💾 Archived View for tilde.pink › ~slondr › gemini-ecommerce.gmi captured on 2024-02-05 at 10:11:06. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-01-29)
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I saw a post recently that implied that the Gemini protocol was so restrictive, it would make e-commerce nonviable. I don't think this is true at all.
The easiest way to do ecommerce over Gemini is exactly how the first round of WWW ecommerce worked: put up a list of products you sell or services you provide, with a link at the bottom to submit credit card info. It took the web a decade to figure out how to do that securely, but Gemini already uses TLS for secure data submission so that is no issue here.
An account-based interactive store with a backend server that handles inventory management and shopping carts per-user would be more complex than the above, but absolutely possible. You can get 80% of Shopify working in Gemini with a little effort. Of course, you won't have extreme levels of user tracking, behavioral prediction and modification, A/B testing, and the like. But if you want to make money by selling products and services (instead of selling your users), Gemini is perfectly capable of supporting you.
In a world where even brick-and-mortar stores now just plug your plastic into a Square-branded iPad, it's almost insane to think that credit cards predate the internet by decades and were not even computerized for years after their debut.