Black Swan Group

Applied software and automation

Black Swan Procurement

In development · Active 2026 · Last verified 2026-07-18

Problem

Purchase intent is trapped inside retailer-specific search boxes. Customers repeatedly restate the same requirements while every seller represents products, availability, pricing, and carts differently.

Product

Black Swan Procurement is a provider-neutral shopping engine that converts natural-language requests into typed purchase specifications and routes them through merchant-specific search and cart adapters.

Intended user

Individual consumers, technically sophisticated shoppers, households, small businesses, contractors, purchasing agents, and AI agents acting under user-defined constraints.

Thesis

A purchase request should be written once, remain under the customer's control, and work across whichever seller or interface responds best.

Request flow

  1. 01Natural-language purchase request
  2. 02Canonical JSON request (schema-validated)
  3. 03Merchant adapter (Kroger today)
  4. 04Normalized product results
  5. 05Cart handoff

Architecture

Retailer-specific logic stays isolated behind adapters rather than leaking into the canonical model. The Black Swan domain model is not allowed to become a collection of Kroger-, Walmart-, or Home Depot-specific assumptions — every adapter translates a merchant's own API into the same typed request/result shapes the rest of the system already speaks.

The same canonical request model backs all four interfaces (CLI, REST, MCP, web), so a request written once through any of them behaves identically everywhere else: a schema-validated JSON purchase-request model with a YAML shorthand for human authoring.

Evidence

  • Canonical, schema-validated purchase-request model shared across every interfaceImplemented
  • Command-line, REST, MCP, and web interfaces on one search-and-cart engineImplemented
  • Kroger authentication, product search, and cart integration working end-to-endImplemented
  • Merchant-adapter architecture isolating retailer-specific logic from the core modelImplemented
  • Product normalization and ranking across multiple merchantsIn progress

Open assumptions

  • Whether product normalization and ranking generalize cleanly to a second merchant with a materially different API shape.
  • Whether additional merchants will grant production API access beyond the developer-tier access currently in place.
  • Which business model — consumer app, procurement API, or licensed retailer-normalization technology — the evidence ultimately supports.

Next milestone

Validate product normalization and cart handoff across multiple merchants without allowing retailer-specific assumptions to contaminate the core procurement model.

Partnership

Black Swan Group is interested in merchants and API partners willing to support a second integration, and in technically sophisticated early users willing to test the CLI or web app against real purchases.