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Community & Business Groups

Merchant Community Group

The mission of the Merchant Community Group (“Merchant CG”) is to improve the Web for people and organisations that sell goods or services, or accept donations online. This includes both business-to-business (B2B) merchants, business-to-consumer (B2C) merchants as well as not-for-profit donation acceptors. In this non-technical forum, participants will discuss merchant challenges, how emerging Web technologies could help address them, and what additional Web capabilities may be necessary. Likely topics include:

  • Customer interaction, capture and retention via accessible immersive Web experiences;
  • Web checkout experiences, including the value merchants should gain with W3C's Web payments standards;
  • Emerging regulatory requirements (e.g., related to privacy or accessibility) and ensuring good customer experience;
  • The evolution of Web advertising;
  • Good practices for reducing online fraud;
  • Enhancements to transaction integrity and assurance;
  • Improving mobile Web commerce experiences.

Scope

Participants will choose and prioritize discussion topics.

Activities in Scope

  • Education about Web technology trends and the impact on merchants, including through discussions with other W3C groups. These activities will include non-technical briefings.
  • Identification of current merchant challenges, best practices for addressing them, and how those practices may change for various reasons (e.g., due to evolving privacy practices).
  • Communication of merchant use cases and requirements to groups within and outside W3C.
  • Coordinating reviews of the work of other W3C groups (e.g., the Web Payments Working Group, Web Authentication Working Group or Immersive Web Working Group). It is a goal that this group enable high-bandwidth, two-way communication channels with other W3C groups.

Activities out of Scope

  • Development of technical specifications.
  • Discussion of specific products or implementations consistent with W3C's Antitrust and Competition Guidance.

w3c/merchantcg/

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

Note: Community Groups are proposed and run by the community. Although W3C hosts these conversations, the groups do not necessarily represent the views of the W3C Membership or staff.

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W3C Launches Initiative to Improve the Web for Merchants

W3C today launched the Merchant Business Group, an open forum to address challenges for customer experiences and business needs using Web technologies. Merchants, integrators, platform providers, and others will discuss how emerging Web technologies could help address customer experience challenges, and what additional Web capabilities may be necessary. The group offers participants an opportunity to learn directly from the organizations building Web experiences about how Web standards trends can affect (and improve) e-commerce. W3C Members Worldpay from FIS, Fiserv, Coles Supermarket Group, and Connexus are the first organizations to join the new group, whose first meeting will take place on October 26, 2020.

A W3C Business Group gives innovators wanting to have an impact on the development of the Web in the near-term, a vendor-neutral forum for collaborating with like-minded stakeholders, including W3C Members and non-Members who can participate in the Business Group without full W3C Membership. Please read more in our press release.