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spec(§1.1–1.5): business context — summary, background, actors, problem, pains

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Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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Ben Stull
2026-06-10 07:02:16 -07:00
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specs/SD-0001-mvp-sign-up-and-single-storefront.md
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### 1.1 Executive Summary
<!-- §1.1 pending -->
Independent merchants who want to sell online need a commerce platform that
treats them honestly — and today Wiggleverse has nothing to offer them: no way
to exist on the platform, no storefront to own, no surface to manage. This
design delivers the first real value of ecomm: a person can become a merchant —
establish their identity, claim their one storefront, and stand on a stable
management surface — in every environment the platform runs in, from day one.
The beneficiaries are the first merchants (who can finally exist on the
platform) and the ecomm line itself (every subsequent capability — catalog,
orders, checkout — gains a real account-and-storefront spine to attach to,
instead of mocks). Just as importantly, it proves the platform can be brought
to life anywhere from nothing: a fresh, empty environment reaches "first
merchant, first storefront" through the product alone, with no hand-seeded
data — so launching the real service is an ordinary, rehearsed act rather than
a one-off ritual.
### 1.2 Background
<!-- §1.2 pending -->
ecomm is Wiggleverse's multi-tenant, OHM-grounded alternative to Shopify — a
commerce platform whose mechanics are accountable to the
[OHM concept corpus](https://ohm.wiggleverse.org) (no dark patterns, data
minimization, durable addressability, honest pricing). The product was explored
in a first-pass prototype (`wiggleverse-ecomm-prototype`, releases R01–R07,
189 scenario-bound tests) built against a harvested corpus of ~1,238 BDD
scenarios describing Shopify's behavior. That prototype is read-only prior art;
`wiggleverse-ecomm` is the clean greenfield rebuild, stood up 2026-06-10 with
its architecture intentionally undecided until this design.
The strategic moment: the rebuild has repos, an issue tracker, and a charter —
but no app code and no users. Everything in the product line queues behind one
question: *how does a person come to exist on the platform and own a
storefront?* Until that is answered for real — against real persistence, in
real environments — no other capability can ship honestly.
### 1.3 Business Actors / Roles
<!-- §1.3 pending -->
| Role | Responsible for (in the business) |
| --- | --- |
| **Merchant** | A person running a (small) commerce business who wants to sell under their own storefront: they decide to join a platform, establish their business presence on it, and manage that presence over time. |
| **Platform operator** | The person/org running the ecomm service itself: stands up and maintains the environments the platform runs in, and is accountable for the service being available to merchants. |
| **ecomm team** | Builds the platform; needs each capability to rest on real, shippable foundations rather than mocks. |
(Shoppers — the merchants' customers — are deliberately *not* an actor in this
design; nothing here is shopper-facing yet. See §1.7.)
### 1.4 Problem Statement
<!-- §1.4 pending -->
A person cannot become a merchant on ecomm. There is no way to establish an
identity on the platform, no way to claim a storefront, and no surface from
which to manage one — the platform has no users because it cannot have users.
And even if it could, there is today no defined path from "fresh, empty
environment" to "working platform serving its first merchant": local
development, pre-production, and production bring-up are all undefined, so
nothing built on top can ever actually launch.
### 1.5 Pain Points
<!-- §1.5 pending -->
| # | Pain | Who feels it | Cost / frequency today |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| PP-1 | No way to establish an identity on the platform — a would-be merchant simply cannot exist on ecomm. | Merchant | Total exclusion; blocks every merchant, always. |
| PP-2 | No way to own a storefront or reach a management surface — even an identity would have nothing to hold. | Merchant | Total; there is no unit of "my business" on the platform. |
| PP-3 | Every subsequent capability (catalog, orders, checkout, policies) has nowhere real to attach — work would have to build on mocks and be redone. | ecomm team | Blocks the entire product line; rework risk on everything shipped against fakes. |
| PP-4 | No defined, repeatable path from an empty environment to a working platform — bring-up of dev, pre-prod, and prod is folklore. | Platform operator | The service cannot launch anywhere; every environment question is open-ended toil. |
### 1.6 Targeted Business Outcomes