in order to have an acceptable online presence.
What does OB do?
The Openbazaar application creates the market infrastructure so that you can transact online. Escrow is provided by other users and everything is handled in the app.
This app has been under development for a long time and this morning I looked at a few interesting stats
Online Stores
The website duosearch.ch provides a search engine for online stores and I had been tracking last year the stores but for the last 9 months or so my attention has been elsewhere. I have been waiting for the release of OB2. When I checked today on Duosearch I was surprised that there are less not more stores than the last time I looked. Here is the data I had been tracking. The App divides products into 3 categories; physical goods, digital goods and service goods.
- Total is the total of all three
| Date | Physical | Digital | Service | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016-06-13 | 4435 | 372 | 143 | 4950 |
| 2016-06-21 | 5485 | 366 | 170 | 6021 |
| 2016-06-30 | 5915 | 361 | 151 | 6427 |
| 2016-07-12 | 6746 | 381 | 167 | 7294 |
| 2016-07-31 | 7510 | 313 | 119 | 7942 |
| 2016-09-17 | 6775 | 592 | 127 | 7494 |
| 2016-10-13 | 8070 | 578 | 133 | 8781 |
| 2016-10-29 | 6284 | 578 | 144 | 7006 |
| 2017-07-22 | 3580 | 368 | 92 | 4040 |
There was strong growth in 2016 but there has been a big drop off in stores in 2017. The data for this table was taken from the www.duosearch.ch website.
Apps
Back in October of last year there was also an android app which you could use to make purchases called bazaarhound. The app is no longer available for android and the website has the following text
Source: http://www.bazaarhound.com/
These are not encouraging stats
Websites
At the moment in order to make a purchase you need to download the software to your computer but you can browse on www.duosearch.ch or www.bazaarbay.org. There doesn't seem to be any third party website where you can make purchases. I tried to sign up to Mubiz but I got no response.
Are people awaiting the release of OB2?
Will this app and software take off with the release of OB2? The upcoming release looks very promising. What do you think?
Edit: The number of items online at duosearch was checked again and updated to 3,580 Physical items from 2,031.
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