A Look at PeakD's New "Store" Feature — A User's Out-Of-Box Experience

Back in December, I was excited to learn about a new initiative from @peakd, which is basically a "store" feature integrated into the UI for those wishing to actually sell/market (or buy) products and services directly on-chain, transacting in crypto (HBD, in this case).

This is something I have been hoping for since the earliest days on the old chain, so it's great to finally see such a feature!

Developed by @borislavzlatanov, you can read more about Hive Open Market from the original announcement.

Of course, it's one thing to simply say "what a great idea! I support that!" and quite something else to actually put your money where your mouth is and support it by using it!

So a few weeks back I decided it was time to do just that!

Let's keep in mind that this is still in the very early stages of development and a bit rough around the edges because not all features have been implemented! I'm just sharing my own experience, as well as hoping to publicize it a bit, knowing that I am not the only one who has had an interest in on-chain commerce.

As a piece of additional information, I come at this as an online seller since the late 1990s. My eBay account dates to May of 1998, and I have used dozens of 3rd party online marketplaces — little and large — over the past almost 30 years. However, I am neither a developer, nor do I have much technical expertise.

Onwards!

How to FIND Stores:

I'm going to limit this to the PeakD experience, so your starting point has to be that you have to be logged into Hive via PeakD.

From your profile page, you go here:

Which lands you on the "main" Stores page. The text at the top is a little misleading because it's actually ALL stores, and might better read "Hive Open Market Stores" in place of "This store."

When I started checking this out, only first adopter @paolobeneforti's lovely artwork was listed; a nice example of an artist using this feature as a marketplace.

In order to unlock the "Store" features, you have to subscribe to PeakD Explorer.

To do that, you'll need to scroll down the page till you find the item pictured at left.

The subscription — which only costs 0.10 HBD a month — will be an automatic recurring monthly charge, so you need to make sure you always have a bit of liquid HBD in your wallet! It will auto-renew for 12 months. It doesn't say anywhere, but I imagine you might have to manually renew after 12 months?

You can click on the title to read more details — same holds true for all the "for sale" listings — but the purple "SUBSCRIBE" button seems to only be there when you're in list view.

Side note to developers: You might want to find a way to "pin" the "Explorer" post to the top of the page because it will become a pain in the rear to find it once Stores start populating with dozens — or hundreds — items. Ease of use is incredibly important to help something like this succeed!

When you click on "Subscribe" you'll get a Keychain pop-up asking you to authorize payment for the Explorer subscription. You're agreeing to have 0.100 HBD withdrawn monthly from your wallet for 12 months.

I'm hopeful that future iterations will allow users to prepay for a year, because we don't always remember that we have to keep a liquid balance for future charges.

So, once you've authorized the transfer (and waited a few seconds!) you can refresh the page and you'll notice that purple "Subscribe" button now grays out and instead reads "Active."

You can also tell that you were successful by the fact that there is now an active "View My History" link at the top of the Stores page.

This is probably a good one to remember, because it seems there will be a summary of anything you sell (subscriptions OR products) here.

Here's what that looks like — in the beginning, all you'll see there will be your PeakD Explorer subscription, but eventually it will fill with your sales/subscription transactions:

You can also see that you were successful by going to the activity section at the bottom of your PeakD wallet page:

OK, So You're Subscribed — NOW What?

Now that I have a store, I want to list something for sale... right?

That part took me a bit of poking around to figure out (refer back to my comment up top about this being early days and a bit rough around the edges)!

What you have to do is find "your own" store listings page — even if there is nothing there yet. Your Shop page is basically your PeakD profile page with a "/shop" added at the end:

Now you can actually get started!

Noteworthy: When you list something for sale, it shows up in your shop, but also as a POST on your blog. An unusual quirk here is that the IMAGE(s) only show up in list/grid summaries, but not in the actual POST. The post only has the text you entered!

The listing interface is (at this time) blissfully simple:

Product name: Basically your title. Make it descriptive and appealing. Don't just say "My painting" or "My digital art." Think about what will make someone want to check it out!

Description: This would be where you put your material/medium/technique; original/print; physical item or digital download... also stuff like size, weight; shipping: is postage included or extra, etc. The words are "A brief description" and I am not sure how much space that actually is. It's probably the length of a standard post, but few people read that much information, unless it's some rare collectible!

Tags: Self-explanatory, but make them count. I'd suggest making at least one tag your brand/artistic name. Also note that this area uses comma separated tags, unlike other parts of Hive and PeakD.

Type: This would either be "Product" if you're selling one-of-a-kind items or anything that's a "per unit" thing (including digital items) with a one-time payment; "Subscription" if it's service or something with recurring payments, which could include some kind of crowdfunding subscription.

Price: Which would be in HBD. Keep in mind that if you're selling "shipping included" that you collect enough to actually cover the price of mailing and your item.

Image: Where you upload your best picture of your item; this will represent your listing on your store page, and show up in the "posts" listings of your blog.

Once you're satisfied that everything is correct as you want it, click/tap "CONFIRM," approve with Keychain and the item should be listed!

My initial test image

Side note to developers: Having only a single image associated with a listing might be problematic for most trying to sell physical items — particularly artists who create three-dimensiona objects that need to be shown from several angles. The obvious workaround would be to create a single-file collage of your items, but that's going to look crappy as thumbnails in your store listings. Afterthought: I realize you can add more photos in the body of the description, but that doesn't seem obvious when you are first starting.

Secondly, a "preview" feature would be super nice to have, just like we have with the primary post editors on multiple Hive front ends.

Thirdly, I'm unclear as to how this works without a "quantity" field. Most artists are going to just have one of each. When I sell something, will it show up as "Sold Out?" Might be good to work on some code for that... infinitely available digital downloads are not the same as one-time physical items. Add a counter for transactions; when the QTY = 0 have a toggle for the blue clickable "BUY" button to become a red NON-clickable "SOLD" button. Quantity would also be important for someone offering limited edition NFTs, for example.

And... It Shows Up!

After you've submitted your listing, you'll likely need to refresh the page... but it should be right there, in your store!

In addition, you'll notice that the UX automatically adds the #hive-open-market as the FIRST tag of your listing... which I presume is for categorization/content discovery purposes.

So Far, So Good... BUT:

This is where I learned that there are some quirks here; I will try to walk through them.

I noticed right away that I had made a typo, so I wanted to edit it. There is no "edit listing" option on your Store page, but the usual PeakD "edit" showed up when I clicked the title to get to the text part.

It doesn't EXACTLY work... as I had hoped.

While I was able to edit my typo, the change only "took" in the blog listing end of things, but not in the listing on the store page.

Moreover, doing the edit killed the image part of the listing.

The workaround to this issue is to head back to the text post part of the listing in your PeakD profile, use the standard editor and upload your image as part of the post... from there. Save and wait about five minutes, and you should be good.

Additional Workarounds:

The workaround for those who wish to put multiple images in their listings seems to be use the PeakD post editor after completing the initial listing, adding additional images of your item below the text part of your post.

Be Aware, though, that you need to be super careful about not making any mistakes in the first 35-40 words of your description, as these evidently cannot be edited. Until there is a revision, this "beac" (instead of "beach") looks to be permanent.

Ooops...

So I waited a couple of days (because I got busy!) before coming back and adding more items to my shop, so it actually looks like something.

After adding three more items, I realized there's an additional "quirk," in the sense that each item you add is shown as a "post" on your blog.

That's nice, but if you are doing actual ecommerce on any scale — as an artist, for example — listing 10 items in a day might be pretty normal for you, yet that many blog posts could easily get you labeled as a "spammer" because you're posting too much. So I'm not sure whether there's a workaround for that.

So far, I have only put six items up for sale, mostly being mindful of the "post flooding" issue.

A Few Final Thoughts

All in all, I am really glad to see this new initiative take shape, and I really hope it is developed further and gets some traction.

Of course, I also hope that @borislavzlatanov, @asgarth, @jarvie and the whole @peakd crew find a moment to read this post and consider some of the feedback here. I know you guys are all really busy, but you also deliver (I think!) the best Hive experience, so I'd really like to see this initiative grow by leaps and bounds!

Thank You!

If you enjoy painted rocks, do check out The Hive Rocks Project and help spread the word about Hive, while also being creative!

Because I am trying to make some semblance of income — a part time living, even — I now add this footer to all my posts, in the hope that someone, somewhere, might decide to take a further look at my work, and perhaps consider supporting independent art.

Thank you, in advance, for your consideration and support!

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2026.02.24 AS-TXT-381/351