What @RileyJames said is spot on. When you think about it outside of the lens of websites, it starts to become more clear. Our thesis is that apps should be able to sell natively, without any form of clickouts to external websites, which is how traditional affiliate links operate today. We believe that transactions should be able to occur natively in any environment that has an internet connection. If commerce is ever to occur in environments like games, voice, VR, etc; clickouts would likely be impractical, and a headless API would be needed to facilitate the transaction. This headless API is what we've been working on.
We essentially integrate with all of the ecom platforms (think BigCommerce, Magento, Shopify, etc) and normalize their catalog and checkout/order API's into this single headless API. Developers can then integrate with this single API, and gain access to the products in our system, which are sourced from merchants on all of those platforms. Developers can then add native checkout (no clickout) to their apps, and earn a commission (defined by the merchant) for each order they facilitate. These orders are written back directly into the merchants existing tools, where the order appears as if it had been placed on their website.
Also, I do agree that our landing page can be pretty confusing. We're serving a double-sided marketplace and are still working on finding that right language that makes sense to both sides.
We've been working on something in this space called Violet: https://violet.io. At the core we're a headless API that connects merchants looking to sell their products natively in new channels with the developers (https://violet.dev) who are building those channels.
We essentially integrate with all of the ecom platforms (think BigCommerce, Magento, Shopify, etc) and normalize their catalog and checkout/order API's into this single headless API. Developers can then integrate with this single API, and gain access to the products in our system, which are sourced from merchants on all of those platforms. Developers can then add native checkout (no clickout) to their apps, and earn a commission (defined by the merchant) for each order they facilitate. These orders are written back directly into the merchants existing tools, where the order appears as if it had been placed on their website.
Also, I do agree that our landing page can be pretty confusing. We're serving a double-sided marketplace and are still working on finding that right language that makes sense to both sides.