
The API-as-a-Marketplace - imartin2k
https://versionone.vc/api-as-a-marketplace/
======
rhenzabel
We've been working on something in this space called Violet:
[https://violet.io](https://violet.io). At the core we're a headless API that
connects merchants looking to sell their products natively in new channels
with the developers ([https://violet.dev](https://violet.dev)) who are
building those channels.

~~~
greatNespresso
I am really sorry, but looking at your website, I did not understand what's
the purpose of your company. Reading up your comment, it does not make much
more sense to me. Are you somehow like snipcart?

~~~
RileyJames
From reading through their site it seems to replace affiliate links with api
calls.

Ie: I have a website (Channel), rather than place affiliate links, I can
request products from an api and sell them directly to my users (audience).

Makes more sense when the channel is not a website (ie something that doesn’t
have links) like a instagram story, or virtual environment. You want to sell
the latest console / game from Microsoft, they provide an api, you pull the
trailer, screenshot (media) and a price. The user can click buy there and
then, you take payment via stripe and send an order to Microsoft via the api.
Microsoft then fulfils the order.

Somewhere between affiliate and retailer.

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compscistd
Reminds me of energy brokerages, which are a thing in some US states. Rough
idea is energy-consumers will ask for energy from an intermediary (the
brokerage), which will purchase electricity in the form of a contract from a
pool of suppliers for the best available price.

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theturtletalks
I'm building one called Openship. Here's more about it:
[https://www.openship.org/blog/2019-10-23-using-open-
source-t...](https://www.openship.org/blog/2019-10-23-using-open-source-to-
disrupt-marketplaces/)

~~~
akingyens
Curious: how is Openship different from building your store with apps from the
Shopify Apps store?

~~~
theturtletalks
I used to manage my shops using Zapier and Google Sheets for many years. Our
products were coming from many different sources and many things would fall
through the cracks. Customer service would be slow since agents would have to
know where orders need to be returned and the return process.

Openship started as an internal project so all this could be managed from one
dashboard so we could scale to 5000+ SKUs without the system being
overwhelmed. Orders can be routed to any channel that has APIs to search
products and create carts.

The other benefit of Openship is that your operations are abstracted out of
Shopify. If you ever want to leave Shopify or roll your own e-commerce
backend, Openship and your operations won't skip a beat. Let me know if you
have any other questions.

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zemvpferreira
My girlfriend is (one of the many people) building a Blockchain-API-as-a-
marketplace for commodities trading:
[https://www.vakt.com](https://www.vakt.com)

It's amazing how many billions of dollars are still transacted via phone and
paper records by organisations who ultimately have to rely on good faith to
get oil from A to B (in possession of C and owned by Z). I can't imagine what
it would take to verify a chain of actions taken a couple of years ago with
the systems in place. Impossible.

I imagine other commodities are the same. I would never have guessed there's
still so much efficiency to be gained in these huge, old-as-dirt markets.
Technology, huh.

~~~
lurcio
All well and good but blockchain doesn’t invalidate the need for ‘good faith’,
which is actually due diligence supported by rule of law.

~~~
drchopchop
Right, which is why "enterprise blockchain" generally means a bunch of people
fumbling around with Ethereum/Solidity, failing to build anything more secure
than a read-only SQL database, and inheriting all the bad characteristics of
Bitcoin

~~~
1270018000
Is there a word for "Creating a solution for a problem that doesn't exist?"
The descriptive linguist in me thinks we can start calling that a blockchain.

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haltingproblem
What does this mean? I have read this many times and it must be slow brain
day. I seriously want to try and understand.

\-------------------------------------------

>What is an API-as-a-marketplace?

>Just like a traditional marketplace, an API-as-a-marketplace has two sides:
suppliers and buyers. But, the interface is different.

>In a traditional marketplace, discovery and purchase are done on the
application layer. The transaction process is visible to the end user and is
essentially a part of the platform’s identity and brand.

>In an API-as-a-marketplace, the API is the UX for the transaction; that is,
the transaction occurs on the infrastructure layer and is abstracted away from
the end user.

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alberth
I was tracking with the article until this except.

>>” _But_ unlike Stripe, Twilio, and Postmates, the supply of an API-as-a-
marketplace is not necessarily a commodity. That is, should they choose to,
developers and businesses (or even their end users) can pick their suppliers
based on whatever requirements they have. ”

I’m confused. Isn’t the definition of being able to swap out one vendor for
another and receive the same service back in return ... the exact definition
of a “commodity”?

And is he suggesting that these other API company’s (stripe, twilio,postmates)
are NOTa commodify?

~~~
bwertz
I think you're saying the same thing.

Stripe, Twillio, etc. provide access to commodities.

The "API as a marketplace" concept postulates that there are situations in
which the supply is differentiated and you care about with which supplier you
get connected.

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siphor
Isn’t postmates, or like uber eats an example of that though... you care where
you’re getting your food.

~~~
derefr
Unlike restaurant delivery, grocery delivery services are right now operating
mostly on non-exclusive contracts with the upstream chains (because the chains
are big and have a lot of negotiating power; _and_ because the chains have a
real need to partner with different delivery services in different markets,
because no delivery service exists everywhere the chains are yet.) There's no
real market for delivery from mom-n-pop produce markets, and so there's nobody
for grocery delivery services to bully into accepting an exclusive contract
with them.

If you can get the same groceries from the same store no matter which portal
you order through, then the portal itself is a commodity.

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colinclerk
I wish OP would dive a bit more into the Stripe example as not-a-marketplace.

There's Spreedly, which at first glance might be more of a marketplace.

But then there's also an argument that Stripe itself is an API-as-a-
marketplace, where they support different card providers/types, ACH, and a
host of global methods.

Is one interpretation more correct than the other? (at least as it relates to
an investment thesis)

\---

Another example is the Priceline API (and the GDS's before them), which I
believe solidly qualify as an API-as-a-Marketplace under this definition.

~~~
floatrock
> Just like a traditional marketplace, an API-as-a-marketplace has two sides:
> suppliers and buyers.

When I make a payment on a site with stripe (my transaction-in-need-of-
payment-processing being the "demand" side), there's not really a pool of
"supply side" vendors I'm trying to be matched with... I'm just interested in
knowing that my money is going to the business I'm checking out with.

To concoct this into an example that's more of a marketplace:

\- the business owner needs a payment processor for people checking out like
me -- payment processing is the service

\- imagine that transaction fees varied based on the nature of the individual
transaction (imagine say an individual <$1 visa transaction is different from
a $<1 mc transaction is different from a $1-$10 preferred-vendor visa
transaction or something hypothetical like that)

\- there's multiple payment processors that offer various fees -- Stripe,
Braintree, Paypal, etc.

The marketplace solution now is the one that matches the demand side (a $1-$10
preferred-vendor visa transaction) to the payment processor that makes most
sense (supply side) for each individual transaction.

Obviously payment processing works different than this. That's why Stripe is
an API, not an API-as-a-marketplace.

Now, replace "payment processing" with "shipping" and "$1-$10 visa
transaction" with "1-10lb package going to Somewheretown"... now you have a
situation that sounds like the real world. That's the niche the article says
Shippo is filling.

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carterklein13
What I'm curious is why there's not yet a marketplace for consumer-generated
data. Thinking things like wearables. Is it that these wearables are too
miserly over their data, or are there other considerations that make this more
difficult than some of the more common ones I've seen such as e-commerce and
supply chain.

I see examples for medical data in this thread, which is notoriously slow to
"open," so I'm curious what the reasoning may be...

~~~
dajohnson89
Surely privacy is a huge concern, especially for something like wearables.

~~~
carterklein13
I think I may be missing the point of what the article is getting at with API-
as-a-marketplace versus traditional API marketplaces.

I think even after reading the article and looking at some of the examples,
I'm confused at what's being talked about here, and some of the additional
concerns that would arise with something like wearbles.

It seems like API-as-a-marketplace are providing services where an Instagram-
like company could add the "Instagram shops" section right into their
application as opposed to have to make a separate shop and checkout process?

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orasis
Having run some products through these types of marketplaces I am not
optimistic.

Marketplaces only work if they deliver customers, and I’ve simply seen almost
no volume of customers searching within these systems.

~~~
RileyJames
These being shippo & patch? Or RapidAPI?

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BiteCode_dev
But what about a marketplace for APIs?

~~~
maest
Maybe that can be implemented via an API. So I can have some code that can
dynamically call this API-as-a-marketplace and decide what's the bests
shipping API to use, then it would rewrite itself to use that API.

Say goodbye to vendor API lock-in!

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ksec
First time I come across .vc as TLD.

~~~
coderholic
I've been seeing them more and more frequently for venture capitalist firms,
in twitter bios etc. Thought I'd check our
([https://host.io](https://host.io)) ranking data for .vc domains:

    
    
        => select * from hostio.rank where split_part(domain, '.', 2) = 'vc' limit 25;
            domain    |  rank
        --------------+--------
         bc.vc        |  55389
         8x8.vc       |  66295
         bjn.vc       |  74899
         oscar.vc     |  81721
         plus2.vc     |  89589
         kissanime.vc |  96140
         compre.vc    |  97865
         nt.vc        | 106039
         animo.vc     | 107111
         yts.vc       | 115567
         mylink.vc    | 120827
         dot.vc       | 151363
         luz.vc       | 158821
         vook.vc      | 179284
         huobi.vc     | 202050
         app.vc       | 206374
         pornhub.vc   | 248283
         imi.vc       | 270076
         sf9.vc       | 276701
         btov.vc      | 281670
         175sf.vc     | 283532
         99s.vc       | 288077
         icoc.vc      | 302644
         1776.vc      | 318693
         fenbushi.vc  | 331303
        (25 rows)
    

Nothing particularly popular, and not many of those are VC firms! Only 406 in
the top 10 million domains:

    
    
        => select count(1) from hostio.rank where split_part(domain, '.', 2) = 'vc' and rank < 10000000;
         count
        -------
           406
    

You can download the full top 10M from
[https://host.io/rankings](https://host.io/rankings) if you're interested in
playing with the data yourself!

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grognak420
Chainlink

