What experience might there be in this community for a Virtual High Street, (a site that sells the products and services of a directory of shops defined by their shared location).
What, (ideally open source) platforms and systems might exist that can provide shop admin access ranges from the simple products/service, to the sophisticated, (integrate an EPOS feed).
I have been asked to start a rough feasibility study and ball park costings, that starts to capture all the planning, design, shop agreements, content, selling and fulfilment issues.
We did a bit of work looking at this for local businesses in Finsbury Park. Shopify is not open source or non profit but it is amazingly user friendly for people who are time poor and not very tech savvy. You can integrate multiple shops into one shopfront, thereby creating a high street. I believe that this is best done with a 3rd party integration tool/plugin but can’t quite remember. Happy to have a proper look into my notes if you’re interested.
I’d agree that putting something together on top of an existing platform that handles the heavy lifting makes lots of sense. Take a look at Sharetribe https://www.sharetribe.com - which might offer a decent fit.
I think that this was the plugin that I was looking at - Multi-Store Sync Power - Shopify Apps - Egnition. You might want to dig through the specs of Shopify Plus though as it may tick your boxes. I’ve asked a contact for a link they showed me once which has a whole highstreet in LA selling from one storefront, I believe it was built bespoke.
Sharetribe also a good shout, though I heard they’ve ditched some of their original ethics.
If you did want to explore the Foss options a gentle fork of About Us | Open Food Network might work, It’s got all the enterprise/ shopfront/ e-commerce stuff done.
+1 for OpenFoodNetwork - I was just checking it out yesterday (via the amazing ORFC Global conference) ,
another similar thing popped up on the radar today Voice Online Communities | About Voice I’m not sure what sort of tech they use, but it seems to be popular - i’ll report back
(off topic but ORFC had excellent simultaneous language interpretation from COATI — Coati I wondered whether they might like to know about CoTech)
I’ve just seen this, so late to the party. About 2-3 years I talked to some folks here: Fairmondo UK « CoTech « Cooperative Technologists. The actual software which originated in Germany is more an e-bay style thing, so it may be less suitable.