Glossary

Merchant — a business that integrates TBBN's Trade Engine (marketplace, ecommerce platform, thrift/consignment business, classifieds site, social-commerce app). Merchants currently own payments, taxes, fulfillment, and their seller relationships.

Seller — an individual who lists and trades items; also called a Marketplace profile. Every registered user gets exactly one. A seller may separately be linked to one or more merchants via merchant-fed listings — see "Identity federation" below.

Listing — an item a seller has listed for trade. For a merchant-fed listing, the original price is always merchant-supplied and never set or discounted by TBBN. An individual can also list something of their own directly, without going through a merchant.

Wants — a structured array on a listing ({category, subcategory, brand}) describing what the seller would accept in trade. Turns search into matching.

Offer — a proposal from one seller (offering one or more of their own listings) to trade for one or more of another seller's listings.

Trade Session — the stateful record that exists once an offer is accepted; tracks both sides' sellers, listings, reservations, and payments through to completion. See Trade session states.

Trade sessions store symmetric sellerA/sellerB fields — neither side is ever required to act first, and once an offer is accepted, both sides may check out immediately and independently. Don't build any workflow logic that requires a trade to go in one direction.

Identity federation — the process by which one person, verified separately by two or more merchants, is recognized as a single seller across those merchants. A merchant sends {name, verified email, verified phone} after it verifies the seller; this either matches an existing account or creates one on the spot. name here means whatever the merchant is legally able to share — a name, nickname, or username, never assumed to be a legal name. If that email or phone already matches a different merchant's link, TBBN confirms it's the same person via sequential one-time codes (email first, then phone, both required) before attributing the new merchant's reference to the existing account.

Global / Private / Both / Enterprise (listing visibility)

• PRIVATE: visible only within the originating merchant's own platform.
• GLOBAL: visible on TBBN Marketplace and to all other Global-tier-or-above merchants.
• BOTH: merchant-configurable; the merchant decides per-listing or as a platform default.
• ENTERPRISE: visible only to the merchant's explicitly-selected enterprise trading merchants — not globally visible, not just internal.

Trade Value — OriginalPrice + RequestedAmount − WillingToPay.

Checkout orchestration — TBBN reserving items and redirecting each seller to the other seller's merchant checkout with the trade amount. TBBN does not process the payment itself.