Can we please make a viable (federated!) amazon alternative? I have an idea!
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Amazon.com is a marketplace, separate from aws and all their other endeavors. It is not important for this idea that they have a billion different things working.
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Again, how about a non condescending way to deliver your feedback? Its valid and I'll check it. Just take the win.
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I mean sure but again that is akin to ebay. ebay is amazone without the warehouses, shipping, and logistics intelligence and organization. so anyone that wants to avoid amazon could use ebay right now but they don't because they want the benefits of the fast shipping and returns and such. again I think having some sort of federated marketplace would be great but it would in no way be like ordering from amazon.
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But you're saying yourself that those are "obviously bots". It's easy to ignore those. And just to be clear, I really did mean the reviews, and not the score (where the skew is less transparent).
Everyone leaving a review has to have an account somewhere in the federated network. This includes seeing up an instance just to use it for review bots, or fake votes on something. Obviously there's is defederation and other mechanisms, and I'm sure there are ways to improve the situation. But the whole base setup is just inherently much harder to get into a trustworthy position. Even the common centralized sites (not just Amazon) have trouble getting it under control when they can "see" will the related data, for finding outliers and such. I'm just saying it's an even harder proposition.
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Condescension was not the intention at all. The fact that you mention logistics only as a foot note is what lead me to believe you really didn't understand, and it was just meant as an explanation. Amazon is just scale, in every aspect, and I don't think that can be achieved with a federated approach in the physical retail world.
As for being constructive, you can be constructive by talking someone out of an idea. I really don't believe there's any viability in the idea, no matter how much I wish there was. I personally value my time, so I assume others do as well. I consider saving someones time incredibly constructive, but that only applies if you intend to pursue the idea to actually get somewhere "real" with it, let's say reaching "profit" or improving participants existing profits.
You might enjoy spending your time figuring out solutions here, maybe you see it as an economic experiment or hobby project, so it's fun no matter the outcome. I'm that case my comment really isn't constructive in your situation, and I'm sorry.
Rest assured I didn't comment out of malice.
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I could see XMR being less manipulated on a relative basis, but all of crypto is far far more manipulated than any fiat (even of small country of say 3 million people). Because real currency reflect real economic activity that spans a broad range of use cases.
Yeah, I don't believe in edgelord type stuff. You do want the government to be able to freeze the money of criminals and malicious oligarchs.
You don't need Monero (or crypto) to solve the databroker issue. It's a matter of expectations,vstandards and law enforcement. And you know that Monero won't solve the data collection issue. The products you purchase aren't on a blockchain platform and they interact with the real world, therefore you can make a dataset for tracking of them.
Don't look at people's profiles.
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If you have a network of paricipating stores, then they can agree to take each others physical returns and inspect them.
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Collective buying and building of such a project means that there is not universal standard or regulation and the project falls apart when there is disagreement. Given the scale this is inevitable
Look at lemmy for example: most servers play nicely but occasionally you get the server like exploding heads that cause the overwhelming majority to defederate
Amazon has 300 warehouses across the US and another 175 worldwide according to a quick web search. Thatβs a lot of sites that have to play nice with each other. If even one of them starts having poor practices, doing something offensive, something disruptive, etc. it may cause a lot of the others to not want to work with them. If you have one that is especially shit stirring then it may cause a huge portion of the network to cut ties.
But unlike lemmy now itβs not just some social media where you jump to a new server. Now companies have their products held hostage. Now people in that region potentially have services significantly disrupted. Now your whole system is undermined and a bezos type can swoop in to prove his is much better and more trustworthy.
A state controlling it (which would inherently happen with collective ownership if done correctly, a pseudo state would be created given the scale) would introduce regulation and enforcement to ensure consistency in operation. It is then the responsibility of the constituents to hold representatives accountable to ensure regulations and enforcement are meaningful
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Bittorrent is federated streaming video before it was cool.
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I don't see why we can't just buy directly from shops. Maybe an aggregator of links for products, so there is an rss-like feed of products, prices etc?
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The best idea I can come up with is a federated marketplace. Each vendor has their own instance. Buyers can browse the marketplace and have a unified checkout experience. Vendors would have unified product posts so whichever vendor has the best price or fastest shipping (user preference) would get the sale. USPS for example has shipping zones which determine the price for shipping depending on distance.
The best example I can come up with is rockauto. They are a central marketplace of different auto parts suppliers. You can find parts that are in the same location in order to combine shipping.
If you put a part in your cart it will then show parts that are in the same warehouse.
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like pc-partpicker
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The problem they (should/did) solve was scamming, and payments. So you'd need to have some banking system with locked money, disputes etc. IMO that is the complicated part, the rest is just more or less a searchable database.
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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.
