Re: [w3ctag/design-reviews] Digital Goods API (#571)

Regarding a diversity of stores:
Per the start of the explainer, this is an API to facilitate web apps selling their own in-app digital goods, not a general marketplace for multiple stores to sell some common set of digital goods. The site needs to have a pre-existing relationship with a store for it to function, because the store is the source of truth for item details (eg. prices, descriptions) which the site author has configured with the store. 

So there's not really a need for dynamic search and discovery of stores - the site author would choose one to use (or possibly use a different store depending on the context).

I do hope that this API leads to a diversity of small digital goods stores in the future, but that's not really likely in its current form, because the UA needs to have custom code to interface with each store. Each store has a slightly different API, and many of them aren't available through web technologies. I think that ideally in the future we define a standard HTTP (REST?) store API that the UA can interact with, without the need for custom per-store code. In the distant future, all stores would support the HTTP API and sites could interact without reliance on the UA to facilitate. But right now web apps aren't a big enough motivator to shift stores to implement such an API. See discussion of this point [here](https://github.com/WICG/digital-goods/issues/5#issuecomment-634492883).

Regarding naming:
One of the core API functions is to consume/acknowledge digital items, which finalizes a transaction. It also facilitates purchases through interaction with the PaymentRequest API. So I'm not sure "Lookup/Listing" is broad enough. Happy to take other suggestions on naming though.

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Received on Monday, 1 March 2021 04:13:44 UTC