Can we please make a viable (federated!) amazon alternative? I have an idea!

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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

https://www.ecommerceceo.com/open-source-ecommerce/

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I mean that definitely sounds like a cool idea, regardless of the drop shipping idea.

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Climate impact of monero is significantly less per transaction than any fiat. Their are no physical banks with employees and buildings and travel and transport and minting etc etc etc. Monero is the only truly private currencies all others have every transaction tracked.

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That would probably jumpstart the adoption. Good point.

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I'll have to look into it at some point. The crypto bros could have also been hired by banks at this point to burn crypto as comoetition. I would not touch it with a 10 foot pole before extensive personally conducted research. which is unrealistic even for myself but especially for everyone else.

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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

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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.

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I think a link between your idea and mine can be found in the work of writer Evgeny Morozov (https://mondediplo.com/2024/08/07ai-cold-war), who did some interesting research of alternative forms of how the internet could have developed including a project by the chilean government called "Cybersyn" (in his podcast "The Santiago Boys", https://open.spotify.com/show/7xlRxnooUnl48JVo726YXn). Although it was pretty centralized and not exactly Amazon, more like a socialist distribution system between industries. Well, its a very interesting podcast anyways ...

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Thats an interesting bit of information. Thanks!

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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.

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Glad you found something that works for you mate. Still, this corpo-soft-lock-in-shit isn't cool man. I get it, you want it easy and reliable. But this aint it. The stuff I'm talking about here is kind of the middle inbetween local seller and wholesale chain store. Thats why I like the idea.

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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.

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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.

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I would love a federated Amazon that works directly with producers to sell everything at cost without a middleman or fees to the sellers.

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There you go. Glad you like it.

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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]

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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.

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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.

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.
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.
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...
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.
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.

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I just landed on this thread and choose to respond to you here, OP. I will say you're my kinda person I'm also an ethical business person and came to conclude that federated marketplaces are the future. I put together a community here (https://lemm.ee/c/fedonomy) but never posted anything. I've been thinking / working on this for over a year now, more on the incentive/ economic model and setting up a real life business in a very specific niche. I hate typing on the phone and there is too much to type and it's like 4 am. Please message me.

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Yeah but that doesn't solve anything for the average Joe. Nor lost packages or scamming tactics etc.

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Can we please make a viable (federated!) amazon alternative? I have an idea!