A Sage Institute deliverable
Stoa
A home for local shops.
A neighborhood marketplace that returns the margin to the shopkeeper and the choice to the patron. Transparent pricing, store-sovereign, no hidden margins.
For patrons
I'm looking to shop
Search across local shops near you for anything you may need. Reserve at the counter, or have it delivered same-day.
What Stoa offers patrons →
For merchants
I run a shop
Manage inventory. Receive orders. Reach the community without surrendering the margin or the relationship.
What Stoa offers merchants →
The position
Local commerce is not failing. It is being extracted from. The aggregators that have settled between shops and the people who shop at them take a margin most patrons never see, push terms that local shops did not write, and accumulate the data and the relationship the shop should have owned.
Stoa is the different architecture. Margin is transparent and returned to the shopkeeper. The shop is sovereign: its listings, its pricing, its relationships with the people who shop there. The patron sees what they pay and where the money goes. No hidden cost is built in, and no algorithm reorders shops or listings by what pays the platform more. Stoa is built for every kind of local shop and any product.
The plan
Stoa is in development and built to be national. Onboarding is open and organic on both sides. No allowlist, no invitations, no curated cohort. What a person sees is determined by where they stand: Stoa opens to the shops of the place a person is actually in, and the directory grows with each region that comes on. One scope line is fixed: food is in-store and reservation only. Stoa does not deliver food.
Chicago is the first city. Stoa opens there first as a live pilot of the mobile app, followed by public release and region-by-region expansion as the founding network forms. The first ten shops to list in each region become that region's Founding Shops, automatically, by order of listing.