Re: GNOME store

[Dave Neary <dneary free fr>]

Hi Quim,

Quim Gil wrote:
> http://live.gnome.org/GnomeWeb/GnomeStore
> 
> This is a goal that comes from the GNOME Foundation board discussions.
> Let's see if it can be ready for the 2.18 release.
> 
> As always, feedback and help is much appreciated.

The range of projects should be very small, at least to begin. As an
example, when the Mozilla store opened, you could buy the Mozilla book &
CD, two types of t-shirt, one type of poster, and stickers. I don't
think they even had hats to start with. So we should also try to
evaluate whether there's a market by having a maximum of 4 or 5 products
for sale.

One thing we've also discussed on the board is how to handle
international customers - the easiest thing for the users who wants to
buy a t-shirt is to select his region at the home page, and be taken to
a localised page where he gets the stuff from a producer/redistributor
in his country/region.

Obviously, that's a huge amount of work for us, and it's also forcing us
to get a number of resellers to agree on a web-site look & feel,
co-ordinating product quality from several different people (assuming
they're not produced centrally somewhere), and so on. It's perhaps
possible for us to do this with 2/3 suppliers for the launch, but it
will be tough. We'll need to have at least one successful reseller
before we can even try to do something like regionalised franchising.

It might be an idea to look for suppliers who can distribute goods in
the US and Europe, and who decide where deliveries are sent from based
on your address.

This all assumes that the requirement "integration with the GNOME
website look & feel" is a hard requirement. KDE have finally gone this
route: http://www.kde.org/stuff/merchandise.php - it would be good to
know how their store is doing. They used to have just a list of sellers
making KDE stuff.

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
David Neary
bolsh gnome org