Can we please make a viable (federated!) amazon alternative? I have an idea!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Sure, but the type of people looking to use federated selling platforms are unlikely to want to use something like Stripe
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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.
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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.
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Exactly, you probably want a 3rd party to handle the money exchange part. Doesn't mean a Fedi app can't facilitate everything else.
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To me at least, this contribution makes you seem like an even worse asshole than them. Just some anecdotal feedback.
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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.
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Your point - in general - is valid but what does it have to do with the idea of federated dropshipping?
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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.
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I believe its valid to point these things out from a technical standpoint. What is the point you're trying to make though?
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All these services are centralized. Thats the entire point. I'm trying to figure out how to do this in a social, open and transparent way. Maybe check out techno feudalism to see why i think the needs to happen pretty soon.
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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.
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@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 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.
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With Amazon you pay that service if you consider that its prices are often higher than standard ecommerce sites.
You can say it's a very comfortable service, but try to think how many times you returned products that you considered really necessary... -
It's much more than that. Amazon's strength is also in its proximity warehouses and contacts with delivery companies.
Otherwise you just have a federated Ebay.
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So in simple terms, you propose to build a mom-and-pop shop and have it act like a global player like Amazon?
Congrats, it does not happen very often I sit in a chair and stare at the screen in disbelief!
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Could this be an app realized based on the mycelial web - amazon uses huge AI models to predict their customer's behaviour and do the logistics ... (not sure myself, but it probably won't work solely on ActivityPub)
