Can we please make a viable (federated!) amazon alternative? I have an idea!
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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.
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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.
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I buy stuff from Ebay and Etsy plenty often.
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Thanks for clarifying. As stated, I disagree on this premise. We were talking about amazon.com. more specific the platform that shows you items you can buy from a variety of sellers which you dont have to vet yourself, with no ui change, with unufied payment, unified purchase, unified shipment overview. The other services i'm fine to discuss at some point but thats not the idea here.
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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.
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Thats pretty straightfoward. I like it. Combined shipping can make sense. Thanks for participating.
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Because this does not work in reality. You have many mechanics that are hidden to the casual user but play a significant role from a vendor standpoint.
You have ui change which means you slow down the users purchase due to them finding buttons and informarion, leading to similar websites which is bad for variety and gives corporare unified marketplaces an edge
Then you have trust. Leaving a website you have learned to trust means you have to check if the next website is trustworthy which isnt feasible.
Unified order overview and checkout so you know what you bought and when its coming. Especially for a complex multi stage order.
Unified payment of course as well as claims, returns, etc.
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Thats actually a very long interesting point. Thanks for mentioning it
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Thats a very good point. Thank you. I dont disagree on any of it but I think there could be alternatives to some parts.
There are physical syndicate-owned places that store collective things in them. Also, we are talking businesses here. A collective warehouse of say 100 sellers around a small city or bit town would not be easily being held hostage.
But these are details, although very interesting. Its very good long term for making such a project more resiliant and competitive.
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Thanks for explaining. I appreciate the honesty and now I see your post in a different light.
That said, I'm currently selfemployed with a small ethical it company and do open source development and project management as well as ngo work on the side.
You could argue that I'm a hopeless idealist, although I have made millions with my projects in the past (which I of course did not keep).
I'd say I have a keen sense for opportunities with a certain stubbornness to do the right thing and break down what I perceive as wrong.
If I can get 10 vendors to get off amazon and provide good service for their customers, I'm glad. Everyone on top I'm stoked.
So yes, a hobby if you will.
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You are overlooking the part where you dont haggle with the seller on amazon, you dont have to look if the item is actually used and just sold as new. You dont have to gauge if its a scam, which is hugely common on ebay. Its more like a platform for experienced buyers with concrete ideas. Not that I would not see a possible ebay alternative here as well but my main focus is on providing unified shopping in every site this platform would ne run on with a closed trust network which could then be expanded.
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That's a solved issue. Monero escrow services have been doing exactly this for the dark web for years now
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There is a simple way to solve this. Make it so only people who have purchased the product can give reviews.
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I think htmx is an ideal framework for such a purpose
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I think op sees us as exactly that. His thinktank. Isn't that kinda the whole point of a social network?
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Exactly xmr has been doing this for the markets on the dark web for years now. Escrow reviews ratings seller trust etc.
I fear the idea of crypto has been so poisoned by scammers and bullshit that the average person had forgotten it actually has value
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No, federated model is chosen over distributed model or centralized model to allow feuds, putting it simply.
That may work for a Reddit alternative, but doesn't work for markets. Helps moderation (some idea of it, I don't think that idea is good), but definitely hurts a single space to sell and buy stuff.
Which is why cryptobros and such types make either centralized or distributed systems.
So much for using computer networks for this.
Now about Amazon specifically - your post omits the whole warehouses and logistics part. Which is most of Amazon's core business.
Computer people today somehow started forgetting that real life is very hard and complex. When I was a kid (born 1996, so not old man), computers had a promise of making that real life easier, and from time to time delivered on it, but at some point bullshit like glossy buttons and Web 2.0 and social media became a thing in itself, and everyone started behaving as if it's done, we now can look down like olympic gods to those mortals messing around in dirt, and sometimes easily solve their problems. We can't.
Getting back to logistics - one has to design a system of shared warehouses, transportation, mailing and delivery tasks, tracking, reporting on outcomes of every event, and all that should be even more abuse-resilient than the processes inside actual Amazon. You'll have Byzantine problems in every interaction.
The "distributed king of all social media, solving once and for all the problem of centralized platforms" that I'm often dreaming about is realistic compared to that.
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Your comment brings no ounce of new ideas or criticisms to the table, overlooks all the pros and cons already mentioned and assumes you know a lot more thane for example. I run businesses for 15 years, do ethical business since 10 yrs and am thinking from a position of experience.
The reason I dont present myself in a way that screams competence is because this is lemmy and we dont need this stuff. I like spitballing ideas and push new projects for the benefit of the people.
But feel free to suggest constructive things.
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I made a first prototype here: https://github.com/bluebbberry/MyceliumWebServer. Its recommends songs to the users. You can see it here: https://techhub.social/@myceliumweb and try it out by posting to #babyfungus on Mastodon.
You can do AI in an ethical way by making it more decentralized. The idea behind the mycelial web is to realize it based on volunteer computing, meaning that everybody can contribute computing power. And then I can say, for example: use my models, which was trained with all these other models, on this Amazon alternative to recommend me stuff. And the AI model was trained on my PC and runs on my PC (just wasn't trained solely with my computing power or my data alone).
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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
