Can we please make a viable (federated!) amazon alternative? I have an idea!
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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.
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.
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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.
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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...
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Sorry if my tone will be less gentle than needed.
Your comment brings no ounce of new ideas or criticisms to the table,
I don't think so.
overlooks all the pros and cons already mentioned
It makes sense that others look at different parts of the problem than you do.
I run businesses for 15 years, do ethical business since 10 yrs and am thinking from a position of experience.
Most people have (or recently enough had and will have) a job, and most people know a person or two with 10-15 years of experience in management positions who think they are thinking from a position of experience.
Different professions and job responsibilities exist for a reason.
The reason I dont present myself in a way that screams competence is because this is lemmy and we dont need this stuff.
You did it here instead of continuing a pretty normal thread or leaving it be.
I like spitballing ideas and push new projects for the benefit of the people.
That is important, but almost everyone has been spitballing ideas and pushing new projects since they learned to speak.
But feel free to suggest constructive things.
Quoting myself:
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.
"Shared" is the important part. Even without that one can fail logistics - see USSR, the biggest corporation to fail in history.
Since this was another round of no additional input, I'll repeat myself too:
People have already suggested that. But thanks for participating.
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System shared this topic on
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Correct me if I'm wrong. But you examples are bot cutting off the middle man.
The person with the small computer store is still a middle man.
And being smaller usually means that their cut needs to be bigger to maintain themselves.
I wont correct you since I'm not the authority. I think your point is valid.
In my idea, the shop you visit - lets call them computer store - will sell you a range of computers, some of their own assembly, with normal margin, like its done today. What changes is that they partner with another shop (or many) that sell adjacent products. That could be a desk for the computer, software or other products. Those products are manually federated, ie the partners have been vetted by computer store. If you buy the computer, the seller makes their typical margin. If you buy the desk, no matter if additionally or exclusively, they will only manage the order process and payment. The rest will be done over classical dropshipping. Meaning the original desk seller will handle everything after the sale has taken place. Same as amzon does with many of their products, same as aliexpress and ebay but better than ebay because the computer store owner keeps control of the vendors they partner with. They receive a small fee only which would not be enough on its own but they arguably dont have any work besides processing the order.
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Since this was another round of no additional input, I'll repeat myself too:
People have already suggested that. But thanks for participating.
Since this was another round of no additional input, I’ll repeat myself too:
I don't think so. I also can imagine you moved on to ethical business and suggesting ideas because you had personality conflicts where people actually do something.
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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.
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@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.
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I work in the IT department for a fairly large payment service provider. I can tell you now that you seem to be vastly underestimating both the financial aspect of this as well as several legal aspects.
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Federation would almost certainly have to be opt-in rather than opt-out. I don't think you're going to pass KYC checks for any PSP if it's opt-out, the risk of someone (ever so briefly) selling illegal goods through your website is too great otherwise. Stripe would just shut down your account (if they even let you open it), PayPal probably won't let you open it at all.
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Selling goods from other sites through your own, makes you liable for any returns, warranty claims etc... Simply "passing these on" isn't going to cut it. If the other site disagrees with the customer claim, you are on the hook for it, because it was sold through your website.
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The financial logistics aspect here is really complex. If you're going to process payments on behalf of another site, you have to deal with reconciliation. After reconciliation you have to the send the money to the other shop, incurring additional (sometimes surprisingly sizeable) fees. And coming from someone who deals with (automated) reconciliation on a daily basis, every payment method does it differently and they all find extremely creative ways to mess up your systems. And that includes unannounced changes, mistakes, random unexplained fees, failure to deliver settlement files, etc...
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How do you deal with the risk of scam instances? E.g. instance A tells instance B that a product was sold and the payment was processed. B sends it out, but it turns out the customer was the owner of A, and there was no payment at all. B just lost a product with very little chance of getting it back.
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Then there's practical aspects. How do you deduplicate products in search? Or will you have dozens of listings for the exact same product?
The only remotely viable way I see this working is if only search is actually federated. Once you are on a product page, you can only pay using the payment page of the instance that has the product. You won't be able to pay for products of multiple instances at once, and you might lose some unified styling. But at least that approach has a chance of passing KYC and deals with all the legal issues regarding returns/warranties etc..., and it reduces the scam risk because you're in charge of your own payments. But at that point, you've only federated product search and nothing else, and then as a consumer you might as well just Google it instead.
I appreciate you have experience in running a business, but running a marketplace, especially a very complicated one, is really not like running a usual business.
This is incredibly valuable advice! Thank you so much!
My current stance on federation is of course opt in and requires the main seller to trust the downstream vendors.
The main point is that this already happens for a large portion of thing you can buy. I sell computers and adjacent services, classical system integration if you will. Of course I have to buy the systems from vendors and resell them to my customers.
Many system integrators have shops where some of them rely on custom integration of vendor apis. Take minecraft server sites for example that have an automated integration with a hosting company's api (eg hetzner). you as a customer just order a server, their automation makes the order processing with hetzner and provisions the server for you.
Now make this over a non custom but standardized api, eg activity pub.
I might still be overlooking stuff but from a technical standpoint this should be doable. The legal aspect is interesting, although I think this could be done similar to already existing resellers.
Feel free to point out flaws obvious to you. I appreciate your feedback massively.
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Since this was another round of no additional input, I’ll repeat myself too:
I don't think so. I also can imagine you moved on to ethical business and suggesting ideas because you had personality conflicts where people actually do something.
I'm very happy you reveal your actual intent by personally attacking me instead of taking the hint. Good bye.
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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.
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.
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I feel like this is far too dismissive for a comment that was in my eyes fairly constructive. He correctly pointed out that one of Amazon's main selling points is their whole logistics division. A federated website doesn't have that. So either:
- You somehow also start doing logistics, or
- You provide a good reason why shops don't actually care about Amazon's logistics all that much, and how they could to it themselves instead.
Maybe you could actually address the core of his criticism instead of outright dismissing it.
You're missing that these points have already been adressed in a lot of other comments and have been stated way more constructively.
Of course having a whole logistics setup in place will be far superior to only doing dropshipping. But this is a whole different (additional) project. It absolutely has it is place. What I'm dismissing is the claim that the idea is dependent on somehow cloning the arguably much more expensive and complex parts of amazons business.
Again, i do agree that amazon has a huge machinery in place. But I also wish to discuss things without being treated dismissively myself.
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That's quite a popular theory that the banks and even perhaps the us government itself played a part in promoting the crypto scams and nft bullshit simply to poison the idea of crypto for the masses.
Please do look into it if u got any questions dont be afraid to ask [email protected]
Thank you for this friendly and encouraging offer. This goes a long way sowing trust. I feel a lot more positive about looking into it now. Have a nice weekend.
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I know 20 years ago Walmart was the face of corporate evil but hear me out. They have had 1 company MO and have never wavered from it, providing affordable goods at the lowest possible price to the consumer without any bells or whistles. No coupons, no buy 3 get 1 free, no sketchy pricing based on bullwhip procurement.
My message here is to encourage anyone like myself who is fed the fuck up with Amazon, Google and Microsoft shitting on every product they put out all rhe while cutting all operating costs from any semblance of customer support. I call Walmart every year to check how much .22 ammo they have around deer season to get my tags and the winters supply of varmint ammo in one trip. Every year I speak to a real person even if it rings for a hot minute.
For about the same price as Amazon prime, I have Walmart "prime" that comes with free delivery of not just market place shit but also same day grocery delivery. They dont spread themselves too thin like literally every single corporate giant out there. They were better equipped than Amazon to get into the market place industry and they are killing it. While every other shit head company is dumping billions into AI (Walmart might be too idk so take this with a grain of salt) Walmart invested billions into developing their drone delivery project.
Tldr: I encourage everyone who likes simple affordable products from a straight forward without any bullshit to give the Walmart equivalent of Amazon prime a shot.
Edit: One other perk point for uncle Wally is it isn't a snake payment deal like 9.99/month of never ending monthly payment, maybe they do offer that now but when I signed up it was a single flat payment for 1 year and I get 2 emails letting me know it's coming due for next year and the second being the invoice. They dont spam you, force apps on you, value your data more than you or the product you're buying. Fuck i could keep going with how pleased I've been with Walmart.
no sketchy pricing based on bullwhip procurement.
Walmart's procurement has been abusive to their suppliers (who often go out of business because of their relationship with Walmart) for decades. I think you may need to reassess your perception of their procurement strategy.
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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.
Sorry to bother, good luck.
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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.
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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)
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.
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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.
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I really don't see the appeal of activity-pub for this.
It's a protocol used for social media and interactions. You describe just sort of a "metastore".
Maybe a review store site could work better with activity pub.
I think it makes sense. It would allow a decentralized unified search across all stores. With Lemmy I can search posts as long as the instance is federated. With this I could find products.
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I think it makes sense. It would allow a decentralized unified search across all stores. With Lemmy I can search posts as long as the instance is federated. With this I could find products.
In this example instances are stores, stores are users in instances? How stores are protected to be defederated by competitors (we are talking about money and making a living here).
What it adds to just a simple centralized service that any store can join. If you don't want it to be another amazon, make that service a coop. or some kinds of non-profit that it's paid by the stores that want to become part of that.
I think here we are in the classic conundrum of "a solution in search of a problem".
Fediverse and ActivityPub is cool, but it's a social media thing. And decentralization is cool when needed, for instance social media. But it doesn't have to make sense for every use case.
For what's being proposed there's zero actual need for decentralization or ActivityPub.
