Hi folks! I’m here with another idea. Let’s make an amazon alternative. I know! I know! That was asked for a couple times already but lets discuss some details.
Amazon is basically glorified dropshipping by now. What if we just made federated (not sure if over activitypub would work) ads and sales, powered by fediseer (the “trust” network of the fediverse).
Example 1: So you buy at toms groceries, you trust them. they have experience with tina’s hardware store and they trust them. so you can buy both toms and tinas wares on both sites.
Example 2: So for example, I run a small business that sells computers. You run a small business that sells mice and keyboards. I have worked with you before so I mark you as trusted in my local website, which federates with yours, showing your products in my shop. If a customer buys my computer and buys your keyboard on top, my site sends you a buy order with customer address and payment. I get a small fee for my electricity of say 1%.
Can someone try and poke holes in this idea? It feels like this could work!
Have a nice weekend.
Decentralized sales platforms would just suck to use, in general. The Amazon problem is likely something that can only be solved by the legislative processes of the countries it operates in.
Imagine Ebay but with even less scam prevention.
I agree on the need for legilature. I strongly disagree on the scam. You dont have massive csam on peertube either because it has manual federation. Everyone who runs a business knows that its much more important to not get sued than to sell stuff. Big difference between small businesses and large ones btw.
I think the way to beat amazon is to specialize in one tiny area. Carve them up into such small slices that they cant fight back.
So like, instead of trying to do just their books business, do just horror books. Horror that mixes with all genres, every possible crossover, but always horror books.
Having a genuine specialty is what can take amazon down, bit by bit. Something genuinely cool, something genuinely fun. Another big-ass store is nothing special.
You obviously didnt get the point. These stores already exist and they’re not big.
I do get the specialization idea and I think its valid. i just dont see how to make that federated and why only for books as I’m not talking about a service, really. Its a network.
Closest we’ve got right now is Flohmarkt, right? If they haven’t already been working on some kinda trust system, they’re probably taking code contributions. I saw somewhere else somebody suggested Loops integration for it, so they could have something like the tiktok shop. I mean capitalism is garbage, but unfortunately we do currently gotta buy stuff occasionally, and it would be nice if that experience sucked less.
Oooh, awesome, thanks for this link!
Flohmarkt is nice if a little small atm but of course it is very new. I’ll check if it would work to implement their api in a normal website/shop. because my point also is to make people independent from each other so that no single entity can control them. in this case I mean if flohmarkt got “outlawed” for example because lobbyists and such, websites would prevail, i hope.
Thanks for participating.
Flohmarkt is nice if a little small atm but of course it is very new.
Philosophically, the classified ad model (a bit like Etsy or eBay without auctions, where you are just an introduction service) seems more in keeping with the Fediverse and has a lot less hassles than trying to replicate Amazon with all it’s storage and shipping.
I’ll check if it would work to implement their api in a normal website/shop.
What I’d like to see is more seamless integration of !flohmarkt@lemmy.ca into other Fediverse services.
So someone has a blog for their writing on WordPress or Ghost but can run a sidebar or footer with links to Flohmarkt where people can buy a signed copy or special edition directly. Or you have it working with !neodb@lemmy.zip where users can read a review of a film and click through to see if anyone has a copy of the Blu-ray on Flohmarkt.
Equally, !friendica@lemmy.ca is a kind of Facebook replacement and Flohmarkt could slot in there as a Marketplace replacement.
In general we probably need more plug-ins in Fediverse services to help integrate things more tightly and Flohmarkt seems the kind of thing that would work well when slotted into a lot of other existing services.
if flohmarkt got “outlawed” for example because lobbyists and such
That would be very difficult to do with a decentralised service.
I agree on all points except the last. It is no problem to outlaw something and disrupting fediverse instances is no problem either. With websites that is a whole different ballgame because they are manifold.
Instances are websites.
No, they are not.
Instances have websites but the bulk of the fediverse is done on a completely different layer, even a different port.
Fediverse instances are clusters of microservices. They usually include a database, a frontend and a backend. The backend is where the api is and where federation requests come in and go out. Thats where the magic happens.
If you want to test this, just disable the webserver (frontend) and watch the instance still working. You can also see this working when you look at the different frontends of some bigger lemmy instances for example.
We coiod think of an integration with all main ecommerce platforms like:
WooCommerce X Cart PrestaShop OpenCart osCommerce Joomla Zen Cart VirtueMart (Joomla) Drupal Commerce (Drupal) KonaKart PimCore
That would probably jumpstart the adoption. Good point.
you are not proposing a federated amazon, this is just federated ads and/or reviews.
how to process payments? how to ship goods? how to handle refunds? how to handle contestations?
please you can’t just make anything federated. this protocol is built for social media and struggles to take over that sphere, we should focus on one thing rather than throwing random stuff at the wall hoping it sticks (cough federated tik tok cough)
the idea is not bad. Think you create your ecommerce site, list your products, and they are automatically listed in a huge marketplace. The same could apply for bed and breakfast booking websites
God, if only someone had invented an internet-native form of money in 2008
A lot of the terrifying aspects of slinging money around that people are talking about in this thread actually do become terrifying, once Bitcoin and friends are your platform. Fraud? Refunds? Someone hacked your server and stole your wallet? All that stuff is now 100% your problem, there is absolutely no way to “undo” if something wrong happens, and no infrastructure in place to handle any of it or any professionals with already a simple system in place for it. Or, if there is an infrastructure, it is based on a shady company which is orders of magnitude more sketchy and predatory than the (already pretty sketchy and predatory) banking system.
I actually think 3% is roughly a fair fee for the processor to charge you, in exchange for agreeing to worry about all of that nonsense on your behalf so you can just collect the money. For in-person transactions, it’s mostly just a predatory rent payment, but for online transactions where the possibility for malfeasance is amplified, it makes sense to me.
how to ship goods?
Part of their point was that Amazon doesn’t handle shipping for a lot of the things they sell. If you want to, they can store everything within their massively-optimized operation and ship it for you for a small-enough-to-be-compelling fee, but you don’t have to. You can also just list your stuff there and ship it to customers when they order it.
how to process payments?
This is trivial. The modern financial internet makes it extremely easy.
how to handle refunds? how to handle contestations?
This is a fair point, probably the biggest issue that could be a stumbling block. One fair counterpoint is that Amazon’s handling of these situations is often pure uncaring dogshit, so if you’re doing a bad job at it, you’re still no different than Amazon (and potentially better than, since it is hard to see how someone could be any worse.)
It’s not totally simple, and you have to do some real actual work to solve it, but it’s also not like going to the moon. It’s solvable.
Amazon doesn’t handle shipping for a lot of the things they sell.
This is false. Very few products sold via Amazon are shipped independently from Amazon’s logistics services.
Do you have numbers for this? I tried to find some, and couldn’t.
Yeah, so 18% of the stuff is shipped by someone else. IDK if you want to call that “a lot”, but I definitely wouldn’t call it “very few.” Anyway glad we got to the answer, however to characterize it.
Considering your answer to payments solution was "This is trivial.’ it sounds like a) You’ve never run a business and b) you’re more interested in fantasizing than a realistic conversation.
a) You’ve never run a business
They might have run a small business or been present in a bigger one in management position, doing their own job well enough to avoid painful understanding they don’t get it as a whole. Arrogance is not always cured by experience, actually I doubt it’s ever cured in humans and we all have it.
b) you’re more interested in fantasizing than a realistic conversation.
That much was clear from the very beginning, I tend to have such ideas too, but I have BAD and thus mania periods.
Pretty much what they’re doing all over this thread.
Like some people can only see the glass half full. Few have the guys to look at both the fullness and the emptyness equally.
I have run several businesses, some of them on this micro-scale. That’s how I know that part is trivial.
You can literally set it up for yourself for free, if you want to see: https://stripe.com/
Wow. Took a while to get a naysayer in here.
Sorry mate, I can do whatever I like. You should visit a hackspace at some point. You would be shocked how many people there give a crap about what you think they can do.
But on a more productive note:
I have not thought out the whole process yet. Otherwise I would not ask here but show a product. There are ways to work payments for open source already. Payments are limited to credit cards, bank transfer, crypto, paypal, stripe, etc as far as I know. So I would suggest the “main shop”, that the customer orders in, would be the one booking and sending the other funds to the other shops the customer ordered in. The delivery would be standard dropshipping (the buy order goes to the other shop and they are responsible for delivery, same as amazon does for many shops now). Contestations is a good point. They would also need to be delivered to the dropshipped company and the payment contested as well. From my current pov this sounds entirely doable.
So if you just drop that condescending tone you can see we actually can be productive here. Do you have any more points we can work through?
“Can someone try and poke holes in this idea?”
you are still proposing a federate ad network. payments are left to crypto (not fedi), credit cards (not fedi) or paypal (not fedi). the shipping is done by shops themselves (not fedi) (also amazon handles ~80% of their deliveries, check in this thread for sources). What’s a “main shop”? doesn’t sound very decentralized. you suggest leaving contestation again to the shops to handle (not fedi).
what exactly are you fediversing here? the proposition to users would basically be a single view with all shops, but then just delegating to them? there can be value in this, i see it mostly as an ad network leveraging AP and I’m really not a fan. it isn’t really amazon
being angered by being shown issues in your idea doesn’t help your idea. go visit your local hackerspace and start building if you think we’re just naysayers
how to process payments? how to ship goods? how to handle refunds? how to handle contestations?
The problems are solvable, but the solutions taken together are couple times as complex as Amazon itself. This translates to cost. Which is naturally the reason Amazon came to existence earlier than that solution.
I think that layers of storage\messages and actual logic should be firmly separated, an instance going down when someone wants a refund for an operation that involved it seems not good enough. If the operation is a cryptographic contract with an escrow, and “instances” are just servers providing message storage probably privileged for some users (might be members of a community, might pay for that storage, that’s lower layer anyway), this is less of a problem. But that’s not a federation.
By the way, however I dislike OP’s attitude, if you suggest this idea like a federated ads and reviews platform, it becomes useful.
Bittorrent is federated streaming video before it was cool.
What about the online food ordering market. I reckon that might be an easier first step than consumer products. Here in the Netherlands JustEatTakeaway has a market share of around 90% and requires restaurants to give them a 14% provision. Restaurants don’t have much of a choice, if they’re not on there they miss out on a huge part of the market, it’s like they don’t exist. Why don’t restaurants unite and develop a FOSS protocol that let’s them federate, so the consumer has a central place to browse the food delivery market, but simultaneously makes the providers independant because they can run their own instance if they please. Have these types of ideas been pitched to branche organizations? Restaurants have a clear interest to develop this to free themselves from the platforms with a monopolistic venture-capital-driven strategy.
I fully agree that this would be a valid application. The reason any company doesnt adopt such strategies is the cost of pioneering it. Most companies who spearhead such an idea want it to pay off -> proprietary. Also most people are specialized in their industry. Developing an app is not native to food industry for example.
The best idea I can come up with is a federated marketplace. Each vendor has their own instance. Buyers can browse the marketplace and have a unified checkout experience. Vendors would have unified product posts so whichever vendor has the best price or fastest shipping (user preference) would get the sale. USPS for example has shipping zones which determine the price for shipping depending on distance.
The best example I can come up with is rockauto. They are a central marketplace of different auto parts suppliers. You can find parts that are in the same location in order to combine shipping.
If you put a part in your cart it will then show parts that are in the same warehouse.
Thats pretty straightfoward. I like it. Combined shipping can make sense. Thanks for participating.
I think there’s some misunderstanding here. Amazon is a massive logistics system. The retail storefront is a tiny part of what Amazon is today.
AWS exists because Amazon needed to solve an internal data handling problem in order to solve their logistics problems so that they could scale up. After building that system, they started selling it as a product to other businesses. The point being, Amazon’s real success is based on providing business-to-business services. The retail website is the tiny public-facing bit, but it depends on the rest of the organization structure in order to operate properly.
What you’re proposing is more like an eBay alternative, where the system is basically just the storefront, and the sellers listing products are responsible for their own logistics. eBay still provides dispute resolution for buyers though, and that’s hard to achieve without some centralized control.
There’s also the legal problems. At some point someone will use such a system as a silk road - probably sooner rather than later. Whoever is administrating and hosting it will be liable for criminal activity in the countries where the crime occurs. It will not end well.
Thats entirely possible. Thanks for pointing it out.
But the rest about amazon is (interesting?) noise in my opinion. The thing keeping people locked in amazon is amazon, nothing else. Sellers need to sell there to survive and customers cant find alternatives, especially not for a competitive price.
I don’t see how you think its noise. Many items from amazon come from an amazone warehouse and delivered by amazon. they don’t exclusively do it this way but this is how they have the same day and few day shipping. I remember when amazon went from mostly being a book site to selling everything and people were gaga about 2 day shipping and when same day shipping came to some metros it was talked about a lot. I think the main thing is the other guy mentioned logistics and aws but forgot to mention the warehouse and shipping part of the logistics.
Your point - in general - is valid but what does it have to do with the idea of federated dropshipping?
nothing outside of what the other person said. it would be more akin to federated ebay rather than federated amazon and still will lack some of ebays benefits. Don’t get me wrong I think its a good idea viewed in that way. I mean better than craigslist which is not even federated.
Sellers need to sell there to survive
Amazon is a service provider. Sellers sell there because Amazon provides product advertising (every product page is essentially an ad), order processing, payment processing, warehousing, order fulfillment (via the warehouse staff), shipping, dispute resolution, return processing (which is its own logistics nightmare), and even resale of returned/refurbished products in some cases, and all of it is coordinated through their data systems.
It is extremely convenient to sell a product on Amazon because they handle all of the customer-facing parts of selling, all you have to do is describe what you’re selling, and arrange for Amazon to get the product somehow. It’s the convenience that keeps sellers on their platform. It’s the convenience that makes it worth the cost of doing business with Amazon.
Now yes, each individual service could be replaced, but splitting them out is going to cause coordination problems. It’s going to slow down the order fulfillment, and it’s basically shunting the operation cost (both time and money) back onto the seller. That’s going to mean fewer sellers interested in using the alternative, because now they have to do for themselves what they could simply pay Amazon a percentage of their sale price to do. And because this alternative is slower and can’t provide the same kind of return guarantees that Amazon can, fewer customers are going to want to use it.
The thing keeping people locked in amazon is amazon, nothing else.
So yes, you’re right, but I don’t think you’re giving enough weight to what Amazon is as an organization. Amazon is a lot more than just the retail website. Having all of those services under one roof makes the operating costs lower, which is a big part of why the prices are so competitive. If the seller has to take on those costs then they have to raise the price of their products.
I believe its valid to point these things out from a technical standpoint. What is the point you’re trying to make though?
Amazon is basically glorified dropshipping
This premise is not correct. As I’ve described, Amazon’s business is providing services to other businesses, many services, which make their platform attractive for sellers due to ease-of-use. Therefore…
Let’s make an amazon alternative.
This objective is not really possible. An alternative that does not provide all of those services is not actually an alternative.
There is no real point. You did not seem to get what the other person said and so I added it to make it a bit more clear on why its not an amazon replacement because amazon does so much more. Its just sorta how conversations involving a few people work. Im not just talking about the last thing you said but about the whole read down the line.
Got it. Thanks for chiming in. I never meant to clone the company. I’m talking about amazon.com maybe I didnt make that clear enough, sorry.
im sorry so you did not meant to clone amazon.com in a federated way but your talking about amazon.com? im a bit confused myself at this point.
Amazon.com is a marketplace, separate from aws and all their other endeavors. It is not important for this idea that they have a billion different things working.
The problem they (should/did) solve was scamming, and payments. So you’d need to have some banking system with locked money, disputes etc. IMO that is the complicated part, the rest is just more or less a searchable database.
That’s a solved issue. Monero escrow services have been doing exactly this for the dark web for years now
Yeah but that doesn’t solve anything for the average Joe. Nor lost packages or scamming tactics etc.
If u get scammed u report it and the escrow doesn’t release the funds to the seller. The technology is the same its just the application that differs.
Its possible that this is pretty sttaightforward. My thought on payment is stripe and paypal atm since they’re already established. They also handle this.
So not decentralised then 😅
Very much decentralized. Just with the caveat that payment decentrlization needs its own project. Successful foss software projects typically have a narrow scope and concentrate on them. Feel free to do the payment part in an adjacent project so that we dont have yo rely on stripe and paypal.
You don’t seem to understand the retail operations of Amazon. They provide logistics and marketing services to retailers, they also directly compete against those retailers because those retailers can’t do better at logistics and marketing without using Amazon’s services.
You are completely misunderstanding what Amazon actually does, and why it’s successful, despite being a shitty company. It’s first and foremost a logistics company. People can order “stuff” in many places, but if they order it on Amazon, they’ll get it by tomorrow if they order it before midnight. They got warehouse everywhere. They do (some) of their own final deliveries for anyone close to those, use the big logistics players for the rest (ups, DHL, …) while having massive volume and the power to dictate price that comes with that. The number of workers in the warehouses is actually minuscule for their size, it’s all automated. Huge up front cost, very low cost once it’s actually running.
Consumers go there because they can get literally anything. Again: warehouses. It’s also a market place but that only works (these days) because it’s THE place the people go. The reviews are also a massive point, and would be inherently untrustworthy in a federated version.
How would you ever get anyone to go to your federated version for shopping that sells like “some” things? Even if you manage to combine all those shops, you’d need a way to agree on what an item is called (or how to assign id numbers) so the same item from multiple sellers is grouped in the same offer, and many similar small things you take for granted it didn’t even ever see/notice on Amazon.
The reviews are also a massive point, and would be inherently untrustworthy in a federated version.
The reviews on Amazon are so often very obviously bots, that they aren’t really trustworthy at all. What the hell is inherently untrustworthy about federation? 🤨
But you’re saying yourself that those are “obviously bots”. It’s easy to ignore those. And just to be clear, I really did mean the reviews, and not the score (where the skew is less transparent).
Everyone leaving a review has to have an account somewhere in the federated network. This includes seeing up an instance just to use it for review bots, or fake votes on something. Obviously there’s is defederation and other mechanisms, and I’m sure there are ways to improve the situation. But the whole base setup is just inherently much harder to get into a trustworthy position. Even the common centralized sites (not just Amazon) have trouble getting it under control when they can “see” will the related data, for finding outliers and such. I’m just saying it’s an even harder proposition.
There is a simple way to solve this. Make it so only people who have purchased the product can give reviews.
There is absolutely nothing “simple” about that. It sounds simple, but what does “someone has purchased a product” actually mean, in technical terms?
Let’s start basic, since this is a proposal about a federated system, there are instances. Who runs these and why? Does ever seller run an instance? can there be users/customers on those? if not, who runs the customer-instances? Who defines what a product is, and are products like communities? or more like posts? how do you correlate different sellers selling the same item, where a review would obviously apply to both? can you review a shop or seller? Are delivery services their own “entitty” and can you review those, too? When you purchase an item
Now without any answers to any of those question, let’s just go to the next level. Where are the reviews stored? in the instance where the item is sold (possibly owned by the shop)? or with the user? if it’s with the user, how does a webserver displaying an item find all the reviews for it? Does this differ between reviews for items and reviews of shops/sellers?
If a review is stored on the instance of the seller, he can just add an entry to the database stating “user x purchased item y”, and the review is valid. If the reviews are stored with the user, he can spin up an instance, and create a bunch of users there who can leave reviews, because he can mark sales as “valid” as the seller, no matter if there was any item and/or money exchanged.
I wrote all of this thinking about the classic sellers attempt at “creating good reviews to boost a product”, but there is the opposite threat of review-bombing (might be a competing product or seller, or you just don’t like pink shirts and decide to review-bomb those): How you protect against those has similarities, but reverses the roles essentially. Sellers are now the “target”, and reviewers the “threat”.
Aaaand this all is just about reviews, which have no monetary value. The platforms main goal would be to deal with physical items, exchanged for real money, and creating physical effects (like shipping). All those have to also be secured in a much more robust way. If a fake review or two slip through the cracks, who cares. But if just one valuable item goes missing (or is never shipped), or the payment for it, that’s immediately a problem.
I’d really appreciate your points, were they not shrouded in condescension. I understand very well what amazon does.
If you feel like helping, think of constructive things to say. Otherwise dont waste your energy.
Condescension was not the intention at all. The fact that you mention logistics only as a foot note is what lead me to believe you really didn’t understand, and it was just meant as an explanation. Amazon is just scale, in every aspect, and I don’t think that can be achieved with a federated approach in the physical retail world.
As for being constructive, you can be constructive by talking someone out of an idea. I really don’t believe there’s any viability in the idea, no matter how much I wish there was. I personally value my time, so I assume others do as well. I consider saving someones time incredibly constructive, but that only applies if you intend to pursue the idea to actually get somewhere “real” with it, let’s say reaching “profit” or improving participants existing profits.
You might enjoy spending your time figuring out solutions here, maybe you see it as an economic experiment or hobby project, so it’s fun no matter the outcome. I’m that case my comment really isn’t constructive in your situation, and I’m sorry.
Rest assured I didn’t comment out of malice.
I like the idea and it could work very well for smaller communities. In fact, theyre already doing something similar called “Werbering” (advertising ring) in germany. It takes the idea and elevates it into the digital space.
Thats an interesting bit of information. Thanks! :)
I don’t see why we can’t just buy directly from shops. Maybe an aggregator of links for products, so there is an rss-like feed of products, prices etc?
I think we will see this continue, but with federated product search, soon.
Small business vendors cannot afford to continue to leave their search results to Google and Amazon to control.
Thats actually a very long interesting point. Thanks for mentioning it
like pc-partpicker
How do you handle returns, defective merchandise, warranties? If I buy something from you and something goes wrong with it, I’m not going to like being fobbed off with “hey, go talk to Tina”. If they return-ship something to you instead of Tina, who pays to ship it back to Tina?
The same way it is done today. If I have a shop for cell phones i dont manufacture them. If they are defective, you come to me and I go to apple, google or whatever.
One could argue that if you made it clear that this shop is being federated to give you a streamlined experience. That way one could contact the shop in question through the same means (federation) and ask for refund, repair whatever.
If you have a network of paricipating stores, then they can agree to take each others physical returns and inspect them.
Example 1: So you buy at toms groceries, you trust them.
[citation needed]
I mean, if their content was signed you could verify the authenticity of the certificate. Usually the business name appears in the cert.
No I mean, I don’t “trust” a groceries store. I only use them to trade for groceries, and only use cash when doing so.
Just because I use someone doesn’t mean I trust them. Even more: just becaue I trust Alice, that doesn’t mean I trust Bob by transitivity.
in that case you might be part of the problem atm. of course, if you buy groceries, you trust the grocery store to not sell you poisoned stuff. and if your friend asks you where to buy groceries, you recommend those you have good experiences with.
That said, trust is on its way out in our society but that is a political problem, not a technical. i can solve technical problems.
@haui_lemmy I had a mostly similar idea a few weeks ago but I’m a mess ( sleep issues ) so no coding for me. 😂
But yes, as I mentioned somewhere extending activitypub could be a start.You dont need to code. Help can have many forms. Ideas, counsel, testing, building, planning, etc. Feel free to dm me if you’re interested in building something. The most promising start so far was flohmarkt. It already kind of does something remotely like this but its very young. I’ll check it out and report back.
@haui_lemmy Flomarket is more like a separate shops, you need a protocol, and gui’s that are easy to embed via EU made web frameworks like drupal. ( React to be avoided as it’s from meta ) That way you see the shop on the individual site but also can create aggregators that look like ebay or ammazon but are federated.
I think htmx is an ideal framework for such a purpose
@muntedcrocodile Exactly why was all the effort done to separate logic and presentation and visual design if we are now back at embedding the logic in the presentation ? IDK I need to get used to that idea. Might be just old and tired…
I like htmx cos ur entire application state is in one place.
