User:Ziggy/Vegan Mall

Overview

Vegan Mall is a website portal for finding all things vegan in your local area, and aims at making vegans' life (especially for new vegans) easier. The site doesn't sell anything, but rather catalogues products of all kinds, as well as services, recipes and various other useful information, and where to get or contact them, and prices/cost. It also ranks products and services on veganness, greenness, and fairness.

All the information in the portal is crowdsourced (i.e. user-contributed), just like the Wikipedia. Users can register and specify a number of preferences and display options so that they can access their favourite products and services quicker, as well as create shopping lists and shortlists, bookmark interesting items, add comments or reviews, communicate with other users, and offer or request shopping assistance to buy in groups or in bulk.

We hope that this service will promote the development of better consumption habits, and increase vegan to vegan trade.

Website features

The website can be considered a vegan-specific searchable user-contributed catalogue. All catalogue items recorded are user-contributed and placed in the w:Public domain; any copyrighted information included in the system must have a copyright notice, be granted permission for inclusion, and link back to the source.

All catalogue items belong in one of the main categories, and may have multiple subcategories. For example, Besan is in the Food category, and belongs in the Flours, Gluten-free flours categories.

Products are generic catalogue items, and each product may have multiple varieties, e.g. different brands, packaging, manufacturer/producer. Whilst a product is generally recognisable (pear, soy milk, burger patty, shampoo, jacket), a variety is uniquely identifiable (nashi pear, Regular Soy Milky, Fry's Traditional Burgers, Natures Organics "Fruits" shampoo & conditioner, Vision Vegan Leather Jacket). There are various different cases of what information is required, based on the category and some subcategories, e.g.:

• Fresh produce does not require specifying its grower, vendor, or place of origin; extra information may be added by vendors and pricing, such as organic status and other characteristics.
• Barcoded products are already uniquely identifiable by their barcode, which is their variety.
• Products other than fresh produce and barcoded products such as clothes are typically uniquely identifiable by brand and model; options such as available sizes and colours should be part of the product variety description rather than varieties themselves.

Other products

The portal will include support for cataloguing vegan alternatives to products of types which are frequently non-vegan, such as:

• Furniture
• Personal care
• Cleaning

It will also include support for cataloguing comparatively significantly greener products of types that typically have a high environmental impact, such as:

• White goods
• Electrical appliances
• Computer and electronics

Recipes

Each ingredient in the list of ingredients of any recipes will link to foodstuffs catalogued in the system (including availability and pricing, and possible alternatives for foodstuffs that may not be commonly available, such as certain fruits, or that can cause allergic reactions, such as wheat flour, or compatible alternatives, such as different mylks), and vice versa (foodstuffs will link to the list of recipes in the website that make use of them).