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Community & Business Groups

Federated Commerce Community Group

Decentralized e-commerce and storefront apps will more easily share and syndicate their products rather than relying on single and proprietary APIs from hosts to operate a storefront. By structuring portable commerce data stores, protocols, and semantics, this group seeks to enable marketplaces to be built more eaily and made more easily discoverable.

This group's efforts will complement existing activities such as Web Payments, Linked Data, and DID, to deliver a search, browse, configure, checkout, and payment workflow for physical and digital products with mostly existing web technologies.

At a higher-level, it would be potentially beneficial to include support for an aggregate query language, (such as SPARQL) to enable applications to query a known network of compatible applications for product information to better support web resource-to-web resource indexing and listing of products, increasing visibility without the need for central search engines. This would potentially utilize HTTP methods to register product catalogs in other web apps or request product catalogs from other web apps, enabling products to be purchased outside of the scope of the original commerce site, creating an aggregate marketing power across the web rather than depending on singular, monolithic e-commerce platforms.

Group's public email, repo and wiki activity over time

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Call for Participation in Federated Commerce Community Group

The Federated Commerce Community Group has been launched:


Decentralized e-commerce and storefront apps will more easily share and syndicate their products rather than relying on single and proprietary APIs from hosts to operate a storefront. By structuring portable commerce data stores, protocols, and semantics, this group seeks to enable marketplaces to be built more eaily and made more easily discoverable.

This group’s efforts will complement existing activities such as Web Payments, Linked Data, and DID, to deliver a search, browse, configure, checkout, and payment workflow for physical and digital products with mostly existing web technologies.

At a higher-level, it would be potentially beneficial to include support for an aggregate query language, (such as SPARQL) to enable applications to query a known network of compatible applications for product information to better support web resource-to-web resource indexing and listing of products, increasing visibility without the need for central search engines. This would potentially utilize HTTP methods to register product catalogs in other web apps or request product catalogs from other web apps, enabling products to be purchased outside of the scope of the original commerce site, creating an aggregate marketing power across the web rather than depending on singular, monolithic e-commerce platforms.


In order to join the group, you will need a W3C account. Please note, however, that W3C Membership is not required to join a Community Group.

This is a community initiative. This group was originally proposed on 2020-08-14 by Philip Laszkowicz. The following people supported its creation: Philip Laszkowicz, Dmitry Solovov, Michiel de Jong, Matthias Evering, Angelo Veltens. W3C’s hosting of this group does not imply endorsement of the activities.

The group must now choose a chair. Read more about how to get started in a new group and good practice for running a group.

We invite you to share news of this new group in social media and other channels.

If you believe that there is an issue with this group that requires the attention of the W3C staff, please email us at site-comments@w3.org

Thank you,
W3C Community Development Team