[use cases] Offer of Sale

Chaals, maybe you'd like to weigh in on this one.

Two weeks ago, Use Case Task Force members asked what the offer of sale
use case was about:

https://www.w3.org/Payments/IG/wiki/Use_Cases_Task_Force#Offer_of_Sale

If we are going to do digital receipts and payment requests, we are
going to have to figure out how to express items for sale in a
machine-readable way. All the large search companies (Google, Yahoo,
Yandex, and Microsoft) have taken a stab at this problem via schema.org:

http://schema.org/Offer

They did this via the Good Relations Vocabulary (which is used to markup
all sorts of business and retail-related information). The search
companies want it to be easy for their search crawlers to find this
information. It has an effect on their advertising revenue. When Best
Buy integrated these machine-readable offers into the output of their
web pages, their search traffic went up by 30%:

http://readwrite.com/2010/06/30/how_best_buy_is_using_the_semantic_web

While Offers are not vital to the transaction process, they do get
people to your website (case in point above). You could view the Offer
as the thing that is used to generate the Payment Request. The same
basic information goes into both, and they're probably going to be
expressed in the same sort of way. If we do Payment Requests or Digital
Receipts, the Offer use case is low-hanging fruit. It's also something
that I think we'd have an easy time getting Google, Microsoft, Yandex,
and Yahoo behind).

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny, G+: +Manu Sporny)
Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: The Marathonic Dawn of Web Payments
http://manu.sporny.org/2014/dawn-of-web-payments/

Received on Monday, 19 January 2015 05:07:08 UTC