Skip to main content
Part II — PlatformChapter 9 / 21·····

🛍️ Shop

文化を、持ち帰る — Take culture home.

The experience ends; the object remains. Matsuri Shop is the marketplace where the culture you met on a tour — the potter's bowl, the weaver's cloth, the one-of-a-kind piece from a workshop — becomes something you carry home. And it is sold by the community itself: every shop belongs to a vetted member of the GCF network.

Matsuri Shop — 文化を、持ち帰る / Take culture home

Sellers — the community behind the counter

Anyone selling on Matsuri has already passed through two gates. Each seller runs one shop, sellers are GCF members, and before a single product goes live, the shop must clear KYC identity approval and complete Stripe Connect onboarding — so every seller is verified and every payout path is bank-grade from day one.

This is a deliberate trade: a smaller marketplace, but one where membership is the first layer of curation. The person selling you a craft is part of the same community that guides the tours and runs the events — not an anonymous storefront.

Self-serve onboarding runs through GCF Start, whose add-on categories include a dedicated shop category — the same path that opens experience, restaurant and crowdfunding access for community hosts.

Four product types

One marketplace, four kinds of things worth owning:

TypeWhat it covers
CatalogStandard listings with inventory — crafts and goods made in quantity
One-of-oneUnique single pieces: when it sells, it is gone
DigitalDigital goods, delivered instantly after purchase
NFTOn-chain collectible items that join your NFT collection
NFTs are a product type, not a gimmick

NFT items sold in the Shop live alongside the rest of your on-chain collection — event-attendance drops and 御朱印 (goshuin, temple-seal) NFTs from mining — viewable in the in-app gallery and verifiable on Solscan.

Shop discovery in the Matsuri iOS app

Escrow — trust as the centerpiece

The hardest problem in a cross-border marketplace is not payments — it is trust between strangers. Matsuri answers it structurally: every order is an escrow order. The buyer pays, the platform holds the funds, and the seller is paid only after the buyer confirms receipt. Neither side has to take the other on faith.

1Shop per sellerevery shop is a real, KYC-verified person
4Product typescatalog / one-of-one / digital / NFT
1Review per orderpurchase-verified, no fake stars
Escrow orders

Funds are held by the platform until the buyer confirms receipt — then released to the seller.

Purchase-verified reviews

Only real buyers can review, and each order carries exactly one review. No fake stars.

Product Q&A

Ask the seller questions directly on the listing before you commit.

Offers

Negotiate — make an offer on a listing instead of paying the sticker price.

Shipments

Each order carries its shipment record from dispatch to delivery.

Coupons

Sellers issue shop coupons and run their own promotions.

Around that core sit the conveniences a real marketplace needs: shop follows to track sellers you love, favorites, and saved shipping addresses for repeat purchases.

Second-hand — 日本の良いものを、次の人へ

日本の良いものを、次の人へ — "Japan's good things, on to the next person." Great craftsmanship outlives its first owner, so the Shop includes a Mercari-style quick-listing flow for second-hand items: photograph, describe, list. The same escrow and verified-review machinery protects both sides, which matters most precisely when the seller is an individual rather than a storefront.

Circular culture

A second-hand market is cultural preservation in miniature: objects stay in circulation, value returns to the community, and a visitor's find becomes the next visitor's story.

Live-commerce drops

A shop is not only a catalog — it can go live. Any shop can host live streams with product drops: the seller demonstrates a piece on camera and pushes it into the stream as a purchasable drop, and viewers buy in the moment. It is the natural stage for one-of-one pieces — show the object, tell its story, sell it once.

Drops go beyond products, too — the live layer can push coupons, polls and more into a stream, with chat, tipping rails and the MLC prepaid coin alongside. The full picture is in Live Streaming.

The buyer flow, end to end

  1. Discover
    Browse shops, follow sellers, favorite products — and use the product Q&A or make an offer before you buy.
  2. Check out
    Cart and checkout run on Stripe, with your saved shipping addresses ready for repeat orders.
  3. Escrow holds the funds
    Your payment is held by the platform — the seller is not paid yet.
  4. The seller ships
    The shipment is recorded on the order and followed through to delivery.
  5. Confirm receipt
    You confirm the item arrived as described; only then do funds release to the seller.
  6. Review
    Leave your purchase-verified review — one per order, from a real buyer.

🪙 Where MTC comes in

Selling is one of the platform's creator-economy legs: hosting, guiding, streaming, publishing and selling all pay out in JPY and/or MTC — the mechanics live in Mining & Earning. And every purchase feeds the wider loop that connects commerce back to culture, described in the flywheel: the more culture travels home in someone's suitcase, the more the economy that protects it grows.