What is Tongraal, exactly?
A marketplace of independent shops that exist as buildings — a door, a street,
someone behind the counter. Not warehouses, not web stores, not a brand with a
logo and a supplier somewhere else. Every shop here was checked as a physical
place before it was allowed to sell a single thing. That is the whole rule, and
everything else follows from it.
What does “verified” mean here?
A person — not a script — matched the storefront to its address on Street View
and checked the owner's government-issued ID and proof of business. The shop also
sent a photo of its own door, taken that day, with the date written by hand. An
image generator can invent a beautiful storefront; it cannot invent a shopkeeper's
handwriting in front of their own door. No shop appears on Tongraal before it
passes.
Why no dropshipping?
Because the object you order should already exist, in a shop, before you order
it. Nothing on Tongraal is forwarded to a third party or shipped from a warehouse
nobody has seen. The shop owns what it sells and sends it from its own premises.
Dropshipping, print-on-demand and third-party fulfilment are not allowed, and a
shop found doing it is removed.
Why only twenty objects per shop?
Because a shelf is a choice and a catalogue is not. Each shop picks twenty
objects it would hand you itself. You are reading a selection made by someone who
knows the maker, not the first page of ten thousand listings sorted by an
algorithm.
Why doesn't Tongraal track me?
Picture a shopkeeper who watches you admire a vase, then follows you home.
Stands outside your window holding the vase. Turns up at your friend's dinner
party. Still holding the vase. You would call someone.
That is what a retargeting pixel does, and a thousand shops do it to you every
week. We don't. No advertising trackers, no pixel sold to a network, no
“people who looked at this also looked at…” following you across the
internet for the next three weeks. You come in, you browse the shelves, you
leave. The vase stays in the shop.