How to Get Professional Merchants to Adopt Peerhub Marketplace

For those who don't know, Peerhub allows users to buy and sell things using Steem Dollars as a currency. Yesterday, I wrote a blog post about how my record business is now accepting Steem payments. I mentioned I'd love to list them on Peerhub, but given the current limitations, it's not a viable option. This post will explain what will make listing on there workable.

Let me start off by saying, I don't know what @steemrollin's vision is for Peerhub, so this proposal may not align with the company's goals. However, I can tell you that this proposal will drastically increase the number of items Steem Dollars can buy.

"That sounds great, why wouldn't we want this?"

I can think of a couple of reasons:

1. Give Peerhub time to grow relatively slowly and get all the bugs worked out.
2. If your goal is to have it remain a place where Steemit users sell products to each other, this may not be a route Peerhub wants to go. It will bring in some sellers who have and want nothing to do with Steem; many will cash out immediately after making sales.

"That makes sense. Why should we want professional merchants to adopt Peerhub?"

In the first week after launch, while a listing contest was running, users created 118 new listings. That's a good start, but we could accelerate growth much more by adding a bulk-listing feature. If this feature were added, I could have 13,000 items on there today.

A bulk listing tool would allow Amazon merchants and eBay sellers to start listing there. In addition, I could reach out to my contacts in the physical music industry (cds, vinyl records, etc.) and likely have 10s of 1000s of items listed on there within days. These merchants are always on the lookout for new marketplaces since every sale counts, and they're generally fed up with PayPal and the fees that come with it.

I believe the more items STEEM and Steem Dollars can purchase, the closer we get to a system where government-issued currency becomes irrelevant, subsequently nearing a system where central banks lose their power.

How can we go about adding a bulk listing tool?

Many online merchants are in a similar position to me. We have 1000s of items in a spreadsheet and need a simple way to turn that spreadsheet into listings online. Listing these products individually just isn't feasible. Here's a sample of my spreadsheet:

The music marketplace MusicStack is an excellent easy-to-use example that could be followed. When I go to upload my inventory, this is what it looks like:

It then allows me to "map" all the columns in my spreadsheet to the appropriate information, such as: Artist, Title, SKU, Image URL, Genre, etc.

This post is focused on music since that's what I'm most familiar with. But it can be applied to other item categories as well. Ebay's file exchange could be used as a starting point for other categories. I hope these suggestions will be useful for Peerhub or perhaps another Steem-inspired marketplace.