Taking an existing idea and slapping Bitcoin on it isn't exactly innovation and won't bring Bitcoin to mainstream civilization. We need new ideas that stand in their own right that can be supplemented by Bitcoin in order to give people incentive to use it. Regular merchants will be easy to gather once unique and successful ventures are already using Bitcoin.
So, in a nutshell, selling toilet plungers or any other widget for Bitcoins is not the way to go unless 1) you already have a successful business doing it or 2) your main value is not receiving Bitcoins.
So if I catch your drift Atlas. You are against the "specialized currency exchanges" which are popping up. Essentially allowing you to buy stuff with bitcoins at a premium by having someone who will accept bitcoins and then go out to the store and buy stuff and ship it to you.
Then again, perhaps the point here is to find a market niche for bitcoins instead of a product niche. For example credit cards like MasterCard and Americard allowed people to consolidate existing revolving credit they had with existing institutions and eventually extend credit to institutions which were not large enough to have a credit department.
I was thinking the other day, that perhaps the market niche for bitcoin is perhaps exactly where it is: Small scale selling. For example, I'm sure a bunch of you have seen the "auto-adjusting price tag url" code that was posted recently. Essentially a url that takes a figure in dollars and converts it into an embeddable image which shows the price in BTC. Likewise most of the alternative clients have some kind of bitcoin URL interpretation. Combine the former with a link that contains the later and maybe the client autofills the message field with some required information (like shipping info,email) which you specify in your client.
This would allow a "1-click buy" from just about any venue in the internet. Personally, I can see the reason for that. I have a ton of things that I don't bother selling because of hassle and fees and multiple communications with people. If I could just make a "mini-storefront" with one simple url and post it to craigslist and forget about it until the money started coming in. Then I think you open BTC up for all sorts of micro-selling.
As it stands there are still some problems to solve. For example, if I have five Opteron 285's which I want to sell at a great price. I don't just want to accept money until I take the URL down (if I'm honest). So it would be good if the URL hosting (image creating) service can do some simple inventory management as well as provide an expiry date. There are probably some security issues to sort out here too.
Thoughts?
