Can we please make a viable (federated!) amazon alternative? I have an idea!
-
Crypto doesn't really solve any of the problems that a payment processor wouldn't also solve, unfortunately.
yeah, thats right as well. and at least to my knowledge it would not be better to the environment either. one thing at a time. federated payment is for next week.
I would probably just use stripe and charge the customer and spread the money to the company in question. this is what you do as a normal business as well btw. You probably need to make your terms and the shop so that customer and the law knows that you are just a storefront for others as well as your own product. but aside from that I dont see a huge issue there.
-
Not crypto, blockchain. When done correctly and you don't have every user trying to calculate the next hash for some pennies it works pretty well. Computing the hash when an action happens like a purchase is fairly trivial compared to mining.
Crypto started the concept of the blockchain, at the end though it's just a distributed immutable audit log. The hash is required, but if done correctly, it's trivial.
in that case this would absolutely be a neat way of doing it. thanks for pointing that out.
-
wow. you're a real piece of work, aren't ya? byee
So I'm not wrong then, got it. Thanks for confirming it.
-
except you cant. not in most real life situations. I personally made it a habbit to not shop at amazon and the time and money I "waste" for shopping elsewhere is insane. If you come with "you're just bad at searching then" I will block you without comment.
It is hard to shop at other places. I just always give other places a chance to win my business. It keeps some money from Amazon.
-
Monero does a couple things that no other currency can do.
- It cannot be manipulated like fiat as its decentralised
- It cannot be frozen owning means u own it
- Ur payments are anonymous so ur purchases are not being mined by privacy invasive data brokers and insurance agencies
- Transaction fees are a fraction of a all existing currency cos free market
No other crypto or fiat can do this. It is objectively the best currency by all metrics. I challenge you to find one metric by which it is not objectively better (except its not widely used by normies).
Don't see why I need this to buy groceries. Shilling bags as I said originally.
I don't believe in [1], crypto market are heavily manipulated.
[2] and [3] are not desirable in my view. Don't forget, not everyone lives in the US and many people have experience and perspectives that likely you haven't though of.
-
I'm in pretty strong agreement with you. Then again, i run a business and am a reseller for a couple companies. It isn't exactly rocket science. Company A has product, I note their price, make my own price, send offer to company B. They accept or decline. if the customer has any problems with the product, they either come to me or to the manufacturer. Imho its not much different than a unified storefron would be. Also you can put the sellers name in the storefront like ebay, amazon, ali express etc. the customer knows that its not you who actually sells the product. I think we're making this a lot more complicated than it needs to be.
Yeah. I think a lot of the people in these comments are people just not experienced with business who assume that it is scary and impossible. There are certain aspects that are hairy if you don't know what you're getting into, but the whole system is designed to make it pretty easy. On the whole pie chart of "pain in the ass aspects," there are some pretty big slices in places, but "I have to set up a Stripe account oh no" is not one of them lol. That one is a tiny tiny sliver.
Even if you decide to collect payments yourself and do payouts to merchants yourself, like a little Etsy or Amazon, dealing with the headaches involved with sending and receiving the cash will still be a minority of your problems. Although they will jump up to being significant.
I kind of want to express interest for getting involved with this thing with you, since I do think it's a really good idea, but IDK if I really want to take it on. I do think it's a really good idea, though. Basically add the "operated by actual humans" aspect to online e-commerce as it is being added for online social media.
-
ITT: OP has an "idea" and no money. Please do all the work.
We are not your thinktank bro
Why do you hate fun
-
It is hard to shop at other places. I just always give other places a chance to win my business. It keeps some money from Amazon.
Exactly. And that is by design. We need legislation for that but we also need a working system to compete if possible (imo). If I didnt have to use search engines all the time to get my products that would be awesome. I'd like to go to a site I trust because I worked with them in the past and buy stuff from them while actively widening my scope of trust without having to navigate potential scams. Example: amazon takes care of scams (or paypal for that matter) and so should a federating shop. thats why trust in federation is very important.
-
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.
-
Yeah. I think a lot of the people in these comments are people just not experienced with business who assume that it is scary and impossible. There are certain aspects that are hairy if you don't know what you're getting into, but the whole system is designed to make it pretty easy. On the whole pie chart of "pain in the ass aspects," there are some pretty big slices in places, but "I have to set up a Stripe account oh no" is not one of them lol. That one is a tiny tiny sliver.
Even if you decide to collect payments yourself and do payouts to merchants yourself, like a little Etsy or Amazon, dealing with the headaches involved with sending and receiving the cash will still be a minority of your problems. Although they will jump up to being significant.
I kind of want to express interest for getting involved with this thing with you, since I do think it's a really good idea, but IDK if I really want to take it on. I do think it's a really good idea, though. Basically add the "operated by actual humans" aspect to online e-commerce as it is being added for online social media.
I feel like you're my kind of person. From the hackspace I frequent, I take the liberty to just set something up and put some work in. others can come in and help or not. stuff will either progress or not.
I would suggest we prop up a repository on codeberg (because of course) or something. You can dm me if that suits you more. everyone who reads this is of course invited to help/participate with any skills they want to bring in.
First question will be does something like this exist like e.g. https://codeberg.org/flohmarkt/flohmarkt and should we just work on implementing something like this in normal websites with the ideas just mentioned in this thread, should we fork it or should we build something from scratch.
-
Don't see why I need this to buy groceries. Shilling bags as I said originally.
I don't believe in [1], crypto market are heavily manipulated.
[2] and [3] are not desirable in my view. Don't forget, not everyone lives in the US and many people have experience and perspectives that likely you haven't though of.
Most crypto markets yes they are manipulated because their value is purely speculative and not tied to physical goods. Xmr is used extensively across the dark web tiring it to real world goods stabilising its value.
U think the government or a bank should have the right to just freeze ur money whenever they want or feel like it? U want ur entire purchase history being sold to databrokers who will use it to profile you so they can sell u crap and up ur insurance rates to the maximum point possible.
If u looked at my profile u would have noticed an Aussie flag so ur american argument doesn't work.
U still haven't found a metric by which xmr is worse.
-
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.
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?
-
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.
-
Exactly. And that is by design. We need legislation for that but we also need a working system to compete if possible (imo). If I didnt have to use search engines all the time to get my products that would be awesome. I'd like to go to a site I trust because I worked with them in the past and buy stuff from them while actively widening my scope of trust without having to navigate potential scams. Example: amazon takes care of scams (or paypal for that matter) and so should a federating shop. thats why trust in federation is very important.
There are currently money saving plugins that will alert you Automatically to lower prices on other sites when I am shopping Amazon. They kind of suck, but maybe a Fedi version of that would be better.
-
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.
-
Accepting payments isn't some kind of wild adventure that will inevitably doom your operation. People do it all the time, you can set up a Stripe account in a few minutes. You could, if you wanted (and you would probably want to go this route at least initially), require people to have a Stripe account or something and get paid directly from the buyer without you being involved. And then just charge a flat fee to the merchants or something, if you wanted to make the whole thing sustainable.
Stripe is well-equipped to deal with issues of taxes, fraud, refunds, and so on for micro-level businesses. Once you get into accepting payments and re-disbursing them to people, you've opened up a whole can of worms which probably means you should be spending a couple thousand dollars on lawyers and accountants to make sure it's all on the up-and-up, but even then, it's not unsolvable. It's kind of a pain in the ass, that's all. Jim Bob's Towing with his 2 pillhead employees manages to do it every day. It's how Jim Bob financed his boat. It's fine.
Sure, but the type of people looking to use federated selling platforms are unlikely to want to use something like Stripe
-
Sure, but the type of people looking to use federated selling platforms are unlikely to want to use something like Stripe
Then they are being silly.
I actually don't think that would be an issue in practice, given how alarmingly eager Fediverse instance operators are to get in bed with Cloudflare and AWS. But, if you are accepting payments, you are for the forseeable future going to be working with some kind of financial processor, and Stripe is far from the worse of the bunch as far as that is concerned.
-
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.
I don't know what Mafia-led grocery stores you use but if I put in a pickup order at my local store I trust them to actually have what I asked ready at the time, place, and cost we agreed to.
-
Accepting payments isn't some kind of wild adventure that will inevitably doom your operation. People do it all the time, you can set up a Stripe account in a few minutes. You could, if you wanted (and you would probably want to go this route at least initially), require people to have a Stripe account or something and get paid directly from the buyer without you being involved. And then just charge a flat fee to the merchants or something, if you wanted to make the whole thing sustainable.
Stripe is well-equipped to deal with issues of taxes, fraud, refunds, and so on for micro-level businesses. Once you get into accepting payments and re-disbursing them to people, you've opened up a whole can of worms which probably means you should be spending a couple thousand dollars on lawyers and accountants to make sure it's all on the up-and-up, but even then, it's not unsolvable. It's kind of a pain in the ass, that's all. Jim Bob's Towing with his 2 pillhead employees manages to do it every day. It's how Jim Bob financed his boat. It's fine.
Exactly, you probably want a 3rd party to handle the money exchange part. Doesn't mean a Fedi app can't facilitate everything else.
-
wow. you're a real piece of work, aren't ya? byee
To me at least, this contribution makes you seem like an even worse asshole than them. Just some anecdotal feedback.
