I built Open Market last weekend, with the AI doing most of the heavy lifting. It lets you set up a market on one of your storage units that is open to everyone: an order book bound to the unit, stocked from its hangar, settled on chain. The problem was, until this week, just seeing a market meant going into CivilizationControl and deploying one on your own SSU first, and only then could you browse anyone else's. Which is not very open for something called Open Market.
So that is fixed. There is now an Open Market button in the EF-Map Tools Library, and it works in game or out. Click it and you can browse every live market at once, see what is in stock, what it costs and who is selling it. You can buy remotely too, no remote buy order skill required. The goods wait for you at the storage that sold them, you just fly over and collect. The whole flow takes about 30 seconds.
Browsing and buying
Browsing needs no wallet and no structures of your own. In a desktop browser a wallet only comes into it at the moment you buy, and it is EVE Vault specifically, the extension tied to your character. In the in-game browser there is no wallet step at all, the client handles it, so you can fly up to a market, buy something and drag it straight out of the storage into your ship. Got something to sell, drag it in and list it on that person's storage, or sell into one of their buy orders. No CivilizationControl, no extensions, no setup.
Locations
Now, locations. Markets cannot publish where they are automatically yet, so instead each one shows the pilot who runs it and you can contact them directly. But if you name your market with the system, planet and L point it sits at, anybody can just fly up and buy from it in game, nothing special needed. There is only really one stocked properly at the moment, the Sheer Breaker Gas Station, fuel from 0.2 Lux, so there is plenty of room.
Familiar on purpose
It loosely follows the EVE Online order book format. Sell orders and buy orders, a category tree down the left, prices in Lux because that is what people are used to. There are 363 goods in the catalogue. A lot of Frontier players came from EVE Online, so it made sense not to just copy the EVE Online market, but that is essentially what I have done. If it gets used, that opens the way to add the market features people actually miss from there, price history and the like, but that is presumptive at this point. It needs people to use it first.
The simple one
There is already a bigger marketplace in the ecosystem, Tri-Ex, and you can deploy that from CivilizationControl as well. It does a lot more than this: its own currency, shared storage built in, access control lists, member hangars. If you want all of that, use it, it is a proper platform. Open Market is deliberately the other end of the scale, the same thinking as Shared Storage was: sell orders, buy orders, and that is about it. No shared storage, no roles, nothing fancy. I maintain a lot of products at this point, so simple means less to break, and if it does not get adoption it is less time wasted. I think that trade is right for what this is.
On getting your market blown up
Markets are indefensible at the moment, someone can just destroy one. The structures have decent hit points, but there is no way to properly defend a public location, so I would not move your wealth into one. The pitch is different: most of us have stuff rotting in a hangar somewhere. List that. A station with cheap starter fuel helps new players, and if someone does blow it up, you have lost things that were languishing anyway. Transponders for structures sound like they are coming next cycle, which might let you keep a market at a private spot and share the code with people you trust. That is all future though, Open Market is just EVE Frontier as it is today.
Try it
The all-markets view is at ef-map.com/civ-control/market/all, or open the Tools Library on EF-Map and click Open Market. There is a demo with fake markets and no wallet at /civ-control/market/demo if you just want to poke at the interface, and an overview page at ef-map.com/open-market. If you want your own, set it up in CivilizationControl on one of your SSUs, under Trade Posts, name it where it sits or do not, and anyone browsing will see your stuff. As close to an open market as I could make it, I think. Any issues, let me know and I will get them fixed.