Potential Proposal: Adding New Stores (Unofficial)

(Note: This is not an official declaration that anything is happening, these are just my thoughts - hoping to gather feedback from staff and members of the community)

I think it’s safe to say stores added are one of the biggest factors of the StormX app. If the right stores are added, certain people are more likely to use it, more often. From personal experience, I like to try out different stores I have never seen but I know there are a few stores I use heavily to gain cashback (Such as Groupon, eBay, etc.)

As it stands, we are available to submit store requests at StormX Shop Requests but after that, the process from our side ends and it’s kind of a “If the team can do it, we’ll get it up” but there’s no further indication of progress on that front.
It’s good that the team tries to get as many requested stores up as possible (and I know it follows protocol of “Does this shop support link tracking?” and other factors) but realistically, there are only a certain amount of hours in the day and a finite amount of effort and attention that can be given.

For this reason, I feel it may be an idea to combine the store-choosing process with governance, allowing people to have a say in where that finite amount of time and energy is directed.

I’m not entirely sure what this would look like. Obviously, 1 proposal per requested shop might seem a little overkill. Maybe we have a pool of effort dedicated to certain community chosen shops and we have people vote on these pool of stores and the top X voted stores get added to the shop priority list.

This idea may not be possible, as I’m not sure how stores get decided and in what order. I’d be interested to hear thoughts on this, both from the team and from community members!

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I think the team needs to be a little more transparent about the process in order to come up with a good plan if we were to go this way. Right now its like flinging poo at a wall for all we know.

Appreciate the thread! A little more transparency on how stores get added.

  1. We first check potential volume. Will people buy here and if so how much?
  2. If its high enough then we check if that store has link tracking
  3. If there is link tracking is it through a type of link tracking that we currently support? If not, what’s the effort/time/cost in supporting this other type of link tracking?

If a store’s link tracking is supported then it’s easy to set up a contract and get things moving. Usually, the friction happens around supporting a new shop integration.

There are a lot of stores we need/want to add. This makes the app more useful for more people in more countries :slight_smile:

If we were to put this to a governance vote I think it would quickly turn into a three-part question. Can you support this store? If no, then the discussion stops. If yes, and it takes one month then what’s the opportunity cost of focusing on that integration vs. building other features or negotiating increased cashback for current stores. All of this requires back-and-forth communication from the core team to the community.

The last question is tricky. It ultimately comes down to how someone measures opportunity cost vs. potential sales. We have an affiliate team that has been doing this for a long time and have a method to the madness.

If you read through Governance Participation: Perils and Promise — Orca Protocol it does a decent job at explaining when might be a good time to take things to a vote. Essentially, when coordination costs go up and management, asset or ownership risk go up. And usually for things that don’t have on-chain data to give binary answers.

Store data isn’t on-chain so it does satisfy that criterion, but I think the coordination cost is relatively low still since its one development team and one affiliate team adding stores.

Even with saying all this, I’m not against voting on a shop integration. But what I’d love is for our platform to better accommodate non-core developers to add an integration to a new shop and get paid for doing so. This is a whole project in and of itself and makes the system more of a developer platform and less centralized.

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Thanks for that detailed explanation, Alex! Good to have more insight into store decisions!

In that case, I’m having second thoughts on integrating community decisions with stores - I hadn’t realised integrating link supporting could be complex enough to warrant investigations into the planning phase. Makes me a bit worried that either the community could vote on something, only for the team to find out its not possible or the team would do research on each store being put up for voting before the proposal, which ultimately leads to a lot of wasted time if

A) it’s discovered the store can’t be integrated or, more likely
B) X number of shops don’t get voted for, making their investigation a little worthless to begin with

Topping this off with a lot of stores the team are going through, it makes me have some doubt about this idea.

Still, though! Great to discuss these things and brilliant to have some insight into vendor decisions! (This is what Governance is about - the community and the team becoming one!)

I took a look through Governance Participation: Perils and Promise — Orca Protocol and there is some really good stuff here! It may be worth pinning this in the Discord or making it stand out on governance.stormx.io!

Even with saying all this, I’m not against voting on a shop integration. But what I’d love is for our platform to better accommodate non-core developers to add an integration to a new shop and get paid for doing so. This is a whole project in and of itself and makes the system more of a developer platform and less centralized.

That’s a brilliant idea! It would encourage people to go the extra mile to get their favourite stores added and allow for hands-on experience programming with StormX! I can appreciate it might be a quite a way off before we can get to that stage but I really look forward to the day it’s a common practice within StormX! Brilliant suggestion!

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Thanks Goldboi! I made a quick Getting Started which links to our blog and to that article Getting Started

The link support is a little complicated but its also just forming the relationships and legal contracts with these different affiliate networks and stores.

I like the idea in general, but in reading Alex’s response, it does feel like this idea might not be the best fit for governance at this point in time. However, having the information Alex shared is very helpful in understanding things from a bigger picture and hopefully we can better communicate as a community on how/why some stores get added while others do not. I’d be curious to know if pressure from the community on the store side has any benefit?

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