Can we please make a viable (federated!) amazon alternative? I have an idea!
-
Accepting payments and creating "contracts" over the Fediverse is no bueno at the current time. I think it would require some kind of 3rd party, almost PayPal-esque (PayPal has its own controversy) service that would create the obligation and associated penalties that come with an online transaction. Could be the instance itself but as you said that's a risk most instance owners wouldn't take.
-
I mean, if their content was signed you could verify the authenticity of the certificate. Usually the business name appears in the cert.
-
I wonder if you can 'outsource' trust by relying on payment systems? If a seller uses stripe and scams some users, stripe would freeze their account right?
-
This is some Azula-level irony.
-
Another issue might be, how do you deal with people selling illegal items/services? How do you avoid "Silk Road" style liability? Would there be a blacklist that someone running an instance could use so they don't have to vet everyone they are federated with?
-
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.
-
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.
-
Correct. Someone orders something, it doesn't arrive, they dispute the charge with their CC company, their CC company and Stripe talk to one another and get the merchant's side of the story, and basically unless there is some pretty massive indication that the buyer is lying or has a consistent pattern of this or something, the buyer gets their money back. If that happens a bunch, the seller loses their Stripe account.
The system is heavily biased in favor of the buyer, which for the most part works out, because most of the fraud exists on the seller end. And on the whole the fact that 99% of people on both sides are not cockheads trying to abuse the system, is what makes it all work reasonably well.
-
I have run several businesses, some of them on this micro-scale. That's how I know that part is trivial.
You can literally set it up for yourself for free, if you want to see: https://stripe.com/
-
Pretty much what they're doing all over this thread.
Like some people can only see the glass half full. Few have the guys to look at both the fullness and the emptyness equally.
-
Another point here, Amazon has really thin profit margins on their core business (not counting AWS, etc. Just the online shopping). If it weren't absolutely gargantuan, it would fail. It's only profitable because of the logistical efficiency it has achieved, exploitation (of workers, cheap goods from China, etc.), and absolutely massive economies of scale. Similar to Walmart.
Recommended reading: People's Republic of Walmart.
All for nationalizing - would be better for everyone. -
God, if only someone had invented an internet-native form of money in 2008
-
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.
-
What is "meatspace"
-
Real life. The offline world. Grassville.
-
They're also transphobic and where whinging on one post about being censored
Apparently consequences for being a bigot is censorship for them
-
OK Crypto Scammer
Also, FUCK TRANSPHOBES
-
Or you can just buy from other online retailers.
-
I think there's some misunderstanding here. Amazon is a massive logistics system. The retail storefront is a tiny part of what Amazon is today.
AWS exists because Amazon needed to solve an internal data handling problem in order to solve their logistics problems so that they could scale up. After building that system, they started selling it as a product to other businesses. The point being, Amazon's real success is based on providing business-to-business services. The retail website is the tiny public-facing bit, but it depends on the rest of the organization structure in order to operate properly.
What you're proposing is more like an eBay alternative, where the system is basically just the storefront, and the sellers listing products are responsible for their own logistics. eBay still provides dispute resolution for buyers though, and that's hard to achieve without some centralized control.
There's also the legal problems. At some point someone will use such a system as a silk road - probably sooner rather than later. Whoever is administrating and hosting it will be liable for criminal activity in the countries where the crime occurs. It will not end well.
-
Ideas are cheap. This is the third post like this I've seen in two weeks. Build it.
