fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
Coinmall Platform Update: USDT, Unus Sed LEO and more
Tags: Cryptocurrency, Ecommerce, Ethereum, Marketplace, Bitcoin

CoinMall is a marketplace where you can buy and sell virtual products with PayPal, Stripe and cryptocurrencies. Today, we’re bringing you the ability to pay and get paid in two new cryptocurrencies: Tether (USDT) and Unus Sed Leo (LEO) along with a handful of platform tweaks and fixes

Tether

Tether (USDT) is a cryptocurrency known as a stablecoin, which pegs it value to the US Dollar. Tether’s peg to the dollar allows users to spend and earn crypto without having to worry about the fluctuating value of their crypto (and therefore earnings!).

The addition of a stablecoin was a much-requested feature from many of our sellers, and our choice of Tether from the many stablecoins in circulation was not a hard one given its strong backing, reputable history and widespread adoption.

Unus Sed Leo

Unus Sed Leo, also known as LEO, is a utility token designed to empower the Bitfinex community and provide utility within its ecosystem. For those unaware, Bitfinex is one of the longest-standing exchanges in the blockchain industry, with a vibrant community of passionate idealists and entrepreneurs. We are delighted to bring more utility to the LEO token and help the community earn and spend LEO on virtual products.

Tweaks & Fixes
What’s new — RentALL Android mobile app v1.1.0
By: Saadhika Devi
Tags: Startup, Marketplaces, Release Notes, Technology, Entrepreneurship

We released the RentALL Android mobile app v1.0, a big event for the development of RentALL. Now, we have introduced some new features and fixed bugs. We bring a new version of RentALL — Android mobile app v1.1.0(Airbnb clone)

What is RentALL script?

RentALL script is a customizable rental application defined to suit any renting business. , an Airbnb clone is available in Web, Android, and IOS platforms. Rental business such as vacation rental, car rental, bike rental, coworking, and venue sharing could make use of our RentALL script.

Introducing new features

We have updated new features in RentALL Android mobile app v1.1.0 which are:

Supporting Multi-language

Any application using the user’s language would connect with them better. We have introduced RentALL app in the language Spanish, Italian, French, and Portuguese. Plus, we can install any languages along with the existing ones.

Revamping profile page settings

We have added the ‘Help’ section. It can be helpful for the users to get clarified on the company’s policy. Then, we have added the section ‘About us’, ‘Trust & Safety’ and ‘Terms & Privacy’ screens.

‘About US’ section is the information about the company purpose and what it stands for. Trust and Safety section contains policy on the company’s measures to provide a safe and friendly environment for users. ‘Terms & Privacy’ section notifies users about the management of the user’s private data.

Bug fixes

We have fixed bugs based upon customer’s feedback. Now, RentALL mobile app is more efficient and fast-loading.

We appreciate your time reading this post. Please try the latest version of RentALL mobile app v1.1.0 from the Play Store and share your feedback.

Here is the link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rentall.radicalstart

If you have any questions, feel free to reach us at support@radicalstart.com.
Announcing OGN Payments. Buy or Sell Using Origin Tokens.
By: Shahul Hameed
Tags: Cryptocurrency, Marketplaces, Product, Ethereum, Blockchain

OGN for advertising

Sellers can also promote their listings using OGN with Origin Commissions. Sellers can put up OGN to be paid to the application developers and marketplace operators that surface these listings and ultimately helps close sales. Sellers are prompted to optionally choose an amount of OGN they want to pay to have their listings featured across priority placements on the Origin marketplace. If these listings are sold, Origin is paid a commission in OGN. Third-party developers on the Origin platform will also have the opportunity to earn OGN commissions, and we look forward to the innovative ways they use to drive sales.

Promoting listings with OGN

OGN for growth

Last year, we announced and launched Origin Rewards, an incentive program to jumpstart the growth of the Origin platform. Users earn OGN for referring their friends to the platform and verifying their profiles to build trust in Origin’s community of buyers and sellers. We’ve seen an overwhelming response to Origin Rewards and it has fueled explosive growth. We’ve seen our daily active users grow from a few hundred to over 35,000 since its launch with over 120,000 unique wallets using our application.

What’s next for OGN?

We are constantly thinking of ways to add utility to OGN, not only add useful new features, but to strengthen the incentives that shepherd the growth of a healthy, well-functioning network of marketplace participants and developers.

With the launch of several prominent proof-of-stake networks and the rise of DeFi (decentralized finance), staking has definitely been top of mind. We see how passionate the crypto community is about staking and are impressed with how quickly staking incentives can transform behavior in crypto networks. We are actively exploring how we can add OGN-denominated staking rewards to our platform.

As the Origin network continues to grow, we also recognize the potential of OGN as a governance token. We are committed to decentralized ownership of the network by our community of OGN holders that will have a say in the future of the Origin platform. Stay tuned for even more exciting news about OGN.

Learn more about Origin:
Retaining Buyers and Sellers Is Easy, Right?
Tags: Platform Economy, User Retention, Marketplaces, Disintermediation

So, you’ve launched your own online marketplace, gig economy or sharing economy platform. What’s next? You need to attract users and, more importantly, retain them. But it’s actually one of the biggest challenges for a platform business to overcome. A study found that the average lifespan of a platform business in the US market is less than 5 years, and even shorter in the gig economy where platforms collapse on average after just 2–3 years.

There can be any number of reasons for this but one of the most significant ones is disintermediation.

Disintermedi-what?

Disintermediation. It’s when buyers and sellers use a platform to connect but then transact independently, off-platform after the first transaction. Also known as network leakage, it’s a common problem, especially in the gig economy. Click here to check out our animation, where we explain exactly how disintermediation works and how best to avoid it.

But you don’t want to know the problem, you need the solution! Once you’ve watched our animation, scroll down to take a look at our top 10 tips to encourage buyer/seller loyalty and get ready to make your platform shine.

Follow us Twitter and LinkedIn

Originally published in: https://www.paybase.io/blog/retaining-buyers-sellers
Introducing Native Listings on Replin!
By: Ink Protocol
Tags: Blockch, Decentralized, eBay, Marketplace, Twitter

Introducing Native Listings on Replin!

With the launch of native listings on Replin, we are doubling down on the personal store concept to supplement the existing decentralized selling profile. Ink Protocol Follow Jan 16, 2020 · 2 min read

Sample store filled with native listings: https://on.replin.com/makko

You can now list items and services directly on Replin without going through a social channel such as Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook. While most of our sellers still find their buyers on social media, the native listing format allows them to easily list once and sell across multiple channels.

Take a look at the super simple flow below:

With his addition, we are also doubling down on the “personal store” concept, which we believe is a welcome addition to the simple selling profile that Replin started out as. You can now import all your reputation, create a decentralized seller profile, and run your own decentralized store without the need to pay high marketplace fees. Sellers will typically post their profile and/or store links across social media channels and attract buyers within niche marketplaces.

Our vision for Replin is changing slightly as we gather more and more real-world seller data, so look for much more to come! With well over 1,000 Replin seller profiles, we are off to a great start and hope to hit our stride soon as we figure out exactly where the product fits in with existing social selling behaviors.

The next big task will be further refining the messaging a bit and then going after larger and larger social marketplaces. HobbyConnector is growing strong but is only the start. Stay tuned!
The resilience of Faire
By: Alex Taussig
Tags: Startup, Consumer, Marketplaces, Venture Capital, Retail

The resilience of Faire

Local retailers form the bedrock of their respective communities. In aggregate, they sell over $1 trillion of goods each year in the U.S. alone. In times of crisis, they have repeatedly proven to be resilient. During the Great Recession, for example, retailers with 1–4 employees were the only segment of retail to add net employees every year after 2008. Taken as a group, these small business owners found a way to innovate their way out of a crisis.

COVID-19 had the potential to be even more devastating for these local entrepreneurs. “Stay at home” orders prevented consumers from entering stores in many neighborhoods, and unemployment quickly rose to its highest level in recent memory — 50% higher than its peak during the Great Recession.

Faire, the leading online wholesale marketplace for local retailers, sits at the center of this ecosystem. Its customer base includes over 100,000 independent retailers and 10,000 brands. Put in perspective, its network consists of more retail locations by door count in North America than Starbucks, Walgreens, Walmart, Sephora, Target, and Nordstrom combined.

Faire bore witness to the precipitous decline of sales in these stores at the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis. It took immediate and bold action to help its customers stay afloat. The company extended payment terms to retailers in financial need, giving them critical time to adapt their businesses to the effects of COVID-19. It spread best practices and created resources for retailers to find emergency financing through PPP and other programs. Faire overhauled its recommendation algorithm to emphasize “essential” merchandise and other products in demand by the COVID-19 consumer. And, most importantly, it was able to drive product discovery and fulfillment services at a time when other wholesale channels were shut down.

The resilience of local retail drives Faire’s resilience. Faire saw its business rapidly bounce back in late Q2. On average, its customers are now growing YoY despite the ongoing pandemic, and Faire’s business more than tripled YoY in Q3. The recovery was driven by the adaptation of Faire’s customers to the post-COVID environment, and by the consolidation of the wholesale channel onto Faire. Like the rapid acceleration of e-commerce during the pandemic (see below chart), the wholesale supply chain also moved rapidly to online channels — and Faire is the industry’s leading online marketplace.

Today, Faire is announcing that it has raised a Series E of $170M, led by Sequoia at a $2.5B valuation, with strong participation from us at Lightspeed and many of its other current investors. The capital will go towards growing the team, building more incredible products for retailers and brands, and expanding into Europe in early 2021. We’re proud to continue to support the company and help it fulfill its mission of empowering entrepreneurs to chase their dreams.

For more on Faire, please read my past blog posts from 2018 and 2019 on the company. Oh and, of course, Faire is hiring! Find out more at the link below.
COVID-19 Challenge for Global Supply Chain
By: Jane Vyshnova
Tags: Covid 19, Ecommerce, Marketplaces, Online Store, Supply Chain

It’s not a secret, epidemic measures significantly influenced our routine. Every average consumer observed empty shelves in stores and went on lacking the basic things. Delivery took longer time than usual and might not have happened at all.

But not only customers suffered from modifications in their habitual lifestyle. It affected the whole supply chain starting with manufacturing. Factories work has been put on hold, ports have been closed, flights have been prohibited. At this rate it was difficult to invent new non-contact shipping methods to reach a final consumer. As a result, every unprepared for such a turn of events merchant experienced great losses.

Anyhow, every conscious seller who lacked “Plan B” came to conclusion: diversification is his salvation.

Diversify Manufacturing. Big part of sellers has Chinese suppliers. And as quarantine has started, shipments from China were impossible. In case these sellers had another inventory stock, let’s say in the USA, it would become a good way out of this emergency situation and would solve a problem of delayed shipping. In a word, the more inventory sources you have, the readier you are to survive the crisis. What else is important, usually manufacturing supply chain is the most sensitive, since it will be under disruption consequences longer than the crisis itself lasted.

Diversify Selling. As stay-at-home time came, most traditional stores had to be closed. Only those entrepreneurs, who in addition had eCommerce websites or invested in marketplaces, succeeded. By the way, Marketplaces, like Amazon, became a good choice for not yet recognized brands to be promoted, which was a positive insight for some aspiring vendors. Anyway, no one can predict what global disruption may happen next, and having an online store still doesn’t guarantee complete protection. The best thing is to evaluate all possible threats for your business, not only world-wide pandemic. For instance, upcoming data privacy and security issues deserve attention as well, for it may also bring certain changes in digital business management.

Diversify Distribution. As practice shows, two previous points are not enough for business backups. Amazon vendors, who depended only on Fulfillment by Amazon, turned out to be cut off when Amazon decided to suspend FBA. Even when they had extra inventory sources, sellers were unable to deliver their products to the audience. In case they dealt with other fulfillment services, like FedEx Fulfilment, vendors would have avoided the worst case scenario.

To sum up, the tiny virus served us a useful tool to consider prevention measures from now on and paid our attention to the thought “Who knows, what will happen next?” Spare strategy is always a step to stability and business well-being. Read this article to see how to extend your business boundaries. And celebrate diversity!
State of the housing for workers in a blue-collar economy
By: Karel Zheng
Tags: Marketplaces, Accommodations, Seed Investment, SaaS, B2B

Companies are putting tremendous effort into hiring these employees from selected? countries. In the Czech Republic, it is mainly Ukraine, Slovakia, Russia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Poland. They recruit through various channels — own recruiting points, social&marketing, but mainly specialized employment agencies.

Due to the high demand for these employees, recruitment is very competitive. Employees and agencies need to provide excellent service in terms of paperwork and moving agenda. Therefore it is becoming the industry standard that housing becomes a mandatory part of the job offer.

Foreign workers are accommodated in dedicated hostels/dormitories or apartments. Usually, they stay in rooms with 2–6 beds, with a shared bathroom, kitchen and living room. The conditions in these accommodations are not always of good quality. The length of the stays depends on the industry — a few weeks for construction companies and long-term stays for manufacturing companies.

These hostels/dormitories are not like hotels or hipster hostels, which travellers book during holidays. The majority of them are not listed on any modern booking portals or marketplaces. They do not use any property management software and surprisingly some of them don’t even have a proper computer. These hostels are owned by regional old-time entrepreneurs who don’t know anything about digitalization and innovation. It is not hard to believe that accommodation in this vertical is the last bastion of accommodation that is still pen&paper based and is ready for disruption.

We are all very familiar with booking services such as booking.com, Airbnb, and Trivago when we travel. It is hard to imagine our planning without these services. But this is not applicable when it comes to accommodation booking and planning for the workers. It is important to say that it is always the company or the agency who does the booking.
My honest UX case study on OfferUp
By: Cyriac Ndo Zeh
Tags: Marketplaces, UX Research, UX Design, Offerup, Ux Case Study

Overview

OfferUp is the largest mobile marketplace in the US. People can buy and sell locally easily. The app is known to be a community based sales platform that allows users to list and sell items directly on the app. Similar to Craigslist or eBay, sellers can create their own descriptions of the product, name their price, and interact with interested buyers. While known for marketing its use to local buyers and sellers.

Several things differentiate the app from other similar eCommerce platforms. One perk is the built-in camera feature (Fig 1.2) which allows for easy uploading of product photos. OfferUp also integrates a peer-to-peer rating system which motivates better user behavior, keeping security and transparency as top priorities. When a buyer makes an offer on an item and the seller accepts, OfferUp prompts the users to find a public location for the exchange and warns against sharing personal numbers or emails.

Context

My Role

Sole UX/UI designer

Who I work with

Product manager, UX researchers, Content strategist, Engineers, Data analyst, Customer experience team

About OfferUp

Largest mobile marketplace in the US

280+ employees

4.8 stars / 3.5M ratings in App Store, 5 stars / 1M+ ratings in Google Play

Challenge: Improve the App Experience

The high-level goals are:

examine metrics, user flow and usability in regards to search results and item discoverability then point out some issues. Monitor metrics and improve completion rate

Metrics

As a C2C product, there are 4 metrics we are looking at:

Acceptance rate, decline rate, expiration rate Completion rate Engagement rate Retention rate

Design principles

Simple and easy

Trust and safety

Process

1. Understand

Metrics

NPS survey

Competitor analysis

2. Design

Design sprint

Sketch

Prototyping

3. Research

Surveys

Usability studies

A/B testings

4. Evaluate & repeat

Launch features incrementally

Concerns.

Concern 1

Difficult to determine the shelf-life of an item.

Explanation

Search results can be filtered using several different criteria: newest, closest, price low to high, and price high to low (Fig 2.1). The default setting is to sort results from newest to oldest. This is useful for these garage-sale type of listings since they typically are unique and have only 1 “in-stock,” not to mention it is also preferred by most users (see Appendix A).

However, it is unclear while browsing how long items have been listed or if the user selling the item is active. Some listings are weeks or months old which raises the question of if the listing is still relevant.

To demonstrate this point, pictured below are the search results for ‘metal trash can’ filtered newest to oldest (Fig 2.2). In the second row is an item that is already 3 months old (Fig 2.3). With 60% of people expecting top search results to be new as of that week and 100% agreeing that knowing the date is helpful, stating this information up-front could be beneficial for users (see Appendix A).
The marketplace buyers-sellers dilemma: who comes first or how to build an attractive platform?
By: Jane Vyshnova
Tags: Startup, Ecommerce, Marketplaces, Webdev, Business Plan

Every marketplace owner may face the well-known the chicken-or-the egg dilemma. However, in this case an entrepreneur asks another question: who comes first, a seller or a buyer?

Obviously, to involve buyers, you will need to find retailers for your platform first. And this is a challenge every business model may face, but for a two-sided platform it’s more crucial.

Ideally, there is a need for both buyers and vendors at the same time, so they could interact between each other and justify the purpose of your business. How to make it happen?

You definitely should figure out how to attract one side in the absence of another. For instance, Uber chose the tactic of paying its drivers even when there were not enough riders.

As for consumer engagement, consider your marketplace promotion within various informational resources.

One more important thing for successful promotion is to create your marketing strategy beforehand, so it will do the trick as soon as you launch your marketplace. Don’t neglect such advertisement methods as social media posting and email blasts, as it can warm up your target audience.

Don’t neglect your clients too, as individual treatment can work wonders. By the way, word of mouth is still considered to be the most efficient way of advertising.

And make sure your newly-born marketplace pursues the trend of your business niche. You can focus on the main peculiarities of your direct competitors by the market.

With reference to current trends in two-sided marketplace platforms, many prosperous platforms tend to apply vertical markets. It lies in focusing on a single product category or sphere. Here is top vertical markets marketplaces that are worth attention:

Society6;

Rover.com;

Etsy;

Bonanza.

If you are curious about what is their key to success, visit the article that also contains some more clues.
Top Freelance Marketplaces in the UK
By: Uk'S Marketplace Hero
Tags: Job Search, Marketplaces, Freelance, Freelancing, Freelancers

As a freelancer finding work can be tricky! With thousands of freelancer job sites out there, it can be overwhelming on where you should look and sign-up to. Some are over competitive, some are expensive, and some are just just there to waste your precious time. But of course, there are also good sites that offer good work. In this quick piece, I’m going to map out my top 4 (at this moment) marketplaces that work for me, in no particular order.

YunoJuno

YunoJuno is one of the leading freelance job sites. It offers really high quality jobs from high quality clients. The sign-up process requires some time, but I think it’s definitely worth it.

Bark.com

Bark is an another freelance job site that you can find pretty good gigs on. Bark doesn’t charge a membership fee, but be careful with paying for leads (sometimes it can come up to you spending £30 to actually getting a lead).

Wishu

Wishu is a fairly new marketplace within the UK scene. I joined wishu in April and got quite a few direct messages from clients inviting me to projects. If you’re a freelancer who is looking for a nice looking app that provides you with not only jobs but also good freelancer resources and you don’t want to spend money — you should check wishu out.

The-Dots

Okay, The-Dots is a professional network, not a marketplace. But hear me out, I have landed a few really amazing freelance gigs as-well-as great connections with some really interesting and big clients.

Please note that I will be going into greater detail on each of these sites separately, as-well-as comparing them. This is only Part 1. So stay tuned!
SIDBI Swavalamban
By: Surekha Shetty
Tags: Sidbi, Marketplaces, Loans, Fundstiger, Lending

Small Industries and Development Bank of India (SIDBI)

Small Industries and Development Bank of India (SIDBI) mainly focuses on the financing, promotion and development of the Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs). Established in 1990, SIDBI’s primary objective is to strengthen the MSME sector by facilitating cash flow. The bank assists MSMEs to get funds for the development, commercialization and marketing of their innovative technologies and products. SIDBI offers customized financial products under several loan schemes and provides services to meet the demands of various business projects.

SIDBI’s Objectives

SIDBI majorly follows four major objectives which are development, promotion, coordination and financing. Some of its key functions incudes:

SIDBI extends financial support to Small Scale Industry (SSIs), and other service sectors

It provides indirect finance through banks, NBFCs, SFCs and other financial institutions

SIDBI aims to create equilibrium in the financial sector by strengthening credit flows and promoting skill development

SIDBI Swavalamban

People aspiring to become small entrepreneurs have a place to visit at the ongoing Kumbh Mela in Prayagraj. Thanks to the Small Industries Development Bank of India (SIDBI).

To encourage entrepreneurship amongst the youth, SIDBI has set up a stall with “Swavalamban” as the key theme at the ongoing Kumbh in Prayagraj.

Headquartered in Lucknow, SIDBI’s focus is lending to the Micro and Small Enterprises (MSEs). At its Kumbh stall, the bank has used — “Aaayiye Ganga Nahaaiye Aur Udyami Banker Jaayiye” (take a dip in Ganga and become entrepreneur) — as the tagline of this stall.

Through the stall, the bank is trying to create awareness about Pradhan Mantri Mudra Yojana, Credit Guarantee Fund Trust for Micro and Small Enterprises (CGTMSE) and several other schemes.

“Keeping SIDBI Vision 2.0 in mind, we are taking these initiatives to encourage people to venture into entrepreneurship. We believe in a country like India there are vast opportunities to be tapped,” said Mohammad Mustafa, Chairman and Managing Director, SIDBI. “However, directing prospective entrepreneurs to the right avenues is the key and we hope to bridge that gap.”

In the release, SIDBI also said it has reoriented its thrust to MSEs and is doing what is required to make them feel empowered. To infuse entrepreneurship culture, SIDBI has been bringing out the ‘Swavalamban’ print series and three issues have already been published so far. Through this initiative, more than 3,000 respondents have been provided with handholding support in their entrepreneurial journey, the institution said.

The following are the Swavalamban given by SIDBI:

Source: SIDBI portal

For Entrepreneurs

For Startups

For MSME

FundsTiger.com is an Online Lending Marketplace.
Platform Update: Performance Bidding
By: Ben Heyhoe Flint
Tags: Content Acquisition, Content Rights, Marketplaces, Contents Industry, Licensing

Since our last update, we have been listening to our users as to how we can improve the Vuulr platform… and so the next big thing for Vuulr is an enhancement that solves for an underlying trend in the industry that is, inevitably, growing.

With the proliferation of VOD services in recent years — and not all with the huge buying power of Netflix! — Buyers are now looking to ‘buy smarter’ when it comes to licensing content rights. One way they are able to do this — where traditional linear networks are less able — is to use their performance data to measure the success of the content they have acquired.

And not only after the fact; Buyers are now using performance metrics as the basis of their bids when sourcing rights for their channels. So, to solve for this trend, Vuulr has developed a big change to its functionality for Buyers: Performance Bidding.

What’s Performance Bidding?!

What exactly does it look like? Well, here are the models which VOD Buyers can now use to make an offer:

As you can see, depending on the nature of the VOD platform, we’ve enabled 3 new bidding modes that can be tied to the performance of an individual title.

We still enable a Buyer to bid on a ’traditional’ flat fee (only) basis, and even the Performance-based options enable a Buyer to bid with a Minimum Guarantee (MG) + a performance component.

To further help transparency, during the bidding process on Vuulr, Buyers can also provide a forecast of each of the variables, e.g. an estimate of total viewers over a given time period, so that the Seller can evaluate the potential resulting fee… or estimate a bonus upside.

Still not sure how it works? Here’s a 1 minute video that shows a sample Performance Bid:

Benefits for Buyers

This new style of bidding creates the following benefits for VOD Buyers:

Acquire more content with less upfront cost, and therefore manage cashflow more efficiently

Explore niche content that audiences might not find elsewhere, with less risk

Diversify a catalogue with new genres and categories of content

Does this mean it’s all bad news for Sellers?!

No! This new pricing models will unlock more customers for Sellers (i.e. the new breed of VOD buyers) who will now be able to buy more content and explore new genres of content to diversify their catalogue. In other words, this bidding style gives Sellers an additional way to monetise their content. It will, however, require some adaptation to this new normal.

And of course, we would recommend that Sellers insist on regular reporting from the Buyers — in their agreements with Buyers — when accepting Performance-based bids.
Your Own Isolation Horror Game could Start Life using this Kit.
By: Mike Haggerty
Tags: Gtbeginner, Marketplaces, 3d Modeling, Unreal Engine, Modular

Ever since I first ran around in the Citadel in Mass Effect, I have been absolutely fascinated with how different developers do different science fiction environment design. You have the High Science Fiction of Mass Effect, the grittier more “realistic” low of the Dead Space universe. And then you run into games that meld the two. Ones like Deus Ex or Prey are good examples of that.

This pack is more reminiscent of a higher sci fi look and feel, so channel your inner Shepherd and get ready to put together some awesome scenes with this Modular SciFi Starter Bundle.

So this pack is free, it is part of the curated UE4 2019 collection and that means you get $60 of value for the low low cost of zero dollars. Hard to beat.

The folder hierarchy feels like it is a mess, it is named well so you can find your way around easy enough but it just feels overly dense and harder to navigate. Thankfully that is about the only negative mark I have against it.

The scene is impressive from the outside in. I especially enjoy the setting, like its the safest place and has the best access to water in the area for this little shelter. Very reminiscent of the latest Subnautica DLC.

It is interesting to see how the effects are placed here, seems intuitive but it can be easy to get lost in a project and not realize that effects only need to be where people will see them.

The snow flurries and wind effect you can see outside these windows really sells the scene.

The meshes are beautiful, some of them seem a bit more high poly then needed but the scene itself does not seem to be impacted by this at all. That said there is a lot that could have been done with normals and more unique UVs. Understandably they did NOT do this to help keep the meshes fully modular, utilizing a lot of the material instances from UE4 so that you can switch out materials as you need.

I think that works fine for this pack, just may not be the way you would do it for a more streamlined or unique project. This would work especially well with some master materials and a bunch of modular instance materials as they have it in the pack now.

The map is a treasure trove for well made “filler” props. Things like consoles, boxes, shelves etc. These are all things that while not hard to make, can add up whenever you are trying to design and art up your levels. For free, these assets are definitely making their way into games and scenes all over the place.

All in all, a great pack and definitely worth the download. If all you download it for is to see a nice scene and level design than you have gotten a ton out of it. Go and grab it today, dive in and see what you can build!

This developer also has a ton of great looking assets on the marketplace you should check out!

Some Pros to force your hand

Some cons to take away.

Marketplace Link:
My DeFi Pet x Kephi Gallery Strategic Partnership
By: My Defi Pet Official
Tags: Nft, Defi, Marketplaces, Kardiachain, Games

My DeFi Pet’s incredible growth continues to shine on its amazing community! In just 1.5 months of the launch, 850,000 transactions, 30,000 active accounts and over 650,000 pets are present in both KardiaChain and BSC platforms for My DeFi Pet!

With Kephi Gallery’s IDO approaching, My DeFi Pet is proud to announce the formation of a strategic partnership with Kephi Gallery in a new move towards mass adoption of NFTs!

Kephi Gallery is an NFT marketplace where artists from different disciplines can get together and share (and monetize!) their work. From visual arts, to music, from movie clips to even theatre, every artist is welcome to mint their NFT and start trading their pieces of art.

Being a project based in Latin America, which has been extremely supportive of blockchain and crypto development, the partnership will bring a multitude of benefits for both My DeFi Pet and Kephi Gallery!

With both projects being on KardiaChain, a state-of-the-art blockchain, with a scalable, non-invasive interoperable hybrid blockchain platform, the partnership aims to integrate both KPHI and DPET tokens into the other’s ecosystem!

My Defi Pet is extremely excited about the partnership as it is a step towards bringing advancements in the capabilities of cross-chain DeFi and NFT. The path to mass adoption of NFTs is just ahead!

This collaboration agreement will certainly benefit both communities. Kephi Gallery is a project that is growing extremely fast and will be an extremely valuable partner for My DeFi Pet to expand its ecosystem.

Your NFT pets in My DeFi Pet will soon appear on a large range of NFT marketplaces!

Find out more about Kephi here:

Whitepaper: https://storage.googleapis.com/kephi/kephi-content/Kephi_Gallery_Light_Paper_en.pdf

Site: https://www.kephi.io/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/kephigallery

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/KephiGallery/

Telegram: https://t.me/KephiGallery

Medium: https://kephigallery.medium.com/

What are you waiting for, step into the world of My DeFi Pet and become a Pet Master now!

Website: https://www.mydefipet.com/

Telegram: https://t.me/mydefipet

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MyDeFiPet

Discord: https://discord.gg/Pxf3EmYA

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mydefipet
Operator turned investor: Philipp Werner as our newest Principal
By: Project A
Tags: Startup, Marketplaces, Operational Excellence, Venture Capital

We’re incredibly happy to announce that Philipp Werner, our former CMO, has transitioned from our operational team to our investment team — as Principal. The move marks yet another turn in his exciting career at Project A.

His operational experience greatly enables Philipp to double down on early stage and Series A+ investment opportunities where he focuses on ecommerce infrastructure, sales tech, marketplaces and energy. From a geographical perspective Philipp is covering the up and coming Spanish and Portuguese ecosystems.

From level to level — Philipp’s career at Project A

Philipp joined us back in 2015 right after his MBA in Hamburg and Paris as one of our first Venture Development Managers — and two years later took over the team’s leadership. As the opportunity presented itself, Philipp transitioned into the data team as Director Business Intelligence with the objective of significantly improving the team’s impact on our portfolio companies. Joining a team of excellent analysts and data engineers that had a hard time generating traction for their solutions within our portfolio, Philipp successfully managed to build up a profound business understanding within the team and reshape the analyst role into what is today referred to as data translators (see definitions by McKinsey or Forbes here) that ensure a relentless focus on business impact.

Having learnt from renowned marketing professionals such as Philipp Westermeyer, Erik Siekmann and our own Florian Heinemann, Philipp became Project A’s CMO in 2018. Since then he put emphasis on strengthening our marketing team’s B2B expertise, fostered cross-functional alignment between the marketing, sales, analytics, and brand departments to accelerate our portfolio companies’ commercial growth and became a trusted advisor to many.

Over the last six years Philipp supported over 40 of our portfolio companies including Trade Republic, Kry, sennder, Spryker and Catawiki and took over several interim C-level positions and project lead roles — so he truly is an operator turned investor.

Philipp’s transition into our investment team further underlines our conviction of the Operational VC model. He has shown exceptional skill and brightness when it comes to understanding the needs of our portfolio companies, taking new routes and leading teams. His wit, his passion and the ability to put himself in the founders’ shoes will bring incredible value to the team. We’re convinced that his operational experience will not only enable him to make great investment decisions but also be a valuable sparring partner to our portfolio companies for all things go-to-market and growth. We’re thrilled to have him on the investment team and are certain that he’ll excel at his new role as Principal.
Marketplaces: 5 reasons to care about open banking
By: Jiun Yi Tan
Tags: Sharing Economy, Marketplaces, Gig Economy, Payments, Open Banking

If one gauge of whether a trend is close to tipping point is that it’s already being used to cover a multitude of similar but subtly different ideas, then marketplaces — multisided online platforms that connect sellers and buyers — have definitely reached that stage.

By 2024, marketplace transactions will account for 70% of all transactions and exceed $7tn in sales, according to iBe. The shift to online commerce is nothing new, but the global pandemic has accelerated the trend, as retailers around the world were forced to sell online or stop business altogether.

Consumers meanwhile are turning to marketplaces more frequently, with the average UK shopper making almost four times as many purchases from a marketplace than from an online retailer this Spring, according to this research from Adobe.

For marketplaces operators, success brings with it a number of tricky operational challenges.

Competition for suppliers and sellers is increasing and shopper expectations are higher than ever. Operators need to widen their offering to keep shoppers happy, while attracting the right suppliers.

They also face a relentless battle against fraud (the cost of chargebacks is estimated to be $40bn annually and growing), and soaring operational costs.

In our discussions with marketplace operators, we hear the following issues again and again:
INSTAGRAM FOR YOUR GROWING BUSINESS.
By: Venkatesh Rangachari
Tags: Marketplaces, Marketing, Instagram Marketing, Sme

Is not Instagram only for Influencers? So ask a large number of clients on the GroCurv platform. As the world moves from Offline to Online, these businesses are keen to explore various social media platforms. Digital marketing is becoming a very important part of business vocabulary, and within that Instagram.

Facebook, Insta, Linkedin and Pinterest are well known platforms that come out tops in every conversation. But when clients think Insta, they think celebrities.

We started to look at this question in order to have more reassuring conversations with these businesses.

Instagram is a great way to present your business to clients (b2B) or customers (b2c). Presenting your services with style, imagination and creativity.

In this blog we are sharing three examples.

1. A Project Management tool for small businesses and individual businesses. MOE.

2. Chewy for pet foods

3. Vans for shoes

Each business has a different TG, but has used Instagram to create a very attractive and desirable engagement platform.

In our understanding of Instagram, we find the three important attributes for any Instagram page to create social engagement.

Ø Keep the business at the core

Ø Create a clear visual template

Ø Involve the audience

Lets see these in more detail:

A. Keep the business at the core: This is the simpler task. Each business must obviously create content that illustrates what its core business is. However the trick is to do this in close coordination with the second point, which is to keep the content in line with the overall visual theme of the site.

B. Create a clear visual template: Its always a good idea to think very carefully about how you wish your page to look like. Over a long term, Say 6–9 months. So this look isn’t open to changes and edits once it is finalised. Do take in inputs from persons more visually accomplished. The visual template needs to be repetition. Either the color scheme, or the layout.

For example: The centre visual element of each row will be product story, while the one on the right will be a consumer/ customer story and the one on the left could be values of the company that is being promoted.

C. Involve the audience- Finally, each business is about its audience. If you don’t show them “winning” because of your product and service, then there is no motivation for a visitor to seriously consider your brand. Winner stories are really about how using your product made a customer feel. Happy, relieved, strong, powerful , sexy?

These handles below illustrate the above points effortlessly and consistently.

MOE: https://www.instagram.com/moeassist/

Here’s CHEWY- https://www.instagram.com/chewy/

VANS: https://www.instagram.com/vans

Instagram is simple. But therein lies its complexity. Following a few rules, consistently overtime will create a vibrant and attractive page, without effort. And a following that will rely more on visitor experience rather on spends.

Good luck. Happy Instagram marketing.
Join the brand new $15,000 contest for talented NFT creators by Alium.Art 🔥
Tags: Marketplaces, Artist, Nft

Join the brand new $15,000 contest for talented NFT creators by Alium.Art 🔥 AliumFinance Jun 15·2 min read

We are pleased to announce an exciting event to mark the launch of the Alium.Art NFT marketplace.

We are opening a contest for talented NFT creators with a $15,000 prize pool 🎁

To join the contest:

👉 Create unique NFT artwork

👉 Fill in the form https://forms.gle/GGP9xCV2w4wpVjDW8

👉 Share it on Twitter using the #aliumART hashtag and mention our account @alium_art

👉 Register on our platform and apply to create your Storefront

👉 Wait for a confirmation email

👉 Upload your contest artwork to the Platform

Alium.Art started a large-scale marketing campaign and activities to attract collectors from all over the world. This way, Alium.Art digital artists and creators will get a chance to present their work to the NFT market and get exposure to a large community of NFT Enthusiasts.

The Prizes for the competition:

1st Place : 3000 USDT + 1500 $ALM

2nd Place: 2500 USDT + 1500 $ALM

3rd Place: 1500 USDT + 1000 $ALM

4th Place: 850 USDT + 500 $ALM

5th Place: 700 USDT + 350 $ALM

6th to 10th Place: 500 USDT + 300 $ALM

11th to 15th Place: 300 USDT + 100 $ALM

🎨 The Alium.Art team will select the 100 best works for the finals, and a jury of three professional NFT artists will be choosing our winners on a Livestream to make the process more enthralling and transparent!

Our celebrity jury members will soon be announced on Twitter and Instagram.

Submit your incredible artworks before July 15, 10:00 am UTC, don’t miss your chance🌠

Stay tuned and subscribe to our social media:

⚡️ Telegram announcement channel: https://t.me/aliumartnews

💻 Telegram: https://t.me/aliumswap_official

🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/AliumSwap

📰 Medium: https://aliumswap.medium.com
Competitive Markets I: An Introduction
By: Amey Shenvi Sangavkar
Tags: Economics, Marketplaces, Competition, Microeconomics

Image Credits: Google images

We live in the world, that is surrounded by competition. The competition is in every field starting from education, industries and sadly people do perceive even in life. There have been events where we have all been subjected to comparisons between peers, products, style of life, monetary comparisons and so on.

The word competition is very largely used in the field of micro-economics. There are four fundamental models.

1. Perfect competition

2. Monopoly

3. Monopolistic competition

4. Oligopoly

In a concise manner. Perfect competition means an ideal case where the product is similar in all the characteristics, so that it can be standardized. There are many buyers and sellers and no entry, exit and information barriers. Monopoly on the other hand is there is only one seller who is selling the product with control over all he market parameters like Price, product type etc. Monopolistic market is different from the others like there are many sellers who sell similar products and each of their product is unique (similar products but not identical). Market for novels, CDs, video games etc. Now coming to ‘Oilgopoly’, it departs from the perfectly competitive markets as there are only few sellers the products are identical for eg. Tennis balls.

Oligopoly markets display different characteristics:

1. These markets have similar products so there is competition between firms for market share.

2. The firms are in strategic position, it follows the previous statement

3. The firms have options to collude (work together) for the collective interest. Though there are anti-trust laws which prevent this.

4. As they are strategically aligned, there is a scope for application of game theory.

Out of the four kinds of markets, oligopoly markets face the most amounts of competition and there are various scenarios which can be mapped out:-

1. Rivalry : Firms competing with each other to gain competitive advantage

2. Collusion : Firms work together in order to achieve collective monopoly and dominate the market.

Oligopoly markets can be analysed by a framework known as Game Theory. More on that in part 2.
How to set custom commission for seller in Sharetribe
Tags: Coding, Ruby on Rails, Marketplaces, Sharetribe

Sharetribe open-source is an amazing way to start a marketplace in Rails, if you know how to code. In my marketplace, www.ethic2hand.com , ethical products are either from particular (second hand) or enterprise (outlet). If the product is set by a particular, the fee has to be 10%. If it’s set by an enterprise, it has to be 20%. Therefore I had to set custom commission for seller.

The values of the transaction table are sent to Sharetribe in file app/services/transaction_service/gateway/stripe_settings_adapter.rb

This file takes the value p_set to set the commission_from_seller. The function get_active_by_gateway takes the value of the commission you have in your table payment_settings.

Therefore, you have to change the commission_from_seller: p_set[:commission_from_seller] to commission_from_seller: opts_tx[:commission_from_seller] . Indeed, tx_process_settings is called in app/services/transaction_service/transaction.rb, in function create. This function takes in parameter opts_tx and sends it in parameter to tx_process_settings. And the create function is called in app/controller/preauthorize_transactions_controller.rb and app/controller/transactions_controller.rb .

In app/controller/preauthorize_transactions_controller.rb you have to add “commission_from_seller: opts[:listing].author.is_brand? ? 10 : 0” (in my case, if the listing’s author is a brand, the commission is 10, else 0) in function def create_preauth_transaction(opts). Doing so, opts_tx[:commission_from_seller] from file stripe_settings_adapter.rb while take the value you indicated juste above.

You have to do the same in function create of app/controller/transactions_controller.rb, and that’s it !

I hope it helped you, and don’t hesitate to ask if you have any question !